Welcome to you all and thank you very much for joining us for this Friday seminar of the Middle East Centre at this college,
Oxford, our subject today is war on bodies, moral immunity, the psycho politics of the covid-19 pandemic in Iran.
And I'm going to introduce our speakers, our main speaker and our correspondent in just a moment.
But first, I've got just a couple of the by now traditional Zoome housekeeping notes for how the session will run.
So the first thing to note is that the session is being recorded as members of the audience.
You're not going to speak or appear. So you don't need to worry about appearing in the recording if you don't want to.
But your questions, if you submit them in your name, I will give your name when I when I'm putting your question to al Qaeda and Maziar.
So if you don't wish to have your name in the recording,
then submit your question anonymously and and then you can be sure of complete anonymity in the recording.
If you do have a question to put to the panellists, please do so using the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen is very helpful for us.
If you begin to put your questions of questions and put them while the talking is
going on rather than all suddenly putting your questions in the last 10 minutes.
And if you want your question to be answered, then it has a much better chance of being answered if you put it in earlier.
So I would urge you, please don't wait to write in your questions.
We'll try and get to all of them, but we may not have time.
So if you put your questions early, that will be advisable.
The way we're going to run. This is in a moment. I'm going to introduce our speakers.
Then Orchid's, who is our main speaker, will speak for about 20 minutes, perhaps a little bit more.
Marzia will then respond for about ten minutes, and then I will give you their chance to come back on any of the points that Marzia raises.
But then we should still have about 15, 20 minutes for questions from the audience before finishing the session promptly at six.
So I think that's enough housekeeping. So it's now my great pleasure to to welcome to this Friday Middle East and seminar al-Qaeda.
Behrooz on al-Qaeda is a physician, a medical anthropologist and an anthropologist of science and technology.
And I would also call a historian, although she hasn't put that in her bio.
She's the author of Prozac Diaries, Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran, which was published in 2016.
She currently works at SOAS in London and previously held positions at King's College, also in London and at the University of Texas.
Her PhD was in history and the anthropology of science and technology from MIT.
And she's also the founder of the Beyond Trauma Initiative, which I recommend you all to look up and visit.
And she's a bilingual author and poet in both Persian and English.
So Workday's, our speaker this evening and our respondent is Musyoka Olby, whose welcome lecturer in medical humanities at the University of Exeter.
He's worked extensively on illegal drugs and addiction in West Asia and the global south.
And that was also the subject of his first book, Drugs, Politics Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was published in 2019.
His current project is called Living Addiction in States of Disruption.
Marzia has worked previously at South and Oxford and also the Ecodesign attitude and at the hospital in Paris.
And Maziar obtained his fill in politics from Oxford University.
So I think that's enough. By way of brief introduction, I'm now going to ask Orgeat, please, to speak to us.
Thank you for your day. Hello and good evening, everyone is at the end of a long working Friday,
so I really appreciate people joining us, especially in the U.K. and I thank you for it for this invitation.
It's such an honour. It's lovely to be back in Oxford always,
even if we actually and it's also a great pleasure to be in conversation with Muzzi again and discuss this topic.
Today, as we emerge from Global Lockdown's, it's really easy to forget the life of the then epidemic of the coronavirus in Iran in early 2020,
when he became the main epicentre of the outbreak outside of China.
And this was before the pandemic was announced on March 11.
So I refer to this as an epidemic up until March 11, because this has clinical implications in the timeline I present.
And I want to today. I want to just in the interest of time, I just want to give you a very brief overview of an ongoing project that I'm working on.
And I am really here for feedback. So please be patient with the unfinished nature of the analysis.
Iran's pandemic response has been discussed widely by scholars including Malaysia, and what I want to add here is a different angle,
sort of a small additional angle about what the pandemic reveals in terms of
the psycho political life of an illness and hence a society and also immunity.
And the key argument is that in Iran, the pandemic arrived in individual and social bodies that were already immunocompromised.
And the reason why I'm working on this framework of immune deficiency and immunity and the
immune system in terms of the political and social body in relation to the political body,
is that I'll explain why this analytical framework is is helpful in understanding Iranian society at this particular juncture.
I followed the outbreak both as a medical and social construction for over a year now,
and the premise is that an epidemic or a pandemic is a biological and a political entity,
and its emergence, its manifestation and its governance are intertwined with a complex cultural and historical context and also political agendas,
as well as biological realities and so on, is very much interested in the psychological life of the pandemic,
not just in terms of the toll it's taken globally on people, but also in terms of how it's shaped psychologically and psychologically.
