A lot of hogwash was hollered in House Health and Human Services last week as Rep. Phil Jensen (R-33/Rapid City) and his yackadoodle friends grandstood unsuccessfully against science, vaccinations, and comprehensible English sentences. But two people in the room made sense in urging the defeat of House Bill 1159, in simple terms that might be directed equally at anti-vaxer Jensen and our overlady of bad science and public health, Governor Kristi Noem:
The bill was opposed by Lynne Valenti, deputy secretary of the Department of Health, who said the bill was unnecessary as South Dakota already has laws that prohibit forcing a vaccination or medical procedure.
Valenti noted that citizens who exercise their right to not be vaccinated must be prepared to handle the repercussions.
“Individual rights are not absolute and must be balanced with the rights of others,” Valenti said.
Deb Fischer Clemens, representing Avera Health, said those who choose not to get vaccinations bear a responsibility for their actions.
“Liberty does not say you can do any darn thing you want,” Fischer Clemens said [Dana Hess, “House Committee Rejects Jensen’s ‘Bodily Integrity’ Legislation,” Rapid City Journal, 2021.02.11].
Liberty does not mean doing whatever you want. Individual rights must be balanced with the rights of others. I still expect good sense from Avera Health and other professional health care organizations. But Deputy Secretary Valenti seems to be stepping off message from the constant drumbeat of unfettered personal freedom resounding from her boss’s boss’s office. Deputy Secretary, please pass that guidance up the chain, and let’s hear more of that balanced, community-minded messaging on the pandemic.
well..its about time someone with a sense mutual responsibility for the common good represented our government’s position on noxious proposed legislation
Up the chain indeed. Why haven’t we been hearing these words from Kim Malsam-Rysdon, Secretary of Health?
The Noem and Rand Paul mindset denies mask effectiveness which has prolonged and magnified this pandemic. Ironic that each is conservatively fretting about the $$price of cor-virus economic aid while contributing to the human death toll.
Fact is that the massive federal debt paying for PPE, ventilators, and oxygen, hospitalizations, recovery and rehab, funerals, unemployment, and stimulus… that is spiraling upward a $$trillion at a time could have been but 1/2 of that if we would have stressed personal isolation over personal freedom.
Now that virus has been enabled to re-group and is coming back at us more contagious, more vaccine-resistant and more deadly we risk a death toll never spoken before.
Laugh at the idiots, anti vaxers are really, really funny. Just let them be the deadly fools they are and laugh in their faces, with a mask on of course. They are very liberating.
Listen up. The vaccines are extremely problematical .. https://plainstribune.com/podcast/?service=podcast.PodCastDetail&streamId=b5333153c63e6dd40becfc70c5d96b99
Don’t listen up: vaccines save lives.
Getting vaccines out to the elderly population has coincided with a big drop in coronavirus deaths among elderly Scots.
According to Scientific American, we’re seeing more side effects from coronavirus vaccines than we usually do from flu vaccines, but hey: we also have seen a crap-ton more sickness and death from coronavirus than we do from flu, so we shouls expect that this vaccine has to give us a stiffer wallop to do the job. We are seeing milder side effects from the second dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine than from the first. No deaths have yet been attributed to the coronavirus vaccines. We’re seeing 3 to 10 anaphylactic reactions per million coronavirus shots, which is higher than flu shot rates, but in every recorded case of such reactions so far, the person affected has recovered.
Over the last 20 years, vaccines have saved 37 million lives, mostly kids.
Go get your shots, people.
Side effects also show that the vaccine works. Good hooch has a kick (or so I hear from my non-teetotaling friends).