'People all across the world are saying this': Fox Nation host Lara Logan compares Dr. Fauci to Josef Mengele - the Nazi doctor known as the 'Angel of Death'
Fox Nation host Lara Logan has ignited a controversy by comparing Dr Anthony Fauci to the notorious Nazi Josef Mengele, who conducted hideous experiments on inmates at Auschwitz during World War II to earn his moniker as the 'Angel of Death.'
Logan was taking part in a discussion on Fox News Primetime of the Biden administration's response to the new super-mutated Omicron variant of COVID-19 on Monday when she launched into a tirade against the president's chief medical adviser.
'This is what people say to me, that he doesn't represent science to them. He represents Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps,' Logan opined.
'And I am talking about people all across the world are saying this because the response from COVID, what it has done to countries everywhere, what it has done to civil liberties, the suicide rates, the poverty – it has obliterated economies – the level of suffering that has been created because of this disease is now being seen in the cold light of day, i.e. the truth, and people see that there is no justification for what is being done.'
Fox Nation presenter Lara Logan sparked a firestorm on Monday when she compared Dr Anthony Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele
Logan (left) made the remarks on Fox News Primetime while discussing the Biden Administration's response to the new COVID-19 variant Omicron
'This is what people say to me, that he doesn't represent science to them. He represents Joseph Mengele,' Logan said of Dr Fauci. Mengele, dubbed the 'Angel of Death,' was a doctor at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland who performed hideous experiments on prisoners
Logan's rant drawing parallels between the long-serving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Nazi doctor dubbed the 'Angel of Death' coincided with the second night of Hanukkah, a major Jewish festival.
Jewish organizations around the world were quick to condemn Logan, with the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland accusing the TV presenter of 'exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines, pandemic and people who fight for saving human lives is shameful.'
The museum, which maintains the site of the death camp where 1.1million people were systemically murdered, said in a tweet in reference to Logan's diatribe: 'It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.'
Likewise, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center also slammed Logan's comments.
Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan said in a statement that his organization 'strongly condemns the use - by both organizations and individuals - of the Holocaust, its images and characters associated with it, to further agendas and causes of any kind that are totally unrelated to the Holocaust.
'Manipulating the Holocaust in this trivializes the horrific atrocities that were perpetrated, and denigrates the memory of the victims and the survivors.'
Mengele joined Heinrich Himmler's S.S. in 1938 and after serving on the Eastern Front, was transferred to Auschwitz in 1943. He initially gained notoriety for being one of the physicians who supervised the ‘selection’ of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who would be gassed and who would live to be worked to death.
However, he became far more infamous for performing grisly human experiments on camp inmates, including children and twins, in his quest to find a scientific proof of the superiority of the Aryan race.
At the end of the war, Mengele fled to South America, where he lived until his accidental death by drowning in Brazil in 1979.
Logan, who hosts the show Lara Logan Has No Agenda on Fox News' streaming service, made her controversial remarks invoking the monster of Auschwitz just hours after Fauci, who has become a lightning rod for conservatives opposing vaccination and mask mandates, appeared at a press conference beside President Joe Biden to talk about the new COVID-19 variant.
Fauci said Americans should make it a priority to get either their first shots or a booster dose now, rather than waiting for pharmaceutical companies to adjust their existing vaccines to better attack Omicron.
'I would strongly suggest you get boosted now,' he said.
Earlier on Monday, Fauci said that scientists will need about two weeks to discover how well the existing COVID-19 vaccines protect against the variant, and how dangerous it is compared to earlier strains.
'We really don’t know,' Fauci told ABC’s Good Morning America, calling speculation premature.
Biden told a weary nation that while the new variant, first detected in South Africa, is a cause for concern, it is 'not a cause for panic.'
Fauci has long been pilloried by Republican politicians who have accused of drawing a false equivalency between himself and science, mishandling the early response to the pandemic by offering conflicting advice on mask-wearing, and lying to the US Congress about National Institutes of Health's funding of research at a Wuhan, China, lab.
Republican Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz went on the offensive on Sunday, after Fauci stated during an interview on Face the Nation that those who criticize him actually criticize science because he represents science.
Paul slammed Fauci for displaying 'absolute hubris,' while Cruz contended that Fauci has done more to hurt the credibility of science and doctors by being 'dishonest,' 'political' and 'partisan.'
When Fox News host Pete Hegseth on Monday asked Logan about the new variant, the former well-regarded investigative reporter lashed out at vaccine mandates and argued that the response to the pandemic, which she compared to the 'seasonal flu,' has been disproportionate to its severity.
'Really now, there is no justification for putting people out of their jobs or forcing vaccine mandates for a disease that ultimately is very treatable,' Logan said.
The Auschwitz Memorial in Poland was quick to condemn Logan for 'exploiting' the Holocaust
Since March 2020, COVID-19 has claimed 778,000 lives in the US alone and killed more than 5.21million people worldwide, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.
Logan's comments set off a firestorm of criticism on Twitter.
Tennis champion Martina Navratilova did not mince words, calling Logan in a tweet 'a total disgrace and a sorry excuse of a human being.'
German academic Marcel Dirsus tweeted: 'I've seen a lot of distasteful analogies during the pandemic but to compare coronavirus vaccinations to medical experiments in Auschwitz is truly disgusting. I'd say you should come to Germany and visit a concentration camp but we don't want you here. Shame on you.'
Before joining Fox Nation in January 2020, Logan rose to prominence as an award-winning investigative journalist and war correspondent for CBS News, where she worked between 2002 and 2018.
In 2011, Logan was brutally beaten and sexually assaulted while covering the Egyptian revolution in Cairo.
During a 60 Minutes interview that May, Logan said the attack involved 200 to 300 men and lasted 25 minutes.
On Monday, President Biden said that while the new variant, first detected in South Africa, is a cause for concern, it is 'not a cause for panic'
Logan is no stranger to controversy: In 2013, she was forced to issue an apology for inaccuracies in a 60 Minutes report about the 2012 Benghazi attack in Libya, in which US diplomats were killed by Islamic militants.
After leaving CBS, Logan began to openly criticize the media for promoting what she described as liberal bias and spreading 'propaganda' against then-President Donald Trump,
In recent years, Logan has taken to tweeting out various baseless right-wing conspiracy theories.
'Are those in power using COVID variants to further their agenda?' she wrote in a post on Sunday.
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