So here I want to put a magnifying glass on the period between January 2020 and March 2020.
And there is a reason why I'm doing this. The format of this book I'm working on is it starts in a in a diary form.
So I kind of provide a timeline with it and updates from the grounds from the hospitals in Tehran and in major cities.
And but there's no time for me to go over all of that right now here.
So let's go back to February 2020. The most significant defining feature of the Clinton virus pandemic in Iran or the epidemic then,
has been the politicisation of the outbreak and also the security securitisation of information about it.
And it's been a trend all along, even now in relation to vaccines.
This week we encountered another instance of securitisation of information and Şaban about publishing information about the import of Exxon's.
So the first wave of the emergence of the infection in the holy city of Qom in early February
was kept secret for weeks and there was a systematic cover up that's most of you know about.
And these weeks were crucial as a golden window, as we say in epidemiology,
for preventing the spread of the virus and limiting fatalities later in February when the outbreak was no longer a secret.
Still, none of the standard public health measures to contain the outbreak,
including social distancing and all of these things that have now become normal and routine were prohibited.
And there are reasons for that. And this resulted in the spread of the illness outside of Gombe and the creation of several new epicentres,
first in Gilan and et cetera, et cetera, and then also into the region.
And one of the assumptions that people make is historically these kinds of cover ups have been associated with ideologies.
We have Muzzi, an individual who knows that the cover up in relation to HIV AIDS, for example,
in the 1980s and 90s was to some extent ideologically driven and are the reasons for the cover up are very conspicuously political
and economic and the political and economic agendas or interests that were in conflict with public health policy in February.
And I'm emphasising this very particular window of time had to do with, to some extent,
with the strategic significance of the city of Qom as as a seat of the seat of
the Shia religious establishment and political and economic power players.
And also, there was a lot of I don't want to go into the details because we don't have time.
But there is something about the the traffic in and out of school because of the pilgrims the
city of Qom receives both domestically and from foreign affairs and some 2.5 million each year,
and also the connexions with China in terms of clerical students as well as workers,
as well as the infrastructure projects that China has in going including a solar plant.
So all of these things have been discussed and I can go into them in the Q&A if anyone is interested.
So coal was not an unlikely epicentre in a sense.
The other factor that was very important was that an election was coming up on February 21st in 2020,
and so a major impediment in the way of the circulation of information was that there was a very direct
decree from the supreme leader that information about businesses should not be circulated until next week,
until the election. So most of this was extremely sensitive information at the time.
And at this point, a year, over a year later, it's public information.
Everyone knows about these timelines in Iran and public health experts and political experts,
including members of the parliament and medical, the medical establishment,
were urging the government to intervene with quarantine measures, et cetera, et cetera, not unlike what happened here and in other countries later.
They were encouraging the government to stop flights from and to China, closed the shrines,
and at this point, shrines in Karbala and Najaf were already closed, but not in Iran.
And also the mobilisation of reliable data by the media was sort of suppressed.
Iran has a 24/7 health focussed TV channel called Szeptycki Salamat.
And until late March, there wasn't a single word on this channel about called.
So that's that in itself is telling. So this clash, internal clash was ongoing, so experts and factions of the government were encouraging one thing,
actions were different and so similar things happen to calls for closing schools, universities, et cetera, et cetera.
And at this point, most of my reliable data was coming from the students within hospitals in Iran.
My former classmates, my colleagues, my friends were on the front lines, so to speak, so to speak.
And also in social media,
medical professionals were basically the main medium through which this information could travel on March three, on March 3rd.
The epidemic was stopped, I think by March 3rd.
The epidemic was not at different points as a conspiracy theory by the establishment,
as a foreign, as an American conspiracy theory, as a transient issue.
And there were backlash. There was backlash created in hospitals because high fatality rates were already, again,
public knowledge in places like Illinois, which was the second epicentre outside of come in early March the next days.
But really sad news about doctors and nurses and health workers dying.
And a lot of my colleagues were very adamant to emphasise that this these deaths were preventable and they were not inevitable.
Actually, this is quite personal for me because I have had classmates amongst them.
And I know personally doctors at this point, many of the medical professionals know someone personally who has unfortunately passed.
And the point they were trying to make was that this was not because of a shortage of PCP.
It was because we didn't know this disease existed in February.
So people were intubating patients without a mask. And so this is something that's now palpable.
It's it's an open wound and I think it needs to be discussed.
I'll get back to this then in March, schools and universities shut down, sort of basically ramped up, efforts started.
So there was a delay, but the efforts when they started, they were very impressive.
