AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
- Rep. Lauren Boebert called door-to-door vaccinators "needle Nazis" in a Thursday tweet.
- President Biden called for community-based and door-to-door vaccine efforts to combat COVID-19.
- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called such efforts "medical brown shirts," another Nazi reference.
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GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert on Thursday called medical professionals conducting door-to-door vaccination efforts "needle Nazis," marking the second time in one week that a Republican member of Congress has likened the Biden administration's COVID-19 mitigation strategy to Nazism, the ideology that led to the Holocaust.
"Biden has deployed his Needle Nazis to Mesa County," Boebert tweeted. "The people of my district are more than smart enough to make their own decisions about the experimental vaccine and don't need coercion by federal agents. Did I wake up in Communist China?"
Only 42% of all residents aged 12 and above in Mesa County, located in Boebert's western Colorado congressional district, have been fully vaccinated. The COVID-19 vaccines are not "experimental," and have all received emergency-use authorization from the Food & Drug Administration.
In a Tuesday speech on the state of the COVID-19 pandemic and the US's vaccine efforts, President Joe Biden said that "we need to go community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and oft times door-to-door, literally knocking on doors" to reach individuals who haven't yet been vaccinated and offer a vaccine.
The US fell short of Biden's goal for 70% of Americans to receive at least one shot by July 4, and now the Delta variant is sweeping through states with low vaccination rates, threatening to undo much of the progress the US has made in stopping the virus.
Boebert's colleague, fellow conservative congresswoman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, has repeatedly compared inoculation efforts to Nazism. Most recently, the Georgia lawmaker referred to door-to-door vaccinators as "medical brown shirts" and described the coronavirus as "a political tool used to control people" in a Tuesday tweet.
"Brown shirts" refer to the Sturmabteilung or SA, Adolf Hitler's militia and paramilitary force that first formed in the early 1920s. The SA engaged in various forms of political violence and intimidation to bolster Hitler's ascent to lead Germany and kicked off the routine targeting of and violence against Jews in the early 1930s.
Just three weeks earlier, Greene had visited the Holocaust Museum and publicly apologized after comparing employees of a grocery store wearing badges to show their vaccine status to the gold stars Jewish people had to wear during the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.