'Reprehensibly reckless' Kristi Noem ripped for 'endangering all of us' with disinformation

The Republican governor of South Dakota was blasted for "endangering all of us" with her State of the State address.

Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Daly noted Gov. Kristi Noem pushed religious exemptions from coronavirus vaccines and said, "we will also recognize natural immunity."

"The majority of the state legislators applauded, indicating they are not only Republicans but also foolish enough to endorse her fiction that people who have had COVID-19 do not need to be vaccinated," Daly wrote.

Daly interviewed Yale School of Public Health bioinformatician Jeffrey Townsend, the author of an October study published by The Lancet Microbetitled, "The durability of immunity against reinfection by SARS-CoV-2: a comparative evolutionary study."

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“Contracting COVID once does not make you immune over the long term and certainly does not make you immune to new variants,” Townsend said. “The issue with that declaration is that there’s going to be many people who are not going to be protected against new infections, whether or not they’re new variants. Having such a declaration is not properly understanding the dynamics in this pandemic.”

“And the possibility of that variant increases with people getting infected more,” he explained. “The more people there are, the more different variants form and some of them, some very small fraction of them, are going to become new variants that are immunoevasive.”

Daly said Noem's coronavirus stances are designed to find her a place on the 2024 GOP ticket.

He wrote that "Noem is not just wrong but reprehensibly reckless" and "when Noem suggests that having had COVID makes the vaccine unnecessary, she is in truth encouraging hesitant folks not to get the jab. And her resistance to a mandate is part of an image she is constructing of a cowboy-hatted, horse-riding, flag-waving champion of freedom who has led South Dakota to economic triumph amid the pandemic."

Daly noted South Dakota ranked 45th in GDP according to the Board of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce.