The Time a Coronavirus Hit Iran
Six tragicomic scenes from the staging of a pandemic in early 2020
Iran being in the news yet again makes this a great time to look back at the bizarre role the country/regime played in the staging of a spreading coronavirus from afar.
Six tragicomic scenes come to mind.
1. Regime officials wiped out.
It’s a weird virus indeed that seeks and destroys seventeen regime officials. The mob doesn’t even get that kind of hit-job rate. Impressive. Most impressive.1
2. Mass graves propaganda launch
After the Wuhan has to build a hospital and China is burning a lot of corpses stories came satellite images purporting to show Iran digging mass graves for its coronavirus dead.
The message? “See how serious this virus is? So serious that they have to dig trenches for the bodies!”
Iran was Ground Zero for the mass graves propaganda global tour that included (where else?) New York City, South Africa, India, Peru, Indonesia, and Ecuador. Because if your zoonotic/lab leaked virus doesn’t kill a lot of people, your pandemic declaration isn’t worth much, is it?
[Note: The Washington Post covered this too - on March 12, 2020.]
3. Dancing doctors & nurses.
Some of the earliest videos of dancing healthcare workers were “set” in Iran.
One tweet reported an “F-Off Coronavirus Dance Challenge” in Iranian hospitals, saying, “This is how brave #Iranian doctors and nursing deal with Coronavirus…by the way, the regime can f-off as well.”
Maybe that’s a clue about the fate of those aforementioned 17 officials?
4. On/off/on positive flu tests
Although the competition from Hispaniola and Australia is very fierce, ultimately, I must give the *Best* Positive Flu Test Graph Award to Iran.
No real baseline to speak of, and the number of specimens is low, but what in the world happened there with that drop in December 2019, followed by three months of nothingness during the time coronavirus spread was allegedly taking hold and killing the regime, before positive tests for Influenza B try to make a comeback in from April through September 2020?!?!
Wild.
5. Lockdown object lesson
Surely The Never, Ever Wrong New York Times got it right when it came to Iran and coronavirus?
Nope.
They were worse than awful with a March 3, 2020 story that used Iran as a “pro-lockdown” object lesson/cautionary tale.
Iran didn’t handle the virus correctly.
They didn’t listen.
They were too secretive and prideful and now the Supreme Leader is dead from the virus that no one needs to die from if they will just take it seriously — like America MUST DO BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!!
(See how that worked? All too well.)
And Foreign Policy followed the lead/lede…
6. New York City bomb fuse
And finally, believe it or not, New York City’s first case of New Virus (a.k.a. first positive result on a generous PCR test) was a healthcare worker in her 30s returning from…Iran.
She had no unusual symptoms, wasn’t hospitalized, and either had a different strain than the Supreme Leader of Iran or better health, because she lived.
This made for a very quaint “bi-coastal” spread narrative in the U.S. We had cases on the Western seaboard *coming from* the Far East - and cases on the Eastern seaboard *coming from* the Middle East and Western Europe.
Good thing the Feds called 15 Days to Slow the Spread when they did. Otherwise that woman coming back from Iran would’ve been like a fuse lighting a bomb in the most-populous city in America!
Why Iran?
I have no special insights about why the “setting” of Iran appears to have been leveraged as part of a strategic operation to stoke fear over a cold.
I do think it’s odd that on 10 March 2020 — the day before the WHO’s pandemic declaration — the U.S. used “COVID-19” as a basis for demanding that Iran release wrongfully-detained Americans on humanitarian grounds.2
Also strange is that the same day the CARES Act was passed - March 25, 2020 - The New York Times editorial board was citing “this coronavirus crisis” as a reason to ease sanctions on Iran.
This may have been garden-variety political opportunism, but it’s still a good reminder that Iran played more than a “bit part” in the Global Pandemic Show.
