But the vaccine had influential backers. It was the highly touted project of a company called Barkat, part of a sprawling corporate empire close to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Less than a week later, Health Minister Saeed Namaki announced that the vaccine had received emergency approval. At the time, Barkat had not even begun its Phase 3 clinical trial, meant to confirm the vaccine’s effectiveness and identify possible side effects, Iranian researchers later reported in a medical journal. That trial started two days later, the researchers said. The results are still not public.