So there was now a covert task task force in the country, covid words, media campaigns, educational campaigns by television and the Internet.
Health care workers were now called the Defenders of Health and Martyrs of Health.
And not to the legacy of the Iran-Iraq war in terms of the defeat and also the defendants of the shrine being serious
to the whole of this vocabulary and a new discourse of defence and martyrdom emerged mass mobilisation of the military,
the Revolutionary Guard, NGOs, et cetera. And a lot of this, again, has been outlined by others and very aptly analysed by people, including Muzzi.
So I'll just move on from this. By mid-March,
all of these measures were in place and then there was there was a promotion of the stay at
home messages and self isolation campaigns and something akin to test untraced started.
And then, of course, on April 8th, many people had to go back to work. There was a phased lifting of the lockdown.
And again, similar to other places that the question was whether we should save the economy or people.
And and bear in mind that this is a this is a time where the economy is extremely studied and in the back of the US sanctions.
And so at this point, even when there were measures in place, data was still securitised and also information, there was two things.
There was one, the securitisation of information. People were still being arrested for tweeting or for or for spreading information about covid.
And also asymmetric access to testing kits, so just like now when how we are relating to vaccines, if you remember back in, you know, a year ago,
it was all about test kits and PPE and you had government officials and their
families being tested and then front line workers and I users running out of tests.
And we were seeing a similar pattern now with vaccines, unfortunately, with the black market and corruption and lack of transparency,
we are now hearing really concerning reports about vaccines, which I'll get to later.
So, you know, by mid-March, of course, covid has reached Canada, Europe, the United States, and on March 11, we have a pandemic on our hands.
And lockdown's across Europe begin as the frenzy of the pandemic response in the US.
And so a lot of this global condition is now creating a very helpful comparative perspective.
The impressive plans that are implemented for screening calls, contact tracing,
also people's compliance, were it at the beginning, they very much adhere to the rules.
And then, of course, there were issues of travel due in holidays,
very similar things to what we saw during Christmas here, for example, was happening last year.
And the medical community's heroic efforts were also hard not to recognise.
A lot of issues we're starting to talk to create controversies on social media, for example, at this point, there are a lot of uncoordinated efforts.
The Revolutionary Guard was televising Manitas, disinfecting streets and trees and cars with portable cannons,
parading on motorbikes and shouting slogans that really defeat us all the way to Iran's decision to reject the methods of Pontius Pilate and in fact,
actually sending back the help that an MSF team that was supposed to create a temporary ward in Isfahan.
So there was a lot of unaccounted for decisions that had, of course, implications for citizens and high death tolls.
The first major peak happened in April, and this was followed by a second wave in June, a third in September.
At this point, my medical colleagues were saying, know, the word peak doesn't mean anything.
Always it's a plot. It's it's just when it's repeating so many times, they're not waves anymore.
And then in October, November, there was a high fatality episode. In two thousand twenty one,
the supreme leader banned the import of vaccines provided by Kovács on the basis of them being from the United States and European countries.
The manufacture, manufacture and promises were made about the manufacturing of the Iranian vaccine.
Right now, 15 trials are under way in Iran on the Iranian backs on creating a vaccine manufacturing vaccine.
At this point, as we speak, Iran is slowly emerging from a fourth peak, why the politicisation of now vaccination has resulted in high rates of death.
Vaccination is now underway primarily with Sputnik and Cinefamily, the Chinese and Russian.
And recently, AstraZeneca talks with AstraZeneca provided by Kofax.
But efforts are lagging behind me and not unlike many other countries in the region.
And of course, at this point, there's the spirit of solidarity has worn off.
And so the psychology of this April and last April are extremely different.
Similar to how we're experiencing it here in other countries.
So. In the conversations and I'll step in April now to to go back to the actual
question and a lot of my conversations with medical clinics in hospitals in Iran.
I keep finding us discussing this question. Which was this why is Iran showing different demographics of death?
We know that covid was targeting vulnerable groups, older populations in Iran.
The number of young people in our schools was already drawing attention.
And you know, the Medicon, me immediately things, you know, if you're stressed, your immune system is compromised.
We know that stress makes you weaker. And so, of course, I have to hold back and not think medically.
But in those moments, these are the conversations that were happening between us and also in my own mind,
which is why I have chosen the format of this like journaling and creating a chronological timeline for the first half of the project.
I think a lot of the speculation is coming from and this is about ethnographic data.
This is not about what we like to think. A lot of speculations from from people on the ground is summed up in sentences like this.
