To Obey or Not Obey with Holocaust Survivor Vera Sharav: Part 1
Vera Sharav is a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection. She’s spent decades advocating for ethical medical standards and individual rights. Known for her outspoken views on public health, Vera has been deemed controversial for comparing the Holocaust with the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, she continues to bravely highlight dangerous parallels, emphasizing the importance of personal conscience in the face of tyranny.
In this Part 1 of 5, Vera reflects on her Holocaust experiences, drawing connections between Holocaust-era eugenics and the COVID-19 response. She emphasizes the continued use of death-based policies in the 2020s, along with society’s alarming devaluation of the elderly and disabled.
You can watch the full interview on YouTube.
MA: What similarities do you see between how the pandemic was handled and historical events like the T4 (involuntary euthanasia) program under the Nazis?
VS: I recognized disturbing parallels early on in 2020. In New York City, the disease’s epicenter, we were told hospitals were overwhelmed with COVID cases. But then something curious happened. Several truth-seeking women went to hospitals with their iPhones. Guess what? All were empty—except for three hospitals: Presbyterian on 168th Street, one in Brooklyn, and another in the Bronx or Bellevue.
Those facilities were overwhelmed, but everything else was put on hold. This didn’t make sense. Why was the media saying patients were overrunning hospitals? I also heard similar stories from Europeans. It soon became clear this was a deliberate operation, one meant to target the elderly. I immediately thought of the T4 program. Back then, their killing protocol began with infants and young children, then moved to older children and the mentally ill before it reached nursing homes.
MA: How do you see this eugenic mindset persisting today, especially during COVID?
VS: Back then, the victims, again, the disabled, mentally ill, and children—were considered “useless eaters” to dehumanize them. This phrase resurfaced recently when something similar was uttered by the World Economic Forum’s Yuval Noah Harari. He often invokes this kind of phrase to discuss what to do with all the displaced workers of the 4th Industrial Revolution sparked by innovations in AI.
As we know, the Nazis desired a “perfect” Aryan race. They therefore saw people with disabilities as polluting the gene pool, necessitating eugenics. After the horrors of World War II, eugenics became a dirty word. However, this didn’t mean that mindset or its policies were abandoned by the elite. For instance, in the U.S., we have something called “Complete Lives,” a hospital protocol developed by Ezekiel Emanuel as part of Obamacare. During COVID, hospitals were essentially ordered to follow this.
MA: Can you explain the 'Complete Lives' protocol?
VS: Complete Lives sets a value on human life based on age. Adolescents and young adults are given the highest value, so they get whatever care, no expense spared. According to this model, the least valuable are babies and the elderly. The prevailing mindset in public health during COVID was strikingly similar. People in positions of power put a value on people’s lives and acted accordingly. As we now know, during COVID, hospitals and nursing homes were deathtraps for the elderly and disabled.
MA: Can you give an example?
VS: There's a pending lawsuit brought by Scott Schara over the death of his daughter, who had Down syndrome. He has official documents showing how she was murdered. According to his side of the case, she went to the hospital with respiratory problems, but nothing serious, and they tortured her—it’s hard to even listen to the actual detailed, documented medical assault on her life. For Scott Schara and his wife—and thousands, perhaps millions of others—it was devastating. Contraindicated doses of Remdesivir—which was known to be deadly—was the “norm and practice” at U.S. hospitals—while doctors were forbidden to prescribe life-saving medicines. The number of preventable human casualties is concealed.
This was hospital policy under COVID. Ventilators were part of this. Trump was pushing for more ventilators—as was New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—even as they were killing people. This runs contrary to what people with a respiratory illness needed—they required oxygen. There were alternatives, but doctors were forbidden from using them. If they did, they could lose their license. Public health was weaponized, and hospitals and doctors followed these orders, just like under the Nazis. People think that what happened with the Nazis was somehow unique, but it’s not. Something similar just happened again.
MA: So, you are saying these tactics continued on in the West after the war?
VS: If anything, the West adopted the Nazi playbook in America. The government illegally imported major Nazi scientists, doctors, and engineers. Truman didn’t even know—it was done behind his back, despite his order that no former Nazi Party members should be allowed to immigrate to the U.S. The people who brought them here were part of the OSS before it became the CIA. They admired the Nazis. They viewed their work as groundbreaking. They scattered these scientists and doctors across the country, into medical, scientific, and military facilities, where they continued their Nazi experiments.
MA: That’s disturbing. Are you saying the Nuremberg trials didn’t hold most of the criminals accountable?
VS: The Nuremberg trials were a show trial focusing on only a small fraction of the perpetrators—some 23 doctors were tried, which is nothing compared to the number of doctors involved in Germany. Most of the real perpetrators, especially the corporate facilitators, were never held accountable, this includes corporations like IBM, which played a key role in identifying and cataloging Jews in Europe. They were never mentioned at Nuremberg. These corporate players, including major ones from the U.S., like the Rockefeller Foundation, still wield major influence, even today.
MA: This is stunning and deserves much more attention.
Stay tuned next week for Part 2 of my discussion with Vera Sharav.