Once upon a time, Lara Logan was a respected foreign correspondent for 60 Minutes, filing dispatches from war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq and regularly embedding with the U.S. military. Now she works for Fox News Media and, as is required of most people employed by Rupert Murdoch, regularly allows batshit-crazy pronouncements to tumble out of her mouth. The most recent? That Dr. Anthony Fauci, who wants people to get vaccinated and not die from COVID-19, is as bad as one of history’s most notorious human rights abusers.
Appearing on Fox News on Monday night, Logan told host Pete Hegseth, who had just accused Joe Biden of overhyping the omicron variant, “What you see on Dr. Fauci—this is what people say to me: that he doesn’t represent science to them. He represents Josef Mengele. Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps. 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.”
For those who need a history lesson, Mengele was known as Auschwitz’s “angel of death,” and as a “doctor” at the notorious concentration camp, “with full license to maim or kill his subjects,” he performed “a broad range of agonizing and often lethal experiments with Jewish and Roma…twins, most of them children,” according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Dr. Fauci, on the other hand, is trying to ensure that people don’t get very sick and/or die from COVID-19, which is basically the exact opposite of Mengele, and anyone comparing the two needs to have their head examined, perhaps several times.
Not surprisingly, Logan’s comments have been met with total disgust by groups that take issue with the casual claim that Fauci shares any similarities with Mengele whatsoever. On Twitter, the Auschwitz Museum wrote: “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.” Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, told The Washington Post that “there’s absolutely no comparison between mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and other COVID-19 mitigation efforts to what happened to Jews during the Holocaust,” adding, “This includes making outlandish and offensive analogies suggesting that somehow Dr. Anthony Fauci is akin to Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, known for his gruesome medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners.” The American Jewish Committee said Logan’s comments were “utterly shameful” and that “an apology is needed.” It added: “Josef Mengele earned his nickname by performing deadly and inhumane medical experiments on prisoners of the Holocaust, including children. There is no comparing the hell these victims went through to public health measures.”
Last week, in an apparent warm-up to Monday night’s comments, Logan compared two Fox News contributors who left the network over Tucker Carlson’s January 6 propaganda to “cockroaches,” writing, in reference to Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, “This tells you everything you need to know about these two—among the many running for cover as the truth is coming out—like cockroaches when you turn on the lights.”