Marjorie Taylor Greene is getting a lot of attention for comparing COVID rules to the Holocaust. While that may be surprising to some, it’s not to all of us who have gotten used to anti-vax folks who inexplicably love to bring up the Holocaust when they discuss vaccines.
For some of them, every discussion evolves into equating vaccine mandates to forced vaccination and eventually bringing up Nazis and the Holocaust.
Vaccines and the Holocaust Redux
What did Marjorie Taylor Greene say?
One thing that these folks miss is that many Jews died during the Holocaust because they weren’t vaccinated!
“During the last year of the war, as the Germans retreated into the Reich itself, the concentration camp population (Jewish and non-Jewish) suffered catastrophic losses due to starvation, exposure, disease, and mistreatment.”
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia
Which diseases weren’t they vaccinated against?
Typhus, for one.
Typhus killed over 1.5 million prisoners in German concentration camps, including Anne Frank and her sister.
“In early November 1944, Anne was put on transport again. She was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with Margot. Their parents stayed behind in Auschwitz. The conditions in Bergen-Belsen were horrible too. There was a lack of food, it was cold, wet and there were contagious diseases. Anne and Margot contracted typhus. In February 1945 they both died owing to its effects, Margot first, Anne shortly afterwards.”
Who was Anne Frank?
And yes, typhus was a vaccine-preventable disease at the time.
Diphtheria, cholera, typhoid fever, and smallpox were also big killers and were already vaccine preventable.
Believe it or not, the vaccines for cholera and typhoid were first developed in 1896. The diphtheria vaccine came later, but was still available, having been developed in about 1913 through the work of Emil Adolf Behring, William Hallock Park, and others.
Were all of these vaccines available in Germany at that time?
Maybe not, but anyway, these vaccines almost certainly would not have been given to Jews in German concentration camps even if they had been.
Is that the only reason or main reason that Jews died in the Holocaust?
Of course not!
So while anti-vax folks somehow like to equate vaccine mandates, which don’t even mean forced vaccination, to Nazi Germany, yes, one of the real problems with vaccines at that time was that many Jews and other prisoners in German concentration camps didn’t get them and they died of vaccine-preventable diseases.
What about the experiments Nazi doctors did on concentration camp inmates?
Did any of them involve vaccines?
“To determine if people had any natural immunities to tuberculosis, and to develop a vaccine against the disease, Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer injected live tubercle bacilli (bacteria that are a major cause of TB) into the lungs of inmates at the Neuengamme concentration camp. About 200 adult subjects died, and Heissmeyer had 20 children from Auschwitz hung in an effort to hide evidence of the experiments from approaching Allied forces.”
Peter Tyson on The Experiments
Of the 30 different types of experiments that were done, some actually did involve the development of vaccines, even if they didn’t involve prisoners actually being given vaccines that had been developed yet.
” The imprisonment of millions of men, women, and children by Nazi officials in crowded ghettos, concentration camps, and other prison camps during World War II provided Nazi doctors and other sympathizers with the opportunity to conduct inhumane and unethical experiments on victims without their consent. Among these were a number of experiments purportedly designed to develop vaccines for control of epidemic typhus, a disease whose impact was potentiated by the conditions imposed by the Nazis on their victims.”
Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust
Unbelievably, in the case of typhus, while Dr. Gerhard Rose and Dr. Eugen Haagen (sentenced to life in prison) were experimenting on prisoners to develop a vaccine, Rudolf Weigl had already developed an effective typhus vaccines that was taken by the Nazis and was being given to German soldiers on the Eastern Front.
But Weigl also smuggled a lot of his vaccine into the ghettos to vaccinate Jews!
“Concentration camp doctors conducted research on vaccines, antibiotics, fertility, transplantation, and eugenics. The majority of those experiments were either useless, scientifically unsound, or duplicative.”
Brian Palmer on Mein Data
The only useful outcome of these horrific medical experiments, some of which were done on children?
The development of the Nuremberg Code.
More on Vaccines and the Holocaust
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- Anti-vaccine Holocaust denial – something else that goes over their heads
- Anti-vaxxers are comparing themselves to Holocaust victims — who relied on vaccines to survive
- The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia
- How Scientists Created A Typhus Vaccine In A ‘Fantastic Laboratory’
- Holocaust survivor recalls desperate battle to stay alive: ‘I just wanted to live’
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- The Experiments
- Nazi Medical Experiments
- Malaria and World War II: German malaria experiments 1939-45
- Human Subjects Research during and after the Holocaust: Typhus Vaccine Development and the Legacy of Gerhard Rose
- Typhus, War, and Vaccines
- Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust
- Mein Data
- ‘We owe this to them’: Shoah survivors in vaccine spotlight
- Who was Anne Frank?