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If it’s January, you can bet legislators are in Pierre playing doctor…
