Global pandemic architect: ‘Don’t call me Mengele’

Israel coronavirus commissar Dr. Salman Zarka Saturday asked in an interview that people refrain from calling him a Nazi or referring to him as Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who used experimental vaccines on Jews in the Holocaust.

Zarka was one of the first global officials to call for vaccine mandates, which he did in January 2021 even before Israel’s Health Ministry. 

Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel volunteered to be “the world’s lab” for the COVID-19 vaccines, foisting the experimental treatment on an unsuspecting population even though it did not have FDA approval. Israel’s rollout sparked vaccination campaigns in other countries around the world, who also followed Israel in imposing vaccine mandates.

Zarka took over as Israel’s COVID commissar in July 2021 while serving as Ziv Medical Center’s director. Under his direction Israel’s government changed the definition of “fully vaccinated” to include the booster shot— also unapproved by the FDA — which meant that those who had not received all three shots were barred from participating in society.

However, in a Saturday interview with Maariv, Zarka appeared to champion individual liberties.

“To tell you that I think it is necessary to get to the situation that was in China and weld doors to maintain a lockdown? God forbid. We are a democratic country, individuals have rights, but saving lives is also a high value,” he said.

But when involving vaccines, Zarka is not as staunch in his advocacy for individual freedom.

"The claim was that the resolute call for vaccines hurts the right of the individual, but when there is an event of this magnitude, there is legitimacy for making major decisions even if they violate the right of the individual," Zarka said.

Zarka, a member of the Arabic ethnoreligious group Druze, takes umbrage at being referred to as a Nazi or Mengele for his pandemic management.

"Even today it is permissible to say that you don't want to be vaccinated, but to call me a 'Nazi', or a 'Druzi Mengele’ is crossing a line, and even if I have not been threatened personally, there is the battered child syndrome, where it is enough to beat your brother so that you too feel beaten.”

Dr. Josef Mengele was known to carry out research on Jewish subjects, particularly to develop cures for diseases. In Auschwitz, where Mengele was chief medical officer, one of the camps experienced an outbreak of a gangrenous disease called noma. Mengele initiated a research study to further examine the disease and develop treatment, which he began by isolating all those infected. Some children who contracted the disease were killed so their organs could be used for further research.

In 2021, Zarka recommended that parents test their unvaccinated children for the virus before allowing them around other members of the family.

But the coronavirus commissar admitted that even vaccinated patients — who were supposed to have escaped hospitalizations — were being hospitalized during the Delta surge.

“I have been interviewed more than once and said that somewhere, towards December 2020 the vaccines will arrive and we will be out in the light. It was also around Hanukkah and Christmas, so we generally celebrated and threw the masks in the air, and suddenly the Delta wave appeared, and vaccinated people were hospitalized because of COVID. We felt that we had received a resounding slap, it was a crisis both at the national level and at the level of the team, who worked around the clock and reached a plateau, and suddenly vaccinated patients arrive at the hospital in serious condition and there is an understanding that the business is not over."

Surprisingly, Zarka claimed in the interview that Israel’s Health Ministry communicated with the public in “full transparency” and passed on data “without any filtering” despite leaked documents showing data manipulation and concealment.

“It is important to emphasize that the corona vaccines are very safe to use and have been tested in dozens and hundreds of studies around the world, with all the data presented to the public all along the way in full transparency,” said Zarka. “The information that was available to the Ministry of Health and throughout the world regarding vaccines was passed on to the public without any filtering.” 

Zarka also revealed his efforts to target both religious Jews and Arabs alike who had not taken the injections. At one point, he visited the late sage Rabbi Kanievsky to obtain his endorsement for child vaccinations. He also pressed religious leaders in the Arab sector to stop the customary greeting of kissing hands, and in the Jewish sector, to stop touching mezuzot, parchment scrolls containing Torah passages mounted on doorways in Jewish buildings.