Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, responded Thursday to Lara Logan, who compared him to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele earlier this week, calling her comments “disgusting” and “slanderous.”
When MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked him to respond to the Fox Nation host’s comparison, Fauci said, “It’s an insult to all of the people who suffered and died under the Nazi regime in the concentration camps.”
He went on, calling out not only Logan, but her employer: “Forget about the fact that she was being totally slanderous to me and, as usual, had no idea what she was talking about, saying that it’s as benign as flu. When did influenza ever kill 770,000 Americans? So not only is she being slanderous and disrespectful to so many people who were killed in the concentration camps by Dr. Mengele, but she absolutely has no idea what she’s talking about. She’s completely incorrect in everything she says. What I find striking, Chris, is how she gets no discipline whatsoever from the Fox network, how they can let her say that with no comment and no disciplinary action. I’m astounded by that.”
Logan made her statement Monday night on Fox News.
“This is what people say to me: He doesn’t represent science, he represents Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps,” Logan told Pete Hegseth during “Fox News Primetime.” A banner on the screen read, “FAUCI THINKS HE IS ABOVE CRITICISM.”
She was discussing the response to the Omicron variant of COVID-19 and offered criticism of vaccination mandates.
Fauci isn’t the first to condemn the comments, either. On Monday, the Auschwitz Memorial addressed them, too.
“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. It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline,” tweeted the memorial’s official account, which is followed by 1.1 million people.