What has the thirteen ninety eight, which is 12, 19, basically being let's stress.
This is another colleague told me this is a list that loads of imposed on the body.
What do you expect?
And I also heard myself in finally having a little conversations with, again, people on the ground dealing with patients who were saying.
It's very hard to separate deaths caused by covid from deaths caused by infrastructure and political issues.
If you die of covid, it doesn't mean you've been killed by the virus.
That was the bottom line of their actual situated knowledge and experience.
And what does that mean? A lot of references to the 1980s at this point started to surface the terms, the Iran-Iraq war, the terms,
trauma, grief and also military metaphors started to emerge in in public discourse, in the media.
And, you know, here in the U.K. in spring 2020, there was a lot of parallels made with the metaphors of the World War,
the Second World War and the spirit of solidarity. And it was mobilised after the lockdown that started in March 23.
But the war metaphor in Iran is different. It's manifold, it's layered, and it's actually replying to ones that are still open and are still being in.
For lack of a better metaphor. They're still bleeding.
And this public anxiety around in this was something that I've always been very interested in and the dysphoria,
which is not only the outcome of the epidemic,
but also an underlying sense of what psychologists call learnt helplessness and internalised perception of powerlessness,
uncertainty, mistrust, anxiety, and a sense that ordinary people's lives don't matter.
Basically, these perceptions matter whether we agree with them or not.
They matter because they shape the lived experience of an illness and that event of an epidemic, another pandemic.
And the collective nervous system was overstretched at this point because this year that third in the calendar,
thirteen ninety eight has been dubbed the annus horribilis of Iran.
It started with national natural disasters.
The Iranians call it a dark year, and it was a year that carried a lot of tragedies and losses akin to war torn,
the war torn decade of the nineteen eighties. Floods and earthquakes aside, there were two new American sanctions.
The economy was in trouble then.
An estimated three hundred to fifteen hundred people were killed and some 7000 people were arrested during the protests of the month of November.
In that same year, during which time the government shut down the Internet for a whole week.
And so Iran was in a blackout. The cry on social media, the cry, can you hear us?
Became the Iranian equivalent of I can't breathe in the movement.
And in January, after the assassination of us and so many Iranians spent a long week dreading the spectre of a war with the US, that almost happened.
And then that was shortly before they found that they had been lied to about the shooting.
And now it's become apparently clear that this was an intentional shooting of the Ukrainian airline passenger
flights by the Revolutionary Guard that killed one hundred seventy six innocent people this morning.
And processing these perpetual losses has been a luxury that Iranians haven't had to.
The general perception is one thing on top of another.
We haven't had time to catch our breath, that kind of feeling.
Do you have to imagine that mentality and also understand that public trust being at its lowest?
We are looking at two parallel crises at this point in relation to the pandemic.
One was a crisis of credibility and legitimacy because people don't trust data that's coming from the establishment.
And in general, this divide has always existed, but now it's sharpened and also a crisis of expertise, which I talk about in my book, actually.
As a long term legacy of the Cultural Revolution at this point,
we are dealing with a generation of policymakers who are the basically what their
cultural revolution aimed for policymakers that are not necessarily experts,
but they are committed and even and at this point, of course, the commitment also is also the question,
given the neoliberal directions that the establishment has gone towards.
So at this point, I know this is the question. The actual question is what this context tells us and why it is different.
And this specific context is not just a post war or structure context.
It's a wartime peacetime symbiosis, an ongoing cohabitations with sensations of death and war and disintegration.
So I work on this notion of a social and collective community,
and I refer to notions in medical technology such as local biologies and also, I mean, these flexible bodies.
The idea that immunity is a not something that's in the individual body,
but is actually dependent on what's happening to the social body and to the political body.
And the intersection of these two bodies is where the specific psychoanalytical
processes and forces with which the pandemic gangs and local life come to surface.
The two features, so in this what I'm calling it, the immunity by a politics of this space,
and this is again, in reference to notions that we have, in fact, poverty is shaped by two key themes.
One is the normalisation of death and decay.
And this could be death or perception of death or metaphorical death and also war.
And in times of war, I finish by this focus on war because for a social and political body that is ostracised, excluded or stripped of its resources,
for a social body that is in a state of helplessness, a military response, responses that are needed to keep a body immune are not available.
And so covid has both exasperated and uncovered social inequalities that happen everywhere.
But if biological immunities interdependent on the lived experience of the social body and the political body,
that has implications for social immunity. And it's not a coincidence that those hit hardest by covid in Iran are the poor,
the marginalised and the politically oppressed and the social groups whose protests were also heavily cracked down.
And it's in the juxtaposition of these individual life, of the illness and the social life of illness.
I mean,
one of the things that's what you might find interesting is that the word immunity in Farsi and the word security because you have the same groups,
I mean, in fact in Arabic, emeny and amnesiacs.
And these two discourses have become so intertwined that a lot of them are justified in the context of securitisation and security.
Let me finish by saying that, you know, I can go, you know, in the in the second section,
we can talk a little bit about this notion of living that gradual death every day,
death that people talk about, especially in the realm of every day and what that means for the social body and the political body.
This social immunity is a prerequisite for biological immunity.
So if that infrastructure is not in place, the actual body is also not functioning.
So in terms of the metaphor of the war, also there is you know, we are all familiar with the metaphor of the war in relation to the immune system.
But in this in this space, we are also looking at covid itself as war.
We are looking at the legacy of the war because this is a respiratory illness that's targeting actually veterans,
chemical veterans as part of the vulnerable groups.
There's the presence of a war as an economic war in the everyday life of citizens.
There is the threat of war and securitisation of life.
You know, this idea of there's always a war impending and the lived experience of the war and the discourse of war.
So that language and imagine the imaginary of the pandemic are very much you know,
there's a lot of images and pictures and snapshots I can show you on how these metaphors are mobilised.
And then, of course, there's a war on health, war on health, on education and training, which has implications here.
Yeah, so let's let's go to Mozzie, and then if there is time, I'll say something about this immunity by politics.
That's great. I would love to listen to you more, but I'm very conscious that we have to find out and we want to get onto the Q&A.
So without more ado, I'm going to ask Marziano, please, to respond.
And thank you. Or it's a great pleasure to be back as Middle East centre virtually for the first time and very good to talk to to al Qaeda.
It's our second conversation on covid a few years after our first conversation.
So there's a lot to discuss and our ideas probably have changed.
I'll start from actually a very interesting etymological connexion that you revealed to us the connexion between emeny and.
Yeah, so immunity and security. And I would suggest that there is another one that connects these two,
which is to believe Aminov know and believe is a key point in discussing and thinking about and also relating to the epidemic to health in general,
actually, because of course, health is an epidemiological manifestation in this case of a virus, but it is also framed into an epistemological crisis.
And this epistemological crisis in Iran is probably more evident than elsewhere.
But it is evident all across the world from those who deny the virus in the US or Italy or elsewhere,
to all those who argue that only following science would save us, even though we don't come to define what is science at this point.
So I'll try to discuss a bit very briefly, of course,
because I don't have much time this epistemological crises in which Iranians and the Iranian state, of course, find itself.
And then over the last more or less, 14, 16 months now.
This epistemological crisis is, from what I've gathered in my work,
has been mostly if all has worked with physicians and people at the very frontline hospitals.
My collaboration has been mostly with social workers,
people who work mostly outside the hospital setting either in prevention or in post treatment facilities and with marginal populations,
not all the categories that al-Qaida mentioned, but many of the marginal categories that have been heavily affected by the epidemic.
Well, the epistemological crisis that covid has created in Iran is one that I identify as connected very much to fear,
and it's a fear that it manifests itself on several levels. Let's start from the states.
The states cover up that you very clearly mentioned in detail.
It was one which I believe was very much framed in fear. It's a fear that, of course, confuses the mind.
And you think that actually the virus actually didn't exist or you deny it because of the fear of either
being accused in the context of March last year of wanting to stop the election electoral process.
So if you put ourselves in a hypothetical situation in which the Iranian state stops the elections and sort of put everyone in lockdown measures,
that would have been a sort of an outburst. And the short term of accusations of saying, oh,
you want to stop the electoral process because of your fear of people's reaction or this is another authoritarian reaction.
And so, of course, in the long term, the Iranians, they would have come out as a successful model.
And this actually this fear in governance highlights one of the shortcomings in governance.
They ran the state over the last many decades now, I would say, which is the short termism in the responses to the crisis.
That was the case, as often mentioned in the 90s with HIV.
It took a long time before acknowledging it once to acknowledge that the response was more effective than many other countries.
We will see what the covid will produce long term responses that are more effective than other countries,
from what I noticed, working with social workers in Iran.
So the collaborating at this scale, in these situations is that there is a sort of important framework of solidarity
and mutual aid that is emerging and has emerged in part over the last 15 months,
which sees margins of the state. So official state institutions engaging in sort of grassroots participation with people and also private citizens
and groups that have been able to provide services and help that would have been otherwise very difficult.
