Sanctions are war. They may not instantly shred flesh the way bombs and bullets do, but they kill and maim nonetheless.

Subjecting people to such cruelties is indefensible in ordinary times: in the pre-COVID-19 world, America's economic warfare was killing cancer patients in Iran, keeping Syrian children with cancer from getting necessary medicines, and, according to an estimate by two US economists, killing perhaps forty thousand Venezuelans. But collectively punishing entire populations during a global pandemic is perhaps an even more ruthless form of barbarism.

The coronavirus is ravishing Iran, with the country reporting more than twenty thousand cases and over 1,500 deaths. Prior to COVID-19, US sanctions battered Iran's health care system, undercutting access to pharmaceuticals and necessities like cardiac pacemakers. In December, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi described the sanctions as "the collective punishment of over eighty-one million Iranians through and by means of one of the most comprehensive and unrelenting sanctions regimes in modern history."

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo cannot be taken seriously when he claims that "humanitarian assistance to Iran is wide open, it's not sanctioned." Sanctions have hampered Iran's ability to contain the outbreak, sabotaging economic growth, preventing Iranians from accessing Johns Hopkins University's real-time coronavirus database, and leading Google to remove Iran's coronavirus diagnosis app from its online store.