Republican congressman criticised for comparing vaccine mandates to Holocaust

A Republican congressman is facing rampant criticism after he appeared to compare potential vaccine passports to a brutal identification system used in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Kentucky representative Thomas Massie sparked backlash after he tweeted a photo of a person’s wrist with numbers tattooed onto it. During the Nazi reign, prisoners sent to concentration camps were tattooed with numbers as a way to identify them.

The photo was captioned: “If you have to carry a card on you to gain access to a restaurant, venue or an event in your own country...that’s no longer a free country.”

While he later deleted the tweet, it did not escape the attention of CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski, who shared a screenshot of it.

As a result, Massie received huge criticism from opposition politicians, academics and members of the public who were disgusted by his comments:

As in other countries and regions, lawmakers and businesses in Kentucky are debating whether certain venues should force people to prove they have been vaccinated in order to enter them, in an effort to curb the spread of Covid-19. Those against the policy state concerns about their civil liberties.

And it is not the first time a Republican politician has caused outrage by likening measures to control a global pandemic to a genocidal regime. In May, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who represents Georgia, called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “mentally ill” for supporting mask mandates and compared them to wearing “gold stars” - used in the Holocaust to identify Jewish people.

Undeterred, she later tweeted out a news story about a supermarket chain that planned to allow vaccinated workers to go maskless and said: “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.”

In June, she finally apologised after she visited a Holocaust museum and learnt what actually happened.

That that backlash hasn’t made Massie think twice before making his own crass comparison is disappointing, to say the least.

indy100 has contacted Massie to comment on this story.