And this is not simply a manifestation that of substitutes the states in a new liberal fashion.
In my view, it's probably the antidote to the social and sort of fear that this organisation creates.
And this connects to it another effect of fear, which is the rise of right wing politics in general.
If you look at the globe, for instance,
countries where the right wing parties have been in power have had the highest number of cases and the sort of more serious impact in the pandemic.
Trump also Nado Modi. And I would say, unfortunately, even when our own Boris Johnson.
Well, because fear and the lack of knowledge,
the epistemological crisis produces reactions that are often very concerned with short term management, but lack the sort of commitment.
To organising society in a different way and struggles around health, our struggles around future political setbacks.
There is also another issue that I don't think I have much time so well,
I covered two very minor impacts of fear, but I'll leave it to the to the audience.
It was great. Marzio, thank you very much. But the eloquence of our speakers is eating into our time.
And we have audience members who are here and we have some questions already.
So I'm just going to ask Chalkida just if she wants to pick up on anything you said very briefly in just two or three minutes, please do so.
And then I'm going to open the floor to the to to the questions that I'm collecting them.
And please do keep putting your questions in the Q&A box. I'm sure we'll have time for a few more of that now.
Thank you all today. Thank you. This was this is exactly what I want a conversation.
And this idea is still in the making and is being shaped.
The short termism that you've talked about is precisely related to that crisis of
legitimacy and the anxieties that comes with it and and the crisis of expertise.
So it's a combination of those two crises which mean that we have excellent doctors.
I'm not talking about lack of expertise. I'm talking about policy and expertise.
And the state of exception here is so important because it's in the interest section of an interaction
of existing states of exceptions that have just sort of toppled over on top of each other,
that the new form of what I'm trying to think about immunity is fabricated,
not just political, but also moral and psychological, because the fear angle is very telling.
This is about a psychological and moral construction as well, and only as forms of lethal immune deficiency,
if you will, that predates covid and are shaped by at the intersection of various crises.
I just want to say one thing in relation to how I see this sort of immunity landscape and bio politics working in the sense that it in in a way,
it it masks many covid deaths because we have also this instance of not trusting which deaths were caused by covid,
but at the same time it biologists and naturalise.
There's a lot of deaths that are in fact depths of despair or people what have called them that's of decay and disintegration at the same time,
if it politicises these deaths,
but in some ways also politicises this form of moral immunodeficiency that the structural body of the society, the social body is suffering from.
And I think this is a the establishment can use this strategically as it suits them.
And the other thing it does is that it also reveals these emotional political fantasies of the state.
So this idea that there is also something about fantasies I'm working on in terms
of how security versus immunity and versus emeny and aspirations and fantasies.
And of course, these discourses are mobilised as they think.
And I think when we look at the question like these questions, like moral causal questions become very redundant.
And we also deal with a lot of monocles questions in relation to within Iran.
And I think the question of how these forces intersect and interact to compromise both biological and psychological and moral immunity is
something that requires an engagement with what you were talking about and an engagement with historical context and political context.
Thank you very much. So I'm going to forgo the usual chairs privilege of asking the first question in the interests of time.
Our first question is from the Ascott here, and he asks,
can you elaborate on the air carrier Mohan's flights to China and its significance and impact on the spread of the virus?
But I'd like to broaden the question a little bit and ask you perhaps to reflect a little bit
on how in Iran China is viewed in relation to covid we've seen in many parts of the world,
the pandemic has led to instances of racism or very negative perceptions of China or the East Asian individuals and communities.
But this, of course, is at a time when the Iranian government strategically has been wanting to align more with China.
So so there's something of a potential paradox there.
And I wonder whether you could speak to those points, of course, in relation to specifically to on the airline.
It's important. I think the question is raised because of this reference to the fact that in the end of January,
the Iranian government, the government actually confirmed that flights by Mörner airline will stop, will discontinue.
And then it emerged a month and a half later that the 55 flights had actually operated throughout February and March.
So there was, again, another instance of deceit and cover up. And with China, I mean, perceptions on the ground about China, of course, very.
One of the important things is to understand that China has become a lifeline in part because of the American sanctions.
And so in a way, it's a very important strategic ally economically, but also geopolitically.
And so in terms of the perceptions about China and if I want to speak very
anthropologically here in terms of the way these relations are imagined by the public,
you know, the awareness of the for example, this this rumour or statement that was going around about the seven hundred clerical,
Chinese, Chinese, Chinese clerical students in Guam who are travelling at the time of the Chinese New Year to Guam that
was responsible for a businessman who was flying from Isfahan to China back and forth what this was.
