Iranian Government Returns 'Unauthorised' US-Made Vaccines to Poland

The Iranian government has reportedly returned close to a million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Poland after discovering the inoculations were manufactured in the United States.

According to a letter reportedly sent to the Iranian customs authority by the country's health minister, Bahram Einollahi, officials there were repeatedly assured by Polish authorities that none of the dosages would derive from "unauthorised sources"- only to find out that around 820,000 were produced in the US.

In the letter, Einollahi reportedly says Poland has since offered to "replace the vaccines with ones from an authorised source".

Longstanding animosity between the Iranian government and the US came to a head during the presidency of Donald Trump, when hardliners in the administration pushed a so-called "maximum pressure" sanctions campaign that further isolated the struggling Iranian economy.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to sweep the globe in early 2020, the situation in Iran became more desperate, with the head of the Iranian Central Bank going as far as to label the US' refusal to allow Iranians access to critical supplies as "medical terrorism".

Months later, Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei banned the use of vaccines manufactured by the US, insisting that Iran would instead seek doses from "reliable places". The country has since relied largely on shipments of doses from Russia and China, as well as several of its own shots which were developed locally.

Iran is far from the first country to return COVID vaccine doses. Throughout the pandemic, poorer countries have been repeatedly forced to return or dispose of millions of vaccines donated by wealthier nations.

In October 2021, Haiti was obliged to return hundreds of thousands of doses to the US to prevent them from expiring. A month later, Nigerian Health Minister Osagie Ehanire announced the African nation will no longer accept vaccines with short shelf lives after the country had to destroy around a million expired donated doses.