Speaking on behalf of the 26 countries at a meeting of the UN General Assembly’s human rights committee, China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Jun said “unilateral coercive measures” violate the UN Charter, multilateralism, and impede human rights by hindering “the well-being of the population in the affected countries” and undermining the right to health, AP reported.

“Global solidarity and international cooperation are the most powerful weapons in fighting and overcoming COVID-19,” the joint statement said. “We seize this opportunity to call for the complete and immediate lifting of unilateral coercive measures, in order to ensure the full, effective and efficient response of all members of the international community to COVID-19.”

Among the countries that backed the statement were half a dozen that face sanctions by the United States, European Union or other Western nations including Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Syria and Venezuela.

The statement notes that both UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet have called for the waiving of sanctions that undermine a country’s capacity to respond to the pandemic.

There was no immediate response to an email seeking comment from the US Mission to the United Nations.

Germany’s UN Ambassador Christoph Heusgen addressed the sanctions issue at a Security Council meeting on Syria in May claiming EU sanctions “do not affect the delivery of humanitarian aid or medical goods to limit the effects of COVID-19”.

The 26 countries also took aim at “chronic and deep-rooted racial discrimination, police brutality and social inequality.”

They cited the shooting by police of two Black Americans, George Floyd who died at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis in May, and Jacob Blake, shot by a white police officer in August and left paralyzed from the waist down.

“The COVID-19 mortality rate of minorities, in particular people of African descent, is disproportionately high in some countries,” their statement said.

In a Tuesday letter to WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom, the Iranian health minister asked the UN agency to take the necessary measures to terminate the illegitimate and unilateral American sanctions that have inflicted pain on the people of Iran and other nations and have had negative consequences for the world health.

The time has come for an international call for the removal of the sanctions to protect the health of people, he added.

Highlighting Iran’s struggle against the coronavirus pandemic and the illegal sanctions simultaneously over the past seven months, Namaki said, “The legal and legitimate expectation in such an emergency is that the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and all international agencies make sure that medicine and humanitarian supplies are made available to people of Iran.”

After the unilateral and illegal withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal, the US administration has imposed widespread and cruel sanctions on the Iranian people, Namaki deplored.

In the meantime, blocking Iran’s access to the global banking channels has harmed the country’s economy and disrupted the trade of medicine and medical equipment amid the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the minister added, stressing that the US must obey the International Court of Justice’s ruling which orders Washington to lift bans on the free export of medicine to Iran.

The Iranian administration has repeatedly said it is engaged in a battle on two fronts at the same time, dealing with the cruel foreign sanctions and addressing the coronavirus and its economic consequences.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in June that the main priority in the administration’s economic plans is to control prices and supply the basic means of life.

The 2^nd round of the MSTF Science Promotion Meeting hosted Hossein Ghanaati, head of Coronavirus think tank in Tehran province, and Hamid R. Rabiee, Member of The World Health Organization (WHO) AI committee, who have designed AI-Med—a system drawing on Artificial Intelligence for diagnosis of COVID-19 via chest CT scan.

Hamid R. Rabiee, professor at the Department of Computer Engineering of the Sharif University of Technology, stated that they have introduced this system to Indonesia, India, and some African countries.

“We have sent the system to different countries; it is available online, integrated into PACS, and on desktop. We’ve had meetings with a number of countries, and the meetings are to be continued,” he added.

“We have received samples from other countries and entered them into the system,” he continued.

He announced that they are designing a network which “can predict to what extent a COVID-19 patient has the chance of recovery, is at the risk of death, and how long they might be hospitalized.”

“Other modes of data are being added into our new system, other than CT scan,” he added.

He said AI-Med system facilitates the process of diagnosis during the peak time.

“It is integrated with hospitals’ PACS. Different universities helped the introduction of this system into the hospitals,” he continued.

He asserted that not only is this system-specific and sensitive, but also it can detect the amount of infected area and its results are interpretable. Furthermore, the system updates itself according to the dynamic behavior of this virus.

Rabiee further hinted at the integral role of culture-making regarding the acceptance of this system everywhere for COVID-19 detection. “There is clinical evidence that this system gives the results more quickly, in addition to being cost-effective, sensitive, and specific,” he remarked.

Hossein Ghanaati, professor of Neurointerventional Radiology at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, asserted that in Iran we have not passed the first wave of this disease yet.

He said that “Coronavirus is a real war; a war against the existence of human beings.”

Expressing doubts about the efficiency of any COVID-19 vaccine produced in the future, he stated that “COVID-19’s behavior is different from other viruses. The amount of IgG in recovered patients is reduced after a while.”

He proposed 3 strategies that can help to control the current crisis worldwide: 1) prevention; 2) effective management by the governments; and 3) tracking.

Maintaining that the second peak is predicted to be in autumn, Ghanaati said “as people have more indoor activities in that time of the year, the risk of infection increases.”

Emphasizing the importance of wearing masks by everyone, he asserted that “herd immunity, which occurs when a large portion of a community becomes immune to a disease by getting infected, does not help to curb COVID-19.”

He said while the RT-PCR test is not accurate and its result gets ready in 2 days, a chest CT scan test is done via AI-Med is more accurate and the result gets immediately ready.

Asked how this system can help the detection of the COVID-19 patients in crowded areas like airports, Ghanaati replied: “our new system aims to detect the infected subjects with the help of X-ray. It will not substitute the doctor’s diagnosis, but it will help to detect infected people in crowded places like airports immediately.”

“The advantage of utilizing AI in the current pandemic is that no data is missed,” he observed.

Regarding the utilization of AI-Med in Islamic countries, he said that “so far, Afghanistan and Iraq have consulted with us and have used our pieces of advice.”

Science Promotion Meetings are a series of meetings held by the Mustafa^(pbuh) Science and Technology Foundation (MSTF) in order to communicate science and scientific achievements to the public.

The CT scan units, worth more than $4 million, were procured by WHO through support from the Government of Japan and the State of Kuwait.

CT scanning is a key component of the clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 patients.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, WHO is supporting Iran’s efforts to turn the course of the disease. By delivering vital equipment and medicines, training health workers, and raising awareness in communities, WHO works with the Ministry of Health and Medical Education to serve the people of Iran,” said Dr. Christoph Hamelmann, the WHO Representative in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Recently, the WHO also equipped Iran’s COVID-19 hospitals with arterial-blood gas (ABG) analyzers—equipment essential for the assessment and monitoring of critically ill patients. Seventy ABG analyzers with the consumables have been procured and delivered so far, with support from the Government of Japan.

Since the start of the pandemic, the WHO has supplied tons of personal protective equipment to Iran’s health workers to help them provide safe care to communities across different parts of the country.

The Organization’s multiple shipments of PCR test kits have also enabled Iran’s laboratory network to continue to perform hundreds of thousands of diagnostic tests to early detect infected individuals.

As of July 21, a total of 278,827 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases have been reported in Iran, with the total death toll standing at 14,634. The country’s national laboratory network has conducted 2,201,958 tests so far.