Auschwitz Museum, Jewish groups condemn Lara Logan's Fauci comments

Jewish organizations are speaking out after Lara Logan, a host on Fox News Media's streaming service and former foreign correspondent for CBS News's "60 Minutes," compared chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci to infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who earned the moniker "Angel of Death" while working at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

"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 ... the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps," Logan said on Monday during "Fox News Primetime."

"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," she added.

The Anti-Defamation League condemned Logan's remarks in a statement to The Hill.

"As we have said time and time again since the onset of this pandemic, there's absolutely no comparison between mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and other COVID-19 mitigation efforts to what happened to Jews during the Holocaust," the organization's CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said.

"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," Greenblatt's statement added.

The Auschwitz Memorial and Museum tweeted Tuesday that "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 American Jewish Committee also called Logan's remarks "utterly shameful" in a tweet on Tuesday.

"Josef Mengele earned his nickname by performing deadly and inhumane medical experiments on prisoners of the Holocaust, including children," the group continued in the tweet, adding that "there is no comparing the hell these victims went through to public health measures. An apology is needed."

Logan's comments, which were made during Hanukkah, come after Fauci, the country's leading infectious disease expert, has been criticized by GOP lawmakers throughout the pandemic.

When asked about that criticism in an interview with CBS News, Fauci said, "It's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science, because I represent science."