Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the US Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has been accused of ‘targeting’ California’s Armenian community after the former celebrity TV doctor released a video of him conducting street investigations that appeared to focus on Armenian neighbourhoods in Los Angeles.
Oz, a Turkish-American dual citizen better known as Dr Oz for his tenure as a TV presenter, shared a video on Tuesday of him driving around the Van Nuys neighborhood in Los Angeles, pointing out medical facilities and other businesses with Armenian writing and accusing them of being connected to a widespread fraudulent scheme.
‘So you can see these are medical buildings. They’ve got Cyrillic writing’, Oz says incorrectly as he points to businesses with signs in the Armenian language outside.
L.A. County has become an epicenter for health care fraud in America. Criminals have corrupted the system so much that fraud is now almost expected. President Trump has made it clear: we will not tolerate the patient harm or taxpayer funded theft any longer. More to come. pic.twitter.com/JOp8ltimq8
— DrOzCMS (@DrOzCMS) January 27, 2026
‘You see Russian, Armenian writing’, he added.
Later, Oz films a clip in front of two businesses in a strip mall — Kilikia Art Studio and Tigranakert Lavash, with Armenian writing underneath that reads ‘fresh bread’.
He implies these businesses are connected to the fraud scheme, adding, ‘it’s run, quite a bit of it, by the Russian–Armenian mafia’.
‘You notice the lettering and language behind me is of that dialect’, Oz says, pointing at the sign that reads ‘fresh bread’.
‘It also highlights, the fact that this is an organised crime mafia deal’, he adds as the camera zooms in on the lavash sign.
Shortly after, members of the Armenian community in the US widely condemned the video and the insinuations from Oz.
Alex Galitsky, the head of Armenian National Congress of America (ANCA), said that ‘Oz is in Los Angeles targeting the Armenian community with the same vile dehumanising rhetoric we saw fuel the collective punishment of Minnesota’s Somalian community’, referring to the ongoing claims the state’s Somali community is also involved in widespread fraud schemes.
Following this, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s communications director Izzy Gardon also accused Oz of smearing the Armenian community.
The governor’s press office also mocked Oz for attempting to take credit for the crackdown on hospice fraud in the state that Newsom had launched years before Oz took office.
Amazing to watch Dr. Oz cosplay as a fraud fighter for an effort the STATE launched years ago — back when he was busy pitching “miracle” horse supplements to insomniacs on late-night TV.@CAGovernor Gavin Newsom BANNED all new hospices beginning in 2022 and revoked 280+… https://t.co/NzRFMCnr34
— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) January 27, 2026
While there is a history of organised crime in California, sometimes associated with the Armenian community, being connected to Medicaid fraud, Oz did not provide any evidence in his video that the businesses he pointed at were involved in unlawful activity.
In turn, others pointed to previous issues with Oz’s credibility as both a politician and medical professional, and accused him of anti-Armenian bias.
Before his political career, Oz was widely criticised for promoting pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and unproven medical theories.
Such criticism was repeatedly cited during Oz’s unsuccessful run for Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022. At the time, members of the state’s Armenian community also called out Oz for failing on numerous occasions to explicitly condemn the Armenian Genocide.
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