It’s stupid. Sanctions are a policy that has been in place for decades while Covid-19 has been in existence for less than a few months.

So the mere comparison is ridiculous

And by the way, “500,000 Dead Iraqi Children ” is a bullshit . Where did this claim come from? Saddam Hussein’s government.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Saddam’s government claimed that United Nations sanctions resulted in more than 1 million deaths. Baghdad refused to allow humanitarian organizations to conduct independent studies to verify the claims. Unable to conduct their own surveying, some organizations adopted Iraqi government figures. In 1999, for example, UNICEF released a report that concluded that sanctions had contributed to the deaths of 1 million Iraqis. While activists often cite UNICEF as its author, Saddam’s Ministry of Health co-authored it and provided the statistics. They were nonsense numbers.

More here but, in short, there was almost no difference between Iraq’s population growth rate between 1977 and 1987 (35.8 percent), and between 1987 and 1997 (35.1 percent). Or, consider that according to the UNICEF-Saddam government report, the infant mortality rate allegedly was 98 deaths per 1,000 in 1995 while, three years later, it was 103 deaths per thousand. This would mean that as the U.N. relieved sanctions via the oil-for-food program, mortality increased. The only independent report from the time was a September 2000 Food and Agriculture Report, written in collaboration with the World Health Organization, which found half of the Iraqi adult population was overweight and two of the leading causes of mortality to be hypertension and diabetes, not diseases of the hungry.