Psaki says the White House doesn't 'take health and medical advice' from Marjorie Taylor Greene after the congresswoman compared vaccination efforts to Nazi 'brown shirts'
- White House press sec Jen Psaki said they don't take their medical advice from Marjorie Taylor Greene.
- Greene compared White House-backed door-to-door vaccine drives to Nazi "brown shirts."
- Greene has likened aspects of the US' COVID vaccine efforts to the Nazi regime multiple times.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki hit back at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for comparing door-to-door vaccine outreach efforts to Nazi brown shirts, saying the Biden administration isn't taking "medical or health advice" from the GOP congresswoman.
"First I will tell you that we don't take any of our health and medical advice from Marjorie Taylor Greene, so I can assure everyone of that," Psaki told CNN "New Day" host John Berman. "But also John, what we're trying to do here as the federal government is save lives, prevent people from getting COVID and the coronavirus."
In a Tuesday speech on the US' vaccine efforts, Biden said that "we need to go community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and oft times door-to-door, literally knocking on doors," to boost vaccination rates given the emerging threat of the Delta variant.
Greene tweeted her response to Biden's remarks later Tuesday.
"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," she wrote. "You can't force people to be part of the human experiment."
"Brown shirts" refer to the Sturmabteilung or SA, a militia and paramilitary force assembled by Adolf Hitler in the early 1920s. The SA engaged in various forms of political violence and intimidation to bolster Hitler's ascent to lead Germany and kicking off the routine targeting of and violence against Jews in the early 1930s.
It's not the first time that Greene compared aspects of the US vaccine efforts to Nazi Germany. In a May 25 tweet, Greene likened employees of grocery store Food City wearing badges to indicate they're vaccinated to the gold stars Jewish people had to wear during the Holocaust.
"Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi's forced Jewish people to wear a gold star. Vaccine passports & mask mandates create discrimination against unvaxxed people who trust their immune systems to a virus that is 99% survivable,"she wrote.
She later tried to claim that she was referring to "the discrimination against Jews in the early Nazi years," and not the Holocaust itself, but that routine violence and targeting of Jews directly led to the genocide of the Holocaust.
After receiving hash condemnation, including from GOP leadership and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who called the tweet "appalling," Greene visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and apologized for the comparison in a June 15 press conference at the US Capitol.
"One of the best lessons that my father always taught me was, when you make a mistake, you should own it. And I have made a mistake and it's really bothered me for a couple of weeks now, and so I definitely want to own it," Greene said. "There are words that I have said, remarks that I've made, that I know are offensive. And for that I want to apologize."
In a statement, the American Jewish Congress said that Greene "continues to prove that there is no limit to her brutal trivialization of the Holocaust for her own personal political power."
"The Holocaust and Jewish suffering is not a prop for her delusional views comparing efforts to save lives through vaccines with the most heinous, systematic state-sponsored slaughter of millions of victims," the statement continued.