At CPAC over the week, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem lit the room on fire going after the Biden administration and Dr. Fauci.
She pointed out that over the last year, the media held out the government as “the savior”.
In South Dakota, she noted that she largely ignorant the public health experts who demanded she shut the economy down.
“Now let me be clear, COVID didn’t crush the economy, government crushed the economy. And then just as quickly, government turned around and held itself out as the savior, and frankly, the Treasury Department can’t print money fast enough to keep up with Congress’s wishlist. But not everyone has followed this path. For those of you who don’t know, South Dakota is the only state in America that never ordered a single business or church to close. We never instituted a shelter in place order. We never mandated that people wear masks. We never even defined what an essential business is, because I don’t believe that governors have the authority to tell you that your business isn’t essential...
Now in South Dakota, I provided all of the information that we had to our people, and then I trusted them to make the best decisions for themselves, for their families, and in turn, their communities. We never focused on the case numbers. Instead, we kept our eye on hospital capacity. Now, Dr. Fauci, he told me that on my worst day I’d have 10,000 patients in the hospital. On our worst day, we had a little over 600. Now, I don’t know if you agree with me, but Dr. Fauci is wrong a lot.
Even in a pandemic, public health policy needs to take into account people’s economic and social wellbeing. Daily needs still need to be met. People need to keep a roof over their heads. They need to feed their families. And they still need purpose. They need their dignity. Now my administration resisted the call for virus control at the expense of everything else. We looked at the science, the data and the facts, and then we took a balanced approach. Truthfully, I never thought that the decisions that I was making were going to be unique. I thought that there would be more who would follow basic conservative principles, but I guess I was wrong. Ask yourself this question, how far will people go to enforce mask mandates? Once you start lockdowns, how long can you sustain them? In South Dakota we had some cases in March and April, but the virus didn’t really hit the Midwest until late fall. Should we have kept people in their homes for March onward? Of course not.”
It's interesting that Fauci has remained silent about his boy, Andrew Cuomo. Of course, he did manage to go after Noem.
Gov. Noem went on CBS yesterday to respond: