Biden's vaccine mandate is not a Nazi move. But this Arizona leader went there (again)

Opinion: I realize that it is all the rage these days to rage against the efforts of government to get people vaccinated. But can we lay off the Nazi analogies?

Laurie Roberts
Arizona Republic

All weekend long, I wondered who would be the first to go there.

Which of Arizona’s leading lights would be the first to cry “Nazi” after President Joe Biden announced a vaccine mandate to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Would it be Sen. Kelly Townsend? In 2019, this Mesa Republican compared the requirement that school children be vaccinated against devastating childhood diseases to government-imposed tattoos.

Would it be Rep. John Fillmore? In 2020, this Apache Junction Republican was even more direct, calling a government mandate that you wear a mask “reminiscent of the 1930s in Germany, when people on their own bodies were tattooed.”

Or would it be Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward? In August, she promoted the suggestion that a business requiring its employees to be vaccinated against a highly contagious virus is the same as the Nazis requiring Jews to wear the yellow Star of David.

And the winner is … Kelly Townsend.

Can we please stop with the Nazi analogies?

On Sunday, she fired off a meme about the push to get America vaccinated against COVID-19 so we can do our part to end a global pandemic that has killed millions of people, nearly 20,000 of them in Arizona.

“If you’re vaccinated but you’re complaining about the unvaccinated then what you’re really saying is you don’t think vaccines work,” she tweeted.

Attached was a picture of the Nazi swastika, made from needles.

I realize that it is all the rage these days to rage against the efforts of government and society to get the pandemic behind us. Many of the rock stars on the far right are doing it.

I realize there are vaccine skeptics and government critics and a shockingly high number of political panderers in search of power who wax on about their freedom to remain a walking, talking super spreader.

People who don’t trust science or public health experts or the medical community or especially a Democratic president who is begging us to get vaccinated.

But could we please stop with the Nazi analogies? They're silly and they just make you look unhinged.

There's no convincing someone like Townsend

State Sen. Kelly Townsend speaks at a Young Republicans protest against Arizona State University's mask mandate. The protest took place outside the Hayden Library in Tempe on Aug. 13, 2021.

I put in a call to Rep. Townsend to ask her if she really believes Biden’s mandate – requiring that federal employees and contractors be vaccinated and those who work for businesses that employ at least 100 people be either vaccinated or tested weekly – is a step that will lead us to Auschwitz, to Birkenau.

To the wholesale slaughter of millions of people.

She didn't respond, except to post several tweets in response to this column, pointing to what she believes are parallels between the Germany in the 1930s and America 2021. 

"Tell me how I am incorrect in seeing parallels as to what is going on now, the ostracization, the isolation and the attempt to quarantine by camps," she tweeted.

I'm unaware of any American who has suggested putting the unvaccinated in camps.

As for the rest, is asking people to take reasonable steps to prevent the spread of a highly contagious and deadly disease really the first step to becoming a regime that killed 6 million Jews?

It seems to me there's a fairly important distinction that must be made: This is about preserving life. The Nazis were all about ending it.

It's a pity that Townsend wouldn't talk to me directly. I would have liked to talk to her about the statement she posed about why the vaccinated want to see others get innoculated, about the value of herd immunity and the moral imperative of protecting young children who cannot yet be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Then again, it wouldn’t have mattered. Simply put, there’s no convincing people like Townsend that public health requirements are a thing.

“My point is your body is your own,” she explained in 2019, “and at what point do we draw the line and say the government should be able to take your body and do with it what they decide?"

I understand Townsend’s passion on the topic. She once told me she’s convinced that vaccines led to her own daughter's Asperger’s syndrome and epilepsy.

She doesn’t buy any of the scientific studies that have debunked the autism-vaccine link, so it seems only natural that she doesn’t believe what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Drug Administration and the vast, vast majority of the medical and scientific community are saying about COVID-19 vaccines.

Is your body sovereign? Let's have that debate

In fact, Townsend’s question is one that can be reasonably debated: At what point do we allow the government to tell us do with our own bodies?

I’ll start. 

If, as Townsend says, “your body is your own”, should government be allowed to outlaw the use of cocaine and heroin?

And if the issue is mandating what we put into our bodies, how dare the schools require that students be given vaccines that have wiped out polio and smallpox and other diseases that ravaged children in centuries past?

Here’s another reasonable question: At what point do we acknowledge that there are certain requirements that come along with being part of a society? 

And certain rules of decency that apply if you want your concerns to be taken seriously? Chief among them: Never, ever reach for a Nazi analogy.

Contrary to Rep. Townsend's hysterics, we are not one goosestep away from another Holocaust.

Joe Biden is not Adolf Hitler, and a vaccine mandate that will save lives is not the same as state-sponsored genocide that killed millions upon millions of people simply because of who they were.

Sorry, it’s just not.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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