‘Sad intellectual decline’: Auschwitz memorial slams Fox host for likening Fauci to Nazi doctor

‘Exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments ... is shameful’

Fox Nation host Lara Logan has been criticised by the Auschwitz Memorial for comparing Dr Anthony Fauci to infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele as she complained about measures safeguarding against the spread of Covid impacting citizen’s rights and the economy.

“This is what people say to me: that [Dr Fauci] doesn’t represent science to them, he represents Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War in the concentration camps,” Ms Logan said during a Fox News broadcast on Monday.

“People all across the world are saying this,” she added without mentioning any examples.

Josef Mengele was called “the angel of death” for his torturous and often fatal experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust.

“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 Auschwitz Memorial official Twitter account wrote in response to Ms Logan’s comments. “It is disrespectful to victims and a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.”

The experiments conducted by Mengele included removing organs without anaesthesia and forced insemination. According to Auschwitz.org, Mengele “was researching the issues of twins and the physiology and pathology of dwarfism”.

The website adds that the Nazi doctor “was also interested in people with different coloured irises, and in ... the treatment” of a “gangrenous disease of the face”.

“In the first phase of the experiments, pairs of twins and persons with inherited anomalies were put at the disposal of Dr Mengele and subjected to all imaginable specialist medical examinations,” the museum site states. “They were also photographed, plaster casts were made of their jaws and teeth, and they were toe- and fingerprinted. As soon as these examinations were finished, they were killed with lethal injections of phenol to the heart so that the next phase of the experimentation could begin: autopsies and the comparative analysis of their internal organs.”

Mengele also chose some of those who would enter the gas chambers at the concentration camp.At least 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz over the course of four and a half years, almost one million of them Jews.

Dr Fauci has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984 and became the face of the US pandemic response last year. He has often been criticised by conservatives and supporters of former President Donald Trump. When President Joe Biden was inaugurated in January of this year, Dr Fauci was made only the second chief medical adviser to the president.

In a Sunday interview with CBS, Dr Fauci said he was a man of science and criticised those speaking out against him as “anti-science”, prompting a backlash from some on the right.

Ms Logan continued her comments, slamming the measures intended to contain the virus, arguing that the regulations imposed have harmed individual freedoms.

“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 there is no justification for what is being done,” Ms Logan said, without mentioning the lives lost during the pandemic.

Last week, she also made the claim that “hundreds of coronaviruses” can be found in our bones.

Mr Biden has said that the new omicron variant of the virus is “cause for concern, not a cause for panic”. Curbs on travel have already been imposed as governments and scientists scramble to understand how dangerous and transmissible the new variant is, as well as how well the current vaccines protect against the strain.

Mengele escaped to South America after the Second World War and drowned while swimming in the sea in Brazil in 1979.

The Independent has reached out to Fox News for comment.