Kristi Noem’s Face the Nation interview did not go well

The governor of South Dakota and the rising conservative star Kristi Noem were a big hit at CPAC on Saturday, where she bragged during a speech to the state about her state’s response to the coronavirus. But an interview she did hours later with CBS highlighted how her attempt to put reality on its head did not survive the investigation.

In fact, the laissez faire of South Dakota’s approach to the pandemic – including Noem’s refusal to enforce a masked mandate – amounts to a failed experiment in herd immunity, as Bloomberg recently put it. The state has one of the ten highest death rates in the United States. More than 1 in every 500 residents has died since the pandemic began. And like Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan noted during the CBS interview, South Dakota’s death toll was the highest in the country since July.

Brennan noted that the governor is an avid conservative and pressured Noem to explain how someone who claims to care about the sanctity of life can ‘justify decisions that endanger the health of your constituents’. Her reaction was absurd.

“These are questions you should also ask every other governor in this country,” she said, although the whole point of the question is that the Covid-19 response from South Dakota was a failure – and much more limited – than it is compared. to the vast majority of other states.

The worst, perhaps, encouraged Noem people to come to her state for the Sturgis motorcycle rally last August despite the raging pandemic.

Public health experts said it was a very bad idea to hold the protest, which eventually drew nearly 500,000 people. And at least one study proved it – a study by the Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies at San Diego State University found that it could not only infect hundreds of thousands of people with the virus, but that it could potentially exceed $ 12 billion will involve. in health care costs.

When asked about Brennan’s San Diego study, Noem indicated that she’s the most important thing that “people can make their own decisions”.

“Listening, what we did was that people could make their own decisions,” she said. “We gave them all the information about this virus – how to protect their health – and then allowed them to make decisions to make decisions about what they would do.”

“My question is that it would have made a difference if we had a mandate that people should stay at home, and that we had a mandate that businesses should be closed?” Name below. “I would argue that it would not be.”

However, as Brennan pointed out, Noem’s position is not supported by facts. In addition to the aforementioned San Diego study linking Sturgis to thousands of cases, President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force coordinator, Deborah Birx, recently described Noem’s decision to allow Sturgis as ‘not good’. And as the Washington Post reports, health experts believe the gathering could cause coronavirus effects in the Midwest, contributing to the increase in cases seen last fall at the national level.

Noem’s response to the coronavirus was even panned by Republicans like the West Virginia government, Jim Justice, who responded to critics of his mask mandate last November by saying, “I do not want to be South Dakota.” Brennan asked Noem about Justice’s comment, but instead of getting involved, Noem immediately pointed out to blue state governors such as Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom, who both had questions about their Covid-19 response, to twist.

In short, Noem’s CBS interview did her no good. But Margaret Brennan is not the GOP base, and if Noem’s CPAC reception is an indication, Republican primary voters see Noem’s coronavirus response as a success.

Noem’s CPAC speech illustrated how little conservatives learned about the coronavirus

“Let me be clear – Covid did not crush the economy, the government crushed the economy,” Noem claimed on Saturday at CPAC before taking a direct chance to hire trusted public health experts.

“Dr. Fauci is very wrong,” she added to great applause.

The view of Name that personal freedoms are more important than public health seems to be the consensus view of CPAC. This was illustrated by a remarkable scene on Friday in which the organizers of the conference had to beg the participants to abide by the hotel rules and wear a mask on the premises for a freedom! ‘

Name itself is not big with masks. Earlier this month, she was widely criticized for tweeting photos of herself posing masklessly with a group of legislators during a dinner in the governor’s mansion (both pages except one without masks).

At the very least, the photo set a bad example for her constituents – especially since she left it to them to wear masks. But in this polarized time, scientists’s bad example seems like a heroic example of the possession of libs to Republicans.

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