Last Year, GOP South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem Said "Vaccinations Have Literally Saved Millions of Lives Over the Years." Then She Took a Knee for Trump and Became a COVID Spreader.
May 21, 2021
Special to BuzzFlash by Mark Karlin
Notice on the left that when entering South Dakota by car, the law that you are warned about is that seat belts are required by state law (see a sign on far left), thus indicating that Governor Kristi Noem and the state do regulate personal behavior. Then there are the multiple vaccinations required for admission to schools. We’ll get to that. (Geof Wilson )
Governor Kristi Noem (R-SD) sure has hypocrisy clutched close to her heart, or more appropriately to her political ambitions. As the photos and tweet above indicate, Noem is supportive of requiring seat belts in cars, even though they only protect the wearer, but she opposes requiring mask-wearing to prevent COVID transmission, which would be a mandate that would protect other people from contracting the virus. In short, the state of South Dakota can force you to protect yourself, but won’t force you from preventing the transmission of the deadly COVID virus.
The state also requires a driver to have insurance to pay for any damage caused by negligence in an accident. South Dakota doesn’t allow residents to make a decision not to have car insurance and just assume personal financial responsibility for an accident.
The 49-Year-Old Noem married her college sweetheart at 20 and has three grown children. Presumably, she complied with the extensive list of vaccines required by the state for children to be admitted to school.
On the South Dakota Department of Public Health Immunization page, here is just an excerpt:
South Dakota Codified Law 13-28-7.1 (Rev. 2016) requires that any pupil entering school or an early childhood program in this state shall, prior to admission, be required to present to school authorities certification from a licensed physician that the child has received, or is in the process of receiving, adequate immunization against poliomyelitis, diphtheria, pertussis, rubeola (measles), rubella, mumps, tetanus, meningitis and varicella (chickenpox), according to the recommendations of the State Department of Health.
This law applies to ALL children entering a South Dakota school district for the first time. This would include children in early intervention programs, preschool, as well as kindergarten through twelfth grade. Children under 4 need to be age-appropriately immunized.
In fact, not only did Noem comply with the multiple vaccine requirements for her children, in February of 2020, as the pandemic was just beginning, Noem opposed a bill by anti-school-vaxxers that failed to pass the state legislature. What was Noem’s position on the attempt to eliminate required vaccines for students? "Vaccinations have literally saved millions of lives over the years,” Noem said in a news conference last year in defense of immunizing young people to prevent transmission of a number of diseases.
Nevertheless, at a gathering of Trump loyalists earlier this year she mocked Anthony Fauci, masks and vaccines to applause. What then could be the explanation for this egregious hypocrisy? Why? Perhaps it is that Kristi Noem is positioning herself for the presidential or vice-presidential spot on the 2024 GOP ticket. To do that, she has to show her fealty to the deranged mask avoidance and disinfectant cures of Donald Trump, even if she and her state have already codified protecting public health through vaccines to prevent school contagion spread.
In April of 2020, she was interviewed by The Federalist Magazine, whose parent organization has a lock on the right-wing judiciary. The preface to the interview, early on in the pandemic, noted:
Republican Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota was one of the first officials to reject the one-size-fits-all approach to combating the Wuhan coronavirus, deciding not to issue shelter-in-place orders on her state that has seen less than 1,000 cases. Noem also announced Monday South Dakota would be the first to begin a statewide clinical trial for the drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for the coronavirus.
It was clear early on that Noem was going to opportunistically exploit Trump’s mass delusion regarding COVID, and that flagrant hypocrisy would not keep her from exploiting the collective psychoses of Trump and his followers.
Who could forget when she invited at least 250,000 motorcyclists to Sturgis, South Dakota, last summer for a maskless debauchery that then sent tens of thousands of infected bikers across the nation? US News & World Report ran a story about it, “Report: Sturgis Motorcycle Rally May Have Caused Over 250,000 Coronavirus Cases.”
As of May of this year, South Dakota had the third-highest percentage of COVID cases per 100,000 population. As Sarah Palin might ask Noem, “How’s that going for you?”
And those are just some of the reasons Kristi Noem is the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the week.
So many Republicans, so little time.
The original “BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week” ran every week from 2003 - 2010. You can find “winners” from those years by clicking here.
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