Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has once again slammed the United States for abandoning the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a departure that reinstated onerous economic sanctions on his country and has dramatically reduced the Iranian public's purchasing power. Rouhani described the decision as a "disgrace" for the United States. "Even more disgraceful was the act of imposing sanctions on food and medicines destined for Iranians," he said in his Oct. 15 address to a summit of the World Health Organization's Regional Committee for the Eastern Mediterranean in Tehran.

Despite denouncing those sanctions as "a crime against humanity," Rouhani downplayed their impact, boasting about what he said was Iran's 95% self-sufficiency in supplying its domestic pharmaceutical demand.

US officials have repeatedly claimed that the Iran sanctions do not target the medical sector, an assertion that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has persistently dismissed. "Don't take it just from me," he tweeted earlier in August, quoting a Foreign Policy report that had found US sanctions lethal to Iranian cancer patients. 

In his speech, Rouhani predicted that the United States will ultimately face defeat in the "economic war," while Iran will emerge triumphant. He suggested that the "allies" of the Islamic Republic have ignored US pressure by offering Iran concrete help, but did not specifically name any country. The Iranian president noted that the United States had no logical justification in scrapping the nuclear deal and only "bowed to pressure from extremists at home, the Zionist regime and Saudi Arabia."