Governor's Staff Explosive Testimony
Highlights the problems with SB 211 and the many amendments needed
Did you know that under Governor Noem's bill on COVID-19 mandates, vaccine exemptions will expire on or before June 30th of 2023?
Take a listen to this short clip of Katie Hruska, Deputy General Counsel for Governor Noem, testifying for the Governor’s bill, SB 211 earlier this week:
Let’s break down this explosive testimony:
Ms. Hruska states the bill has a sunset. This means the bill expires in one year and our legislature will have to reconvene and go back over the exact same bill. This is wasting taxpayer dollars for a temporary fix. Including a sunset clause means the entire bill, including exemptions disappears, leaving South Dakotans subject to coerced injections once again.
Governor Noem wants to give employers the right to demand retesting for natural immunity every six months. This means more testing for those who aren’t vaccinated, while making no similar requirement for those who are vaccinated—even though we know that immunity from vaccination alone erodes quickly. Why are the vaccinated not required to show titers? Simple: this bill encourages vaccination and favors those who do.
As Ms. Hruska states, the employer, who is most likely not a medical expert, gets to decide how long your natural immunity lasts, and if they want to recognize it as a form of exemption after six months. This means you’ll have to retest, file for a religious exemption, or get injected if you want to keep your job. Based on what she says, the ‘science’ is ever changing. If the ‘science’ changes before the sunset to say immunity lasts a lifetime, this bill still allows employers to deny based on the six month retesting clause.
Hruska includes leftist talking points we have become so familiar with: “There’s a lot of data and science that continues to change over the natural immunity part of this disease, and it continues to change just as often as we see the virus change…” and “that’s why we have a six month retesting period because we just don’t know how this virus will act.” This is false. We DO know a lot about this virus, including that it has a 99.4100% survival rate for people age 60-69 and it gets almost to 100% for younger generations.
SB 211 is loaded with problems that require amendments to actually protect South Dakotans. As Mandate Free SD highlighted last week, the weasel clause is just the beginning. This bill just doesn’t “follow the science.” That is something Governor Noem was quite emphatic about throughout the first year of the pandemic and this bill doesn’t come close.
ACTION ALERT!
Governor Noem is twisting facts and her bill does not “Mandate Freedom” as she would like everyone to believe. Share Governor Noem’s Facebook post with everyone you know. Comment with this link and reply directly to Governor Noem’s facebook post:
Contact SD Senators before Monday at noon. Email your own senator, and then others. You can also call your Senator over the weekend. Ask them to amend the Governor’s bill. There are three areas that need significant improvement to make this a bill that isn’t just for show. 1) Get rid of Section 2, subsection (6))—the “weasel clause.” 2) Strike the sunset clause. 3) Amend the bill to “follow the science” on natural immunity.