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Iranwire – A message makes sense in context: we analyze and understand it based on the message itself, and on the background information we have to hand. But when no context is available – or provided – then we can misunderstand a message or it can even become meaningless.
We see this often now because of social media. Many users publish posts that only make sense for specific audiences who understand the context and were already informed. We might call this phenomenon “the collapse of context”: the experience of encountering a message that has no meaning, or a meaning that we cannot grasp, because the message was not intended for the general public.
Collapsing context can lead to misinformation or disinformation: it misleads the audience and conveys an unrealistic idea to lay readers. Sometimes the media, including in Iran, deliberately collapses context to convey a message without covering all sides of an issue. The aim in this case is to push the audience to reach specific and predetermined conclusion about a given story.
A good example is a May 2021 cartoon and report published by Mehr News Agency entitled An Excuse for Not Importing Vaccines. The full text published with this cartoon read: “Today, the country’s vaccine depots are filled with several international brands, where some officials of [Hassan Rouhani’s government] previously linked the lack of supply of vaccines to the FATF issue and sanctions.” The cartoon was drawn by Abbas Goudarzi.
Everyone knows that until a month ago, Iran was facing a severe shortage of Covid-19 vaccines; no more than 500,000 doses were being administered per day, and the overall process was slow. Everyone knows that until a month ago, the government was run by former President Hassan Rouhani, and in early August, it was handed over to Ebrahim Raisi. Everyone knows that the vaccination drive has accelerated in the last two or three weeks. All this information is in the back of our minds when we see the above cartoon. Mehr News Agency has invested in this context.
The government of Hassan Rouhani either could not, or did not want to, stop the misguided policies of the Islamic Republic on the issue of vaccines – namely, the decision to not import US-made or UK-made brands – and thousands of Iranians paid for this with their lives.
Mehr is affiliated with the Islamic Propaganda Organization: the propaganda organ of the Islamic Republic, supervised by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Hold onto that fact.
Let’s assume Mehr’s audience concluded from the cartoon that Rouhani’s government intentionally or unintentionally failed to import vaccines, while Raisi’s administration resolutely solved it with skill and sheer political will. The cartoon nevertheless omits important information to the audience; that it only shows a corner of the truth. The cartoon tries to mislead its audience and hide the real reason for the vaccine delays; instead, Mehr tried to blame Rouhani, whereas the reality is different.
The truth is that barriers to importing Covid-19 vaccines were removed when the Supreme Leader changed his position, on August 11, 2021, announcing: “The coronavirus vaccine, whether imported or domestically produced, must be provided secured through every possible means and made available to everyone.” The next day, Kianoush Jahanpour, a spokesperson for the Food and Drug Administration, announced that 40 million doses of the vaccine would be delivered by the end of the summer. According to Jahanpour, 21 million doses of vaccine had been imported Iran up until that time.
But Khamenei was also the first person to wreck Iran’s vaccination drive by announcing the ban on US and UK vaccines in January. At the time the Supreme Leader issued this order, the Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines were the only vaccines distributed by the COVAX program and the only ones accredited by the World Health Organization.
So instead, Iran was placed on a waiting list for Russian or Chinese-made vaccines. Restricting Iran’s vaccine supply in this way intensified the national shortage and saw imports grind to a near-halt.
Until the Supreme Leader changed his position, the official policy of the Islamic Republic regarding vaccines, as declared by the then-Minister of Health, was also “turning Iran into a vaccine production center in the region by not importing vaccines.” Competition arose between Iranian organizations to produce vaccines domestically, wasting valuable time and resources.
Blaming international sanctions on Iran’s lack of vaccine imports was not just a tactic of Hassan Rouhani’s government: it was also used by commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp and other officials. So long as Iran’s policy was to focus on domestic design and production – instead of imports – sanctions were always used to justify Iran’s policies and the ban on US and UK imports.
Tasnim News Agency, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, laid out this argument in a detailed report entitled “How the US and Westerners kneel on the throats of the Iranian people: America prevents vaccination through sanctions”.
“Despite what they say,” the article declared, “that the United States does not ban food and medicine [from entering Iran], it did not allow our country to import hens for about nine months. If US sanctions had continued, and we had not revived an Iranian chicken, domestic chicken production would have dropped to zero.”
The report continued: “From the beginning of international efforts to provide a vaccine against the coronavirus, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran provided the vaccine and, as usual, paid for it (even reportedly more than other countries), but again it was faced with a lack of commitment from international bodies.”
Hassan Salami, commander of the Revolutionary Guards, said as recently as August 22, 2021, that: “While we are exposed to this mysterious and complex global disease and suffer from its physiological and social consequences, we are also exposed to the most severe and intense global embargo. … we cannot use our money, which is blocked in the banks of other countries by the United States, to provide medicine, vaccines and pharmaceutical items.”
Future scholars of Iran’s state media and of the coronavirus pandemic in Iran may find it difficult to understand that these reports were not just a statement of opinion, but part of the Iranian government’s deliberate attempt to acquit Ali Khamenei for his lethal decision. But right now, even casual consumers of contemporary Iranian media can recognize such disinformation. And all such consumers should ask themselves: Who’s behind this message? Which media outlet published it? What is its purpose? And, most importantly, what information does it hide from its audience?