So there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that goes around. Also, the missionary activities are very important.
Again, there is there was a lot of traffic between China and in February because it coincided with the Chinese New Year as well.
Thank you. I think you wanted to add just very quickly, and I think, you know,
what they just mentioned is very interesting because it brings out the question of the epidemic on a geopolitical level that not only works,
of course, between states, but actually in the perception of everyday life amongst people,
like a couple of vignettes from from talking to people is that many are refusing immunisation through now what is perceived, the British vaccine.
So AstraZeneca is being refused by many.
And instead they see, of course, the Russian Sputnik five and now increasingly the Chinese vaccine as a form, particularly the same.
It goes with the pills being distributed in little villages.
And I've heard of these which are capable of curing. The symptoms of covid amongst people and people trust them because now it's Chinese,
you know, contrary to what you would think they made in China label would mean generally.
So things are also changing with regard to that. Very quickly, I mean, I could thank you both.
Our second question is, in fact, two questions, and it's coming from covid Moussavi.
And he asks first of methodological question. He says, did you do this research while physically in Iran?
And I guess actually both of you might respond to that. But I read the second part of the question.
He says, if so, what was the impact of the publication of the health minister's letter confirming dispatch of
the five of the vaccines to the supreme leader's household a week after the Security Council,
I guess, had officially banned the US and the UK vaccines in Iran?
So that really is, I think, speaking directly to these questions about mismanagement,
inequality and perception of the way that privilege gets you access to scarce resources in a situation like the one Iran has found itself in al-Qaeda.
Please. Yeah. So, no, I wasn't physically in Iran.
I was actually not as impossible this year for me.
But I think this is why I emphasise on this crisis of legitimacy and crisis expertise,
because this pandemic response has been part deceit, part dysfunction, part incompetence, part US sanctions, whatever.
That's not the point is a lot of these patterns are being repeated.
Everything we're seeing now with the vaccines we saw with test kits,
antipode a year ago that officials had access to tests when ICE use didn't appear with the vaccine.
Yes, the supreme leader banned the import import of vaccines, and that's had implications that actually people on the ground.
Again, I keep referring to people on the ground because it doesn't matter what we think sitting here.
What matters is perception on the ground is that these are death murders.
These deaths were preventable. These deaths were. And so a lot of health workers, again, in this sport died.
And so that's you know, people see that as a direct result of the lack of access, the vaccine management.
Then again, for vaccines to work, you don't need just a vaccine.
You also need the chain of distribution that needs months of prior work.
So what countries were fighting to secure contracts with Pfizer?
Iran was dealing with this back. Right.
And so right now, you have anecdotes of yes, of course, officials have all been vaccinated before, ordinary people.
Yes. Vaccines are being sold at whatever price, but we don't have that infrastructure for the visas.
And so there are all these questions and all these like black holes where that and this lack of information,
this lack of transparency directly affects vaccine compliance.
So people have hesitations because this is the Russian vaccine and the Russian and Chinese vaccine haven't been approved by the FDA.
So that's another angle here.
The resistance to AstraZeneca is also Mozi because of the global issues with clotting and that that became a very highly debated in Iran.
And people are really scared you. Right. So I don't know if I answered the question about the Supreme Leader, I wouldn't comment on that.
I'd be able to. Marzio, do you want to come in on that one or shall we go to the next question?
I, I just the first one, I didn't do research in Iran, of course, no one, I think can do research legally, at least at the moment.
But I relied on a network of collaborators, long time collaborators, which are social workers and have been on the front line.
And so, yes, and also, you know, distant interviewing or talking on the phone.
Thank you. So, Naheed Untrust has a question.
So she she writes, thank you for your insights on social media.
We have seen people comment on how the social sphere has become more permissive as a result of the life,
death, urgencies of the pandemic that led other matters to pale in comparison.
I wonder whether the speakers believe that there will be some permanent political, social,
structural changes in governance that will flow from the conditions of the pandemic.
Hello, doctor. It's good to hear from you.
Of course, there will be implications in governance and governance as as be pointed out,
the anxieties within the realm of governance have already been transformed throughout this past year.
And I think the social response and public perception of that has also changed.
So definitely there will be implications long term in terms of how these perceptions have changed.
And I'm not sure if I follow the question in terms of the social space having become more permissive, permissive in relation to what?
You mean certain social liberties or. This is this is the downside of having the questions done in the Q&A box,
because we can't and I hate to have to also remember that we are we are also waiting for another election in June.
