LONDON: Thousands of Iranians awaiting coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccines have crossed into neighboring Armenia in search of jabs.
Iran is currently in the midst of a devastating fifth wave of COVID-19 infections, spurred in part by the delta variant, that has seen average daily infections spike 63 percent to 17,000.
The jump in infections has been exacerbated by Iran’s floundering vaccination campaign, which has so far seen just two percent of Iran’s 84 million people fully vaccinated, according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data project.
Western vaccines have been banned by a decree of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who in January this year cast doubt on the trustworthiness of British and American-made inoculations.
Unlike Iran, Armenia — with its comparatively tiny 3 million inhabitants — has more vaccine doses than people willing to take them, and has begun offering vaccines for free to foreigners without requiring registrations.
Mobile clinics have been set up in the streets to make the jabs easily accessible to tourists and visitors.
Critically, Armenia is one of the few countries that Iranians do not need a visa in order to enter — and the country’s capital, Yerevan, is just a seven-hour drive from the border.
Parvin Chamanpira, 53, and her husband calculated that it would be months before they qualified for a vaccine in Iran, so last week they travelled to Yerevan to receive their shots.
“This is not an ideal choice for Iranians to be forced to travel and spend a lot of money and be stressed out for getting a vaccine,” Chamanpira said. “We would not do it if we didn’t have to.”
They plan to return in a few weeks for their next dose.
Neither Armenian nor Iranian officials have said how many have travelled to the smaller country for a vaccine, but other clues point to a surge in demand from desperate Iranians.
The number of flights between Tehran and Yerevan has been increased to meet demand, and tickets have sold out until late August.
Vaccine bus trips have sprung up between the countries, and reports from the New York Times suggest many people have been chartering their own buses or vans and planning their trips independently.
In a social media group dedicated to planning vaccination trips to Armenia, Iranians at the border posted videos on Friday showing lines of cars and people stretching for miles, saying the wait was at least 13 hours.
Iran is one of the worst-hit countries in the world by COVID-19, and the worst in the Middle East. It has recorded an official death toll of 85,000, though some observers have suggested that the figure may be higher.
The government’s response to the pandemic, and its competency in rolling out the vaccines, has spurred mounting discontent among sections of the public against the regime.
“Our only weapon is immediate and fast vaccination of the public,” Dr. Saeedreza Mehrpour, the head of Shariati Hospital in Tehran, wrote on his Instagram page on Thursday, criticizing the country’s leaders for putting ideology over public health.
He added: “I wish we had better relations with the world.”
Despite the government’s fiery vaccine rhetoric, Iran has now received over two million doses of the British-made Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine through the UN’s Covax program, which aims to provide vaccines to countries that cannot secure doses themselves.
But this has not made a dent in Iran’s pandemic, and reports suggest the elderly and vulnerable remain unable to book in a second dose of the jab.
Fahimeh Hosseini, 72, a retired banker, said she waited for four hours with dozens of other older people outside a Tehran clinic for a second dose of the vaccine, only to be told there were no more.
“They told us to keep coming back until you get lucky,” she said.
