1. I looked at EU exports to Iran across 7 categories of medicine and equipment relevant for the fight against #COVID19. In all but one category, Iran imported less in 2019 than in 2016 in both value + quantity terms. This is how sanctions weaken Iran's public health response. 
2. The graph above shows the change in indexed value. The graph here shows indexed quantity. It's clear how the reimposition of secondary sanctions in 2018 impacted trade even in these humanitarian categories. For example, EU28 exports of medical sterilizers have fallen 75%.
3. The ratio of export value to quantity of exports gives an expression of price. Here the picture becomes more dire. Since 2016, "price" has increased in 3 of the 7 categories, including a 23% increase in the overall category of pharmaceutical products.
4. As Iranian medical professor Abbas Kebriaeezadeh and I explained in this @ForeignPolicy piece last week, these underlying supply chain vulnerabilities are posing a huge challenge as Iran begins to exhaust its inventories of medicine + medical equipment.
foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/03/ira…
foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/03/ira…
5. Sanctions advocates disingenuously claim humanitarian exemptions prevent harms to Iranian patients. But their analysis almost always avoids specific breakdowns of product categories and fails to look at value *and* quantity together.
6. The Treasury Department's recent move to belatedly support a Swiss payments channel that will ease exports of medicine + equipment to Iran is an admission that US secondary sanctions are having a deleterious impact of the access of ordinary Iranians to medicine + medical care.
7. Sanctions are not responsible for any and all hardships in Iran. But the policy reflects a regrettable instance where the United States has chosen to compound Iran's domestic hardships—including a public health crisis brought on by a global pandemic—for dubious political aims.