Two More Tidbits (post publication add-ons)
Added 20 July 20243
Yale professor and COVID-measures advocate Nicholas Christakis is a good example of an academic with relevant expertise who was misled by the Iran psy-op. In early March 2020, he amplified the WHO narrative about Iran’s outbreak by sharing a Bloomberg story on Twitter and commenting:
“Outbreak in Iran has growth rate that seems to confirm present estimate of doubling time of ~1.5 days, given *typical* social mixing. This is also consistent with Italy and WA [Washington state] situations.”
Christakis also promoted the Washington Post’s “Coronavirus Burial Pits” story.
The fact that a well-credentialed researcher with an interest in “how health and health behavior in one person can influence analogous outcomes in a person’s social network, via social contagion” could be taken in by such propaganda, in my view, underscores both the sophistication of the campaign and the human tendency to abandon reason when anxious or under pressure.
Added 10 April 2025
A March 22, 2020 article in an Iranian news outlet claimed that eleven prominent current and former Iranian athletes had died from coronavirus infection over an unspecified period. The idea of a 22-year-old succumbing to "Corona” was (and still is) absurd, and appears to be a cover story for an untimely death, if not foul play, assuming the death occurred.
Because Iran was one of the countries that participated in the 2019 World Military Games in Wuhan, it’s possible the “dead Iranian athletes” story was intentionally planted as “future evidence” of a lab leak cover-up.4
To my knowledge, these reported athlete deaths were never independently verified. The story below was published at a time when the WHO was accusing Iran of concealing data and failing to conduct adequate testing — very similar to how China was accused of doing the same.5
Text:
More than ten current and former Iranian athletes have fallen victim to novel coronavirus, according to data collected by Radio Farda.
The local sports federations' channels on Telegram, the most popular messaging app in Iran, have been crammed in recent days with posts commemorating prominent active and veteran athletes.
The cause of their deaths is not mentioned in the official notices. Still, many are believed to have died of COVID-19.
Radio Farda has collected a list that names eleven Iranian athletes whose deaths from the virus have been officially confirmed.
Meanwhile, for some unspecified reasons, many bereaved families of athletes are reluctant to publicly admit that their loved ones have died of the virus.
Furthermore, it appears that the state-run media are banned from publishing news about Iranian athletes who fall victim to the Covid-19.
Director of Emergency Operations in the World Health Organization's (WHO) new Emergencies Program, Dr. Rick Brennan, revealed on Monday, March 14, that the number of coronavirus cases in Iran was potentially five times higher than what is being reported.
"We've said the weakest link in their (the Islamic Republic authorities) chain is the data. They are rapidly increasing their ability to test, and so the numbers will go up", Brennan who had earlier visited Iran said.
A 22-year-old member of Iranian women's futsal national team, Elham Sheikhi, was the first athlete publicly named as a victim of Covid-19. Ms. Sheikhi was from the province of Qom that was the epicenter of the deadly outbreak.
Nevertheless, the state-run Radio-TV (IRIB) attempted to cover up her death by interviewing an older athlete and Ms. Sheikhi's namesake, insisting that she was alive.
Images of Sheikhi's grave circulated on social media forcing IRIB and other state-run news outlets to relent and admit that the young futsal player indeed died of Covid-19.
The eleven athletes who died of the novel coronavirus were engaged in basketball, boxing, chess, futsal, judo, soccer, taekwondo, and wrestling.
Roughly a month prior to this article, The New York Times was reporting on positive tests in Iran among officials. Note how the idea that a virus was “spreading” between people permeates the report.
Related: Iran pleads for medicine as it fights epidemic under sanctions (March 12, 2020) | Constraining Iranian Nuclear Scientists Press Statement from Mike Pompeo, U.S. Secretary of State (March 18, 2020)
Revisions made to both post-scripts on 14 June 2025
This is not me defending Iran or China. My view on the COVID event is that it was a cooperatively-planned and executed event, with different countries playing different roles.
Incredible the 'deadliest virus in our lifetime' killed none of the fossils in Washington, luck eh?
I had forgotten about the Iran C19 narrative till now. I’m still wondering how the cabal is able to control a country like that with a West-hating theocracy. Or is there another explanation? Is it possible their leaders saw early merit from playing along? Perhaps with sanction relief offered under the table?
Great report, thanks.