In a comment on a post by Gila Sandhaus Jedwab, who wrote that she "can't believe we are doing this to each other" after seeing a teenager receive the coronavirus vaccination, Brown wrote "I grew up in a home where I heard the horror stories of the Holocaust first hand. We used to wonder to ourselves as kids, 'how did they let this happen?' History repeats itself."
Ari Brown, deputy mayor of the Village of Cedarhurst in the Five Towns, compares the U.S. coronavirus vaccination drive to the Nazi-era Holocaust pic.twitter.com/fErQoDSKLz
— Jacob Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) July 29, 2021
In a Facebook post in January, Brown claimed that the Biden administration would bring in "forced vaccinations" and "special camps for those that have Covid and those that will not choose to be vaccinated."
A number of politicians, activists and celebrities have come under fire in the past year for comparing coronavirus restrictions and vaccination campaigns to the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, including Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who later apologized for the comparison, but continued making the comparison after the apology.
Protesters around the world, including in Israel, have used the yellow star which Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust in protests against vaccinations.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt spoke out against such comparisons last year, tweeting "to compare COVID-19 rules to the slaughter of millions in the Holocaust is disgusting, wrong and has no place in our society."
Brown's comments come as New York and a number of other states are experiencing a spike in COVID cases amid the spread of coronavirus variants which seem to have weakened the efficacy of the vaccines, although vaccinated individuals still seem to be much more unlikely to develop severe cases of the virus than those who are unvaccinated.
On Tuesday, 162 new cases were reported in Nassau County, with daily numbers in recent weeks reaching into the hundreds for the first time since May.
Some 163 million Americans have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus so far, with 69.3% of adults having received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the CDC, outbreaks are occurring in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage, including the southeast US, where vaccination rates are low and infection rates are high.