TEHRAN – The Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS), has denied sending any shipment of COVID-19 vaccines from Iran to Venezuela.

A video went viral on social media on Wednesday, in which a person claims that a consignment of Sinopharm vaccine is to be sent to Venezuela when the country is dealing with the fifth wave of the pandemic and is highly in need of vaccine.

“Our routine is that when we purchase a shipment of vaccine from China, we will receive it at Imam Khomeini Airport and deliver it to the Ministry of Health,” IRCS spokesman Mohammad Hassan Qousian said on Saturday.

“When the consignment of another country arrives at Imam Khomeini Airport, this is a kind of cargo transit, and investigations have shown that this consignment was transferred from China to Iran to be sent to Venezuela,” he explained.

The IRCS has never confiscated any shipment of COVID-19 vaccine from other countries and has never sent the quota of the Iranian people to other countries, he emphasized.

Transshipment is the shipment of goods or containers to an intermediate destination, then to another destination.

One possible reason for transshipment is to change the means of transport during the journey, known as trans-loading. Another reason is to combine small shipments into a large shipment (consolidation), or the opposite: dividing a large shipment into smaller shipments (deconsolidation).

Transshipment usually takes place to reduce transportation costs or circumvent sanctions imposed on the destination country.

FB/MG