While Biden acknowledged that the leadership in Tehran “failed to respond effectively to this crisis” and “continues to act provocatively in the region,” he noted that “the Iranian people are hurting desperately.”

Biden also repeated his criticism of President Donald Trump for pulling the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran negotiated under the Obama administration. Since withdrawing from that multinational pact in 2018, the Trump administration has ramped up punishing sanctions on the country while hostilities with the U.S. have reached a fever pitch.

Trump’s campaign of “maximum pressure” against Iran “has badly backfired,” Biden charged, and “it makes no sense, in a global health crisis, to compound that failure with cruelty by inhibiting access to needed humanitarian assistance.”

“Whatever our profound differences with the Iranian government, we should support the Iranian people,” he added.

Iran has been among the countries most ravaged by the deadly outbreak, reporting more than 50,000 cases of Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, although the actual number of those infected remains in dispute. At least 3,160 Iranians have died from the disease, and a pair of trenches in the holy city of Qom believed to serve as mass graves for coronavirus victims are visible from space.

Sanctions relief for Iran would mark a de-escalation of tensions by Washington, if only until the pandemic abates. The White House has accused Iran — along with China, Russia and “bad actors around the world” — of “spreading misinformation and lies” about the coronavirus, and Trump on Wednesday tweeted that he believed Iran or its proxy forces “are planning a sneak attack on U.S. troops and/or assets in Iraq.”

Meanwhile in Tehran, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last month rejected an offer of American assistance to fight the coronavirus, instead promoting a conspiracy theory that the disease might have been manufactured in the U.S.

Biden’s statement on Thursday represents the latest signal that the pandemic has temporarily scrambled international relations, with the U.S. pursuing shifting diplomatic tacks toward historic rivals.

The White House and its allies have regularly blasted China for not being transparent enough with its coronavirus data and insufficiently warning the world about the grave nature of the threat. Administration officials have also balked at unfounded claims from Beijing that the coronavirus originated in the U.S. and was brought by the U.S. Army to Wuhan, the city in China’s central province of Hubei where the virus first emerged.

But Trump has alternately admonished and offered warm words for Beijing in an effort to stimulate trade amid a period of domestic financial turmoil, remarking last week that the Chinese were undergoing a “difficult time also right now” and had “very much stepped up their purchases” of American products.

In another remarkable sign of the times, Russia on Wednesday delivered a planeload of medical equipment to the U.S. intended to aid the American government’s management of the outbreak.