COVID and the Holocaust

Many of us are having more trouble concentrating. The COVID pandemic is wearing, even though I am not on the front lines. I live in a community that is anti-vax and anti-mask, so I feel unsafe leaving my house. It's increasingly more than feeling physically endangered because of COVID. We have effective vaccines and effective masks. What bothers me more is the selfishness of so many in the community and the contempt they have for others. I had to go to the hospital for some testing, and even in the registration waiting area, one woman had taken off her mask and others had theirs below their noses. They might as well have screamed FU, given their nonverbal message.

As we were coming up to Holocaust Remembrance Day, the irrational attention-seeking antics of some was also more grating than usual.

Across the country, we've seen displays by willfully ignorant people protesting masks or vaccines by wearing yellow stars⁠, claiming that they are "victims," akin to the Holocaust.

The mayor of Anchorage, Dave Bronson, even defended use of the imagery initially as some citizens protested mask mandates. This protest against a common-sense public health measure happened even as the hospital had to declare that it had to adopt crisis standards of care because of an overwhelming numbers of cases.

Earlier this week, at the DC anti-vax rally, Robert Kennedy, Jr. and others again trotted out the Holocaust analogies. He said, "Even in Hitler's Germany, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did." He didn't even get that analogy right. I guess Kennedy didn't bother to read to the end of her story, or he would have known that Anne and her family were betrayed and that Anne died in the concentration camps. While he later apologized for his comments, his words were hollow, as he has previously made similar comments. This latest stunt was quite deliberate.

I appreciated Trevor Noah's takedown of the scene: "Crazy is relative because R.F.K. may be saying wild [expletive] about the Holocaust, but half the people he's talking to don't even believe the Holocaust happened. Yeah, they're just standing there like, 'Anne Frank? Didn't realize this guy was such a liberal.'"

Now, just before Holocaust Remembrance Day itself, we learn that the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee decided, in its infinite wisdom and concern for the well-being of its charges, to ban Maus, a graphic comic–style depiction of the Holocaust which uses cats as Nazis and mice as Jews. The novel is a Pulitzer Prize winner. It was to be used in 8th grade classes. Author Neil Gaiman observed, "There's only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days." But the most on-target comment came from Sarah Lazarus:

Trump won McMinn County by almost 80% in 2020. Unsurprisingly, the county school board is protecting students and staff with the following COVID policy:

• "Masks will not be required for students, teachers, or employees.

• McMinn County Schools will not conduct contact tracing.

• Extracurricular activities and field trips will be allowed.

• Visitors will be allowed in schools."

This Maus episode seems to be just the latest in the current trend of banning books.

In the meantime, we still have a raging COVID epidemic across the country. The CDC still recommends students (and others) mask. There are heated argument pro-and-con mask mandates. It appears that a number of regions that had eliminated mandatory masking have now reinstated those protections as Omicron cases have surged.

A final example of how surreal things feel at the moment is this week's headline, "Hospital refusing heart transplant for man who won't get vaccinated." The reality is that organs are a scarce commodity. Demand far exceeds the supply and there are many requirements to meet before someone is placed on a transplant list. This patient is willfully choosing not to meet a basic requirement — that he be up-to-date on immunizations before he begins life-long immunosuppressive therapy. Why is his refusal even newsworthy?

I am at a loss, unable to understand why wearing masks, getting vaccines, and working together as a community has become so divisive.

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Cite this: Judy Stone. COVID and the Holocaust - Medscape - Feb 01, 2022.