Greene compares Biden vaccination push to Nazis

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in a tweet on Tuesday compared a push by President Biden to ensure as many Americans are vaccinated against the coronavirus as possible to the people who helped Adolf Hitler rise to power in Nazi Germany. 

“Biden pushing a vaccine that is NOT FDA approved shows covid is a political tool used to control people,” Greene said.

“People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations,” she added. 

Biden pushing a vaccine that is NOT FDA approved shows covid is a political tool used to control people.

People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations.

You can’t force people to be part of the human experiment. https://t.co/S8qlstuSqL

— Marjorie Taylor Greene (@mtgreenee) July 6, 2021

“Brown shirts” is a reference to a group loyal to Hitler in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s whose supposed job was to guard Nazi Party meetings and eventually serve as the Nazi army. 

Greene was responding to comments Biden made this week saying his administration was prepared to send public health officials “to go community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes door to door, literally knocking on doors” to encourage people get vaccinated.

“We don’t take any of our health and medical advice from Marjorie Taylor Greene, so I can assure everyone of that,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said early Wednesday during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“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.” 

Earlier this year, Greene sparked controversy for invoking the Holocaust when pushing back on lockdown measures, mask-wearing and other points of debate during the coronavirus pandemic. 

“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 [Speaker] Nancy Pelosi [D-Calif.] is talking about,” Greene said in May about mass mask-wearing. 

Those remarks were met with condemnation from members of Greene’s own party. 

“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,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in reference to her remarks. 

Greene later denied comparing mask requirements for unvaccinated Americans to the Holocaust.

“I never compared it to the Holocaust, only the discrimination against Jews in early Nazi years,” she tweeted. “Stop feeding into the left wing media attacks on me. Everyone should be concerned about the squads support for terrorists and discrimination against unvaxxed people. Why aren’t they?”

Greene eventually apologized for the remark and visited the Holocaust Museum.