Ken Blackwell – Iran Threatens the Entire World With Its Secrecy and Mismanagement of COVID-19

Written by
Shahriar Kia
Ambassador Ken Blackwell’s article in the CNSNEWS
In an article published on CNSNEWS on Friday, Ambassador Ken Blackwell, a former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, elaborated on how the Iranian regime’s cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak has turned Iran into an epicenter of this disease.

“The Iranian regime has been grossly mismanaging its coronavirus outbreak since the day the first cases were reported in the country. It has also been systematically deceiving both its own people and the international community. It is long past time for the international community to recognize these realities. The potential consequences extend far beyond Iran’s own borders,” wrote Ambassador Blackwell.

Referring to the regime’s cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak, Ambassador Blackwell wrote: “It has been clear for more than a month that Iran is the epicenter of outbreaks spanning the entire Middle East region. COVID-19 cases in Europe and Canada can be traced to Iran as well. But some of Iran’s immediate neighbors are doing much better than the country from which their first cases arrived. Once it was clear that the novel coronavirus had breached their borders, the borders were almost invariably closed. Quarantines and social distance measures were proactively put into place at a time when Iranian Health Ministry officials were still insisting that these were “Middle Ages” strategies that would never be needed.”

In another part of his article, while referring to the revelations of documents belonging to the regime’s National Emergency Organization by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), Ambassador Blackwell wrote: “Those first cases were recorded by the National Emergency Organization in the first week of February. The relevant documents were obtained and released to the world by the main opposition the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) in late March.”

Ambassador Blackwell also pointed to the regime’s criminal decision in covering up the COVID-19 outbreak to have a larger turnout at its sham parliamentary elections and its rally marking the revolution’s anniversary. He wrote: “In between those first cases being recorded and the regime announcing the first deaths on February 19, massive gatherings took place in the streets of Tehran to celebrate the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The parades and festivities are an annual boon to the regime’s propaganda. Attendance is mandatory for government employees. There is simply no doubt that the parade became a breeding ground for COVID-19, which had surely been incubating in local residents for the prior two weeks. And if this were not bad enough, Iranians throughout the country were given another opportunity to spread the illness far and wide later in February, during the sham parliamentary elections.”

In another part of his article, Ambassador Blackwell referred to the regime’s cover-up of the real fatalities figure and wrote: “While Tehran claims a death toll of about 6,000, the MEK says that nearly 38,000 have died. These are been dutifully covered up by regime authorities in order to obscure the image of their mismanagement.”

“That pressure is vital and urgent for all parties that are in a position to help apply it. By doing so, they would surely be saving tens of thousands of Iranians, and they would also be helping to prevent the regime from re-infecting the surrounding region or the broader world with a contagion that the mullahs falsely claim to have under control,” he concluded.