SACRAMENTO — Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has been accused of targeting California’s Armenian community after the former celebrity television doctor released a video showing him conducting so-called street “investigations” that appeared to focus on Armenian neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
“Our office is reviewing reports that Dr. Mehmet Oz recently targeted the Armenian American community in Southern California, making racially charged claims of fraud outside Armenian-owned businesses, including a popular bakery. Given the historic sensitivities involved, we are taking these allegations seriously. Any and all acts of hate have no place in California,” Governor Gavin Newsom said in a post on X.
Oz, a Turkish-American dual citizen better known as “Dr. Oz” from his years as a television presenter, shared a video on Tuesday in which he drives through the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the footage, he points to medical facilities and other businesses displaying Armenian-language signage and accuses them of being connected to a large-scale fraud scheme.
“So you can see these are medical buildings. They’ve got Cyrillic writing,” Oz says inaccurately while pointing to businesses with signs written in Armenian.
“You see Russian, Armenian writing,” he adds.
Later in the video, Oz films a segment in front of two businesses in a strip mall—Kilikia Art Studio and Tigranakert Lavash—both bearing Armenian signage, including text that reads “fresh bread.”
He implies that these businesses are linked to the alleged fraud scheme, stating that “quite a bit of it is run by the Russian–Armenian mafia.”
Prior to entering politics, Oz was widely criticized for promoting pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and unproven medical theories. These criticisms resurfaced repeatedly during his unsuccessful 2022 U.S. Senate campaign in Pennsylvania. At that time, members of the state’s Armenian community also criticized Oz for repeatedly failing to explicitly condemn the Armenian Genocide.
