ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Medicine prices in Iran have risen since the country’s war with the United States began earlier this year, while insurance companies have struggled to cover the increased costs, leaving patients to shoulder sharply higher medical expenses amid a recent surge in COVID-19 cases, according to Iranian state media.
“We are facing a serious and critical shortage of medicine. On the other hand, due to problems in securing imported raw materials, we are also witnessing an increase in medicine prices,” Salman Eshaqi, spokesperson for the Iranian Parliament's health and treatment commission, told semi-official Mehr News Agency on Sunday.
Eshaqi criticized the “judiciary's silence in the face of excessive price increases and the grounds for corruption in the pharmaceutical market,” warning that “if we do not have an operational plan to neutralize sanctions and manage the effects of war on health, we will face irreparable damage in the future."
Despite medicine shortages, the country is also facing a surge in COVID-19 cases.
Ghobad Moradi, head of the Infectious Disease Management Center, told the state-run Tasnim news agency that the country has faced an increase of COVID-19 cases over the past three weeks.
"In the week ending last Sunday, approximately 8.3% of individuals who visited health centers as outpatients or were hospitalized with respiratory symptoms tested positive for COVID-19," Moradi said.
The medicine shortages and rise in COVID-19 cases come as the United States has intensified its economic pressure on Tehran. On August 20, US President Donald Trump announced what he described as an “Economic Warfare” campaign against Iran, warning that countries, financial institutions and businesses providing economic support to Tehran would face consequences.
“I am announcing the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country; This will be Economic Warfare,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, warning that “ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences.”
Days afterTrump's announcement, the US Treasury Department unleashed sweeping economic sanctions in what it described as an “unprecedented” economic campaign against Iran, dubbed Operation Economic Outcast.
“Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains the tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone,” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the time.
In response, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said that “the Americans know that no one believes their bluster," adding that the US "is not in an economic position to restrict its relations with other countries any further.”
Over the past week, Washington and Tehran have resumed exchanging fire after a month-long lull, following a US airstrike on the southern Iranian island of Larak that left several casualties.
Iran has repeatedly maintained that it exercises sovereign control over the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which around one-fifth of global energy supplies transit, which has emerged as a point of contention between the US and Iran since the onset of the war when the US and Israel launched a joint aerial campaign on February 28 striking thousands of targets across Iran.
The two sides reached a preliminary ceasefire in early April, followed by the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in mid-June, which established a truce and set a 60-day window for negotiating a final agreement that passed its deadline in August.
Some of the stipulations of the 14-point framework that Iran insisted upon have entailed ending the US blockade on its ports, withdrawing US forces from the Strait, US Treasury sanctions waivers on oil to enable immediate access to energy markets, release of frozen Iranian assets, and most notably, the “sovereign right” to impose a fee-collection system - a condition that the US and global bodies have unilaterally rejected.
