South Dakota Governor Joins Fellow Republicans in Quest to Kill Her Constituents

Over the past few months there’s been a lot of focus on the COVID situations in Florida and Texas, and for good reason: Not only are cases surging in those states, but their respective governors, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, are seemingly doing everything in their powers to ensure their constituents contract the highly contagious virus, from banning local mask mandates to insane new rules like the one wherein Texas schools no longer have to conduct contact tracing or let parents know if a student has tested positive. But it’s important to remember that DeSantis and Abbott aren’t the only elected officials doing a horrendous job when it comes to COVID-19—a lot of their fellow Republican governors are as well! For instance, in Alabama, which, according to NBC News, has the lowest vaccination rate in the country, Governor Kay Ivey has insisted there will be “absolutely no statewide mandates, closures, or the like.” And in South Dakota, which has seen an astonishing surge in new cases over the past two weeks, Governor Kristi Noem is talking about how she’s going to go to war with Joe Biden over vaccine mandates he wouldn’t be personally enacting!

Which is a strange take given South Dakota is basically drowning in COVID cases:

Noem’s comment was seemingly in reaction to the president’s comment on Monday, following the announcement by the FDA that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine had gained full approval from the agency, that private businesses and local officials should start mandating inoculations. “If you’re a business leader, a nonprofit leader, a state or local leader who has been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccinations, I call on you now to do it, require it. Do what I did last month, require your employees to get vaccinated or face strict requirements,” Biden said, referring to the decision last month to require federal employees to get vaccinated or undergo regular coronavirus testing. (On Monday, CVS Health and oil and gas giant Chevron said they would mandate vaccines for some employees, following in the footsteps of other large corporations like United Airlines.)

Which would apparently be a bridge too far for Noem, who thinks that both vaccine mandates and mandates for masks—even in schools, where much of the population is unvaccinated—are some kind of attack on one‘s freedom to get sick and die. Which it appears some of her constituents will be doing soon, per the Independent:

South Dakota’s coronavirus cases have jumped by more than 300 percent, in two weeks, following the famous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which saw more than 500,000 people descend on the town. The Sturgis event contributes an estimated annual revenue of $800 million to the town of Sturgis, which has a population of around 6,600. According to New York Times coronavirus data, there has been a staggering 352 percent increase in cases in the state in the past 14 days, averaging 243 cases and 123 [hospitalizations] daily. The same festival last year was dubbed a “super spreader” event, as coronavirus cases accelerated following the rally.

“Any time you have a mass gathering of hundreds of thousands of people and then they return to their home states, you’re going to increase the likelihood of a ‘superspreader’ event,” Victor Huber, a biomedical sciences professor at the University of South Dakota, told NBC News.

Dr. Anthony Fauci warned prior to the event that we could see a new surge of coronavirus afterwards. “It’s understandable that people want to do the kinds of things they want to do, they want their freedom to do that,” Fauci told NBC’s Meet the Press. “But there comes a time when you’re dealing with a public health crisis that could involve you, your family, and everyone else, that something supersedes that need to do exactly what you want to do…let’s get this pandemic under control before we start acting like nothing is going on.”

Naturally, Noem told Fox News earlier this month that that the Sturgis rally was a “fantastic” event.

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