Fabio Meroni, a councilor from Lissone in the northern Lombardia region, posted the remarks over the weekend about lifetime senator and survivor Liliana Segre, 91, who has publicly supported the country's vaccination campaign.

The number was tattooed onto her skin at the Auschwitz concentration camp when she was a young teenager.

"All that was missing [in the debate about vaccines] was her... 75190," Meroni wrote in a Facebook post attacking Segre for recently saying that vaccination is the only way out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number was tattooed on Segre's arm in 1944 when she was sent to the camp, aged 13. Her father and paternal grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz, her mother having died years earlier in Milan when Segre still a baby.