And the question of vaccines, I mean, not unlike here and not unlike in Israel.
And in February, that was the case in Israel, in the UK, that was the case for the elections in May.
The question of vaccines and the election are also very intertwined.
There is this is a very particular election and presidential election because the public trust is at its lowest.
There is the very active campaigns of boycotting elections going on in a way that went before
from inside Iran and from the families of the people who were killed in these protests.
And so there are now grassroots campaigns so that those kinds of challenges to
governance are in a way I wouldn't say they are the result of the pandemic.
I think the pandemic is also uncovering a lot of what was already brewing.
And do you want to add to that? No, not really, because it's hard.
I mean, I can say that well, maybe I can add something that in the social sphere, I mean,
it's hard to think of a more permissive social sphere under limited lockdown regime.
It means that a lot of people couldn't actually go out much.
So much of life has been quite restrained to home, especially for middle class, upper class people,
whereas in lower class people, I'm more sort of the graphicly in touch with rural communities, completely different setting.
People go on with their lives, but enclosed in the environment of the village and the surrounding villages.
So DeSoto European Rural Connexion is a bit restrained.
That's the comment I can say. As for like sort of southern Tehran and things like that, I haven't really been able to to know much.
Thank you. We're getting close to the end of our time, we've got certainly time for one more question we might manage to squeeze into.
So I have a question for me. Apologies for I don't pronounce the name correctly, Yasser Peracha.
And the question is, if there is time, can Dr. Belarusan perhaps elaborate a bit more on everyday death and decay in the Iranian context?
So a little tiny question in there. I will I will promise to discuss this with us.
There is a wonderful one of my wonderful graduate students at says, given that we have three minutes.
Do you really want me to go into this? It's it's a really big question.
And it's, you know, but I'm glad it brought up because in a way, is the running theme in this book project,
which is the shaping of this collective immune system, has been dependent on that and the knowledge, a tacit knowledge of things disintegrating.
I mean, examples of ethnographic examples of that. Stetler, you're in the hospital, you've recovered from covid.
And these are tragic stories that I'm constantly receiving.
You'll recover from covid 27 year old woman and then you die because the hospital's oxygen supply suddenly collapses.
So this awareness amongst people that a lot is dzakovic,
that is this a death of decay and integration in the infrastructure in the way that the way public health policies have been working in that.
And also juxtapose that with wonderful work that health workers then are doing with empty hats and so on.
So I think it's a very big question. I think we will have to discuss this at another point.
We have literally two minutes left. OK, I'm going to take the last question.
So I didn't take the first one. And I know that both of you have been in touch with many professionals.
I mean, health professionals and social worker professionals.
I'll be very interested to know whether you think that there is any significant difference in the sort of experience
and perception of the pandemic of the groups that you've been in touch with compared to the wider public.
Do you see some big divide there, depending on profession and expertise working?
Perhaps first, you mean with health care health professional?
Well, the situation with health professionals as elsewhere is, of course, different from the general public,
partly because of the viral load that they're exposed to, they've been exposed to.
And that we know that that biologically speaking, they are at a higher risk.
But what's what's significant now is that the fatigue and the emotional fatigue,
again, not unlike other places, but there's an additional layer in Iran,
which is, for example, Iran has a shortage of nursing staff and more and more nurses are now quitting because they're just they just can't.
And a lot of private hospitals are even using nurses. So what that means in terms of the you know, I just let me just refer to this.
I just did a project on the impact of sanctions on medical education.
And a lot of these medical doctors were in training.
Tell you that even if I go around things like access to the latest, whatever software, psychologically and morally demoralised,
I mean, so that I think in that sense, if you put the experience of 14 months of the pandemic,
15 months of the pandemic, plus demoralisation, plus thinking that your life as a people have referred to health workers lives as
human shields because they were basically expended in the early that period of time.
I talked about they were they were used and expended and no one is accountable for it now.
So these these ones are open. And at the same time,
there is this public appreciation for the work of health workers that has increased and that that has then healed another one that was open before,
which was the distrust between public and health workers. So it's a bit complicated, isn't there?
There's a lot of back and forth that very helpful. And I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it.
You're going to have to write to Maziar for his answer to that question. I will bother him myself outside the context of this meeting.
So it remains for me just to thank again very much all day.
And Maziar, we're all applauding loudly, though. You cannot hear us.
And I'd also like to thank our audience for joining us on this Friday afternoon.
Thank you all very much for being here. Thank you so much for having us.
Thank you. And take care of that. Pleasure. Thank you once again.