Older People and the Coronavirus Vaccine
Where We Must Not Remain Silent
Aydin Areta

The tireless philosopher and social activist Howard Zinn once wrote, in the Persian rendering preserved here:
“A good and effective political system always ensures that its people have access to food, medicine and healthcare, clean air, safe water, protected nature, a pleasant home in which to live, work suited to their abilities, and leisure hours greater than their hours of labour. A good and effective political system never asks who deserves these things, because they are not special privileges but natural social and human rights.”

It is difficult to read these words without arriving at a painful comparison between this standard and the difficult social and economic conditions of Iran today, and without asking ourselves why we, as a nation, have come to such circumstances.

Notice that these are only criteria of effective economic and social administration. They do not include any political rights or political freedoms; they focus only upon the effectiveness of a society’s social and economic management.

Iran is not a poor country lacking natural or human resources. With only a small distance behind Canada, Iran has been described here as the fifth-richest country in the world in terms of natural resources and national wealth. According to the World Bank figures cited in the source, Iran possesses the world’s second-largest gas reserves and fourth-largest oil reserves, but Iran’s wealth is not limited to these resources.

Iran is home to approximately one per cent of the world’s population and, despite the underdevelopment of mineral discovery and extraction, possesses seven per cent of the world’s known mineral and metal resources.

Iran is described here as possessing the world’s largest zinc reserves, the second-largest reserves of molybdenum—a metal widely used in military and aerospace industries—and gypsum, ninth-largest copper reserves, tenth-largest uranium reserves, and eleventh-largest reserves of iron and lead. Nearly twenty other important minerals present in Iran are said to place the country among the twenty nations with the largest reserves in the world.

In agricultural capacity, Iran is described as the fifteenth-largest country in the world by area of agricultural land. In environmental resources it is described as eleventh in the world for biodiversity. According to data cited here from World Atlas, with a civilisation said to extend 3,200 years before the Common Era, it is described as older than Egypt, the oldest known civilisation in the world, and one of the ten countries with the greatest number of historical tourism attractions.

Perhaps the most painful question that cannot be avoided when looking at these figures is this: what could a land and a nation wish to possess in order to move toward progress and success that this land does not already have?

The most basic indicator of a nation’s wellbeing is access to an effective healthcare system. It is difficult to hear the complaints of exhausted older people who sleep overnight in long queues to receive a COVID vaccine, only to return home without receiving one, and not ask how, with such natural, historical and cultural wealth, citizens who have worked and laboured their whole lives in this country should receive this degree of disrespect.

How can a country with such national wealth reach a point where, according to the figures cited in this text, healthy life expectancy at birth ranks 119th among 192 countries, healthcare system efficiency ranks 93rd, and hospital beds per thousand population rank 133rd?

How is it that a country described as the fifth-richest in natural resources has one of the world’s least valuable currencies, a large black market, and a much lower ranking in national wealth distributed across the population? How is it that a country described as eleventh in biodiversity ranks far lower in environmental sustainability and protection, while also being listed among major polluters of water by industrial waste, producers of carbon monoxide and atmospheric pollutants, and countries with weak management of waste and environmental contamination?