ABC News reports on the harmful effects of U.S. sanctions on Iran. The article explains how sanctions impede the production and delivery of radioisotopes needed in cancer diagnosis and treatment:

Nuclear medicine, essential for PET scan diagnosis testing, is especially at risk since it is linked with Iran’s atomic energy industry.

Iranian nuclear medication manufacturer Pars Isotope Company was one of the companies added to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s sanction list after the U.S.’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal.

“We were all shocked when we heard the news. Our activities are purely for medical purposes. About 800,000 Iranians use our products annually,” Mohammad Reza Davarpanah, head of Pars Isotope Company, said in an interview with ABC News.

The U.S. economic war on Iran is an assault on the health and well-being of ordinary Iranian people. As we can see from this report, this is not an inadvertent or unexpected result of sanctions. In this case, U.S. sanctions are directly targeting something that Iranian cancer patients need, and that jeopardizes the health and potentially the survival of many innocent people. If 800,000 Iranians use this company’s products, sanctions that interfere with their production exposes a huge number of people to much greater risk. This has real consequences for patients, as the article makes clear:

It was four weeks to her wedding in September when Mohaddeseh Gol Alizadeh, a 26-year-old nurse, realized her mother’s colon cancer had returned. The news was devastating, but what followed turned into a nightmare for the family.

Her mother required an emergency PET scan — a diagnostic test used for many diseases, including cancer — within 24 hours. However, she couldn’t get tested until at least 20 days from her initial diagnosis because of a shortage of medication and resources in Iran.

When Iran hawks tout the results of the economic war on Iran, they are defending and praising a policy that deprives sick people of essential medicines. This is what broad sanctions regimes do to the civilian population again and again, so no one can claim not to have known that this is what was going to happen when the Trump administration reimposed sanctions last year. The administration has done everything it could to hinder the establishment of secure humanitarian channels with Iran, and the Swiss humanitarian channel won’t fix the problem with the isotope company in any case:

However, the channel’s service would not apply to the radioisotope access, as the manufacturer company is directly under the OFAC sanctions.

“For the Pars Isotope case, a direct OFAC exemption is needed,” Mustofi added.

Why are these cancer patients made to suffer? So that Trump could indulge a hard-line fantasy of trying to force Iranian capitulation through collective punishment of the people. Harming these people is nothing but cruelty driven by an irrational obsession with isolating and punishing a country that doesn’t even pose a threat to the U.S.