Officials in Tehran said that Iran’s attempts to procure vaccines to curb the worst outbreak of coronavirus in the Middle East are being hampered by U.S. sanctions. This is because the country is unable to utilize a payment system intended to ensure fair global access to the vaccine shots.

Iran had hoped to deploy funds worth billions of dollars locked up in South Korean Won-denominated accounts to help buy vaccines under an agreement reached with Seoul months ago.

However, the Central bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati said that the U.S. banking sanctions were effectively preventing Tehran from using the COVAX facility that is jointly managed by Geneva-based Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the World Health Organization. Abdolnaser Hemmati said that the banks were unwilling to process transactions and convert the Won into dollars.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Gavi said that there was no “legal barrier” to Iran procuring vaccines through COVAX as the U.S. Treasury’s Office on Foreign Assets Control had issued a license covering coronavirus vaccine procurement.

A Million Cases

An Iranian government official said that the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) license had little effect. The money would have to be cleared through a U.S. bank in order to be converted into dollars and then into Euros before being transferred to COVAX, said the official, who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak on the matter.

South Korea has told Iran that it cannot provide an assurance that the money would not be seized or blocked when it is transferred to a U.S. bank, the official said.

So far, more than a million Iranians have contracted Covid19 and more than 50,000 have died in the pandemic. Officials say that the numbers significantly underestimate the true scale of the outbreak.

The Trump administration has reimposed sweeping economic sanctions on Iran from 2018 as it sought to force the country into a tougher agreement on its nuclear program, after having exited the nuclear agreement and attempting to downgrade its (Iran’s) presence in the Middle East. President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to re-engage with the Islamic Republic, triggering optimism in Tehran that sanctions could be removed.

Recently, the semi-official news agency- Mehr removed a report from its website that said that Iran’s Health Ministry was in talks with AstraZeneca Plc to secure 20 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine that it has been developing with Oxford University.

Iran is preparing to start human trials of its own vaccine, which has been renamed after a top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, assassinated late last month. While the vaccination against Covid19 has begun in the UK, with efforts made by China to place its Sinopharm vaccine in the Middle East, the vaccine in Iran is expected to be available next summer.

The author is a student member of amity centre of happiness