Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., this week drew a comparison between doctors helping President Joe Biden’s push to get Americans vaccinated against COVID-19 and the people who helped Adolf Hitler prior to World War II.
Greene stated in a Tweet Tuesday that “Biden pushing vaccines that are NOT FDA approved shows that covid is a political tool to control people.” People have the right to choose, they don’t need you coming knocking at their doors and ordering vaccinations. People can’t be forced to participate in human experiments.
“Brown shirts” refers to an early group of Nazi supporters who helped Hitler during the 1920s and 1930s, and then went on to fight for the Nazi army.
Greene was apparently responding to Biden’s comment that his administration could have public health officials “go community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes door to door, literally knocking on doors” to help get people vaccinated.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki dismissed Greene’s comments in an early interview with MSNBC Wednesday, saying, “We don’t take any of our health and medical advice from Marjorie Taylor Greene, so I can assure everyone of that.”
“What we’re trying to do here as the federal government is protect the American people and save lives, prevent people from getting COVID and the coronavirus and what we’ve seen over the course of the last several months is that one of the biggest barriers is access and people knowing when they can get the vaccine, where they can get the vaccine, the efficacy and safety of the vaccine,” Psaki added. “It’s up to every individual to decide whether they’re going to get vaccinated but especially as we’re seeing reports from the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] about the rise of the delta variant, one of the most transmissible variants we’ve seen there, this is about protecting people and saving lives.”
Greene has previously compared COVID-19 safety precautions, such as lockdown orders or mask requirements, with the treatment of Holocaust survivors.
“You know, we can look back at a time in history when people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi [D-Calif.] is talking about,” Greene said in May while taking about mask-wearing.
This caused her to come under fire from members of her own party, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who said at the time: “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.”
Greene initially denied that she was making a direct comparison to the Holocaust. However, she later admitted that she had made the mistake after visiting the Holocaust Museum.
“This afternoon, I visited the Holocaust Museum,” she said at the time. “The Holocaust is — there’s nothing comparable to it. It’s — it happened, and, you know, over 6 million Jewish people were murdered. More than that, there were not just Jewish people — Black people, Christians, all kinds of groups. Children. People that the Nazis didn’t believe were good enough or perfect enough. But there is no comparison to the Holocaust. And there are words that I have said, remarks that I have made, that I know are offensive, and for that, I want to apologize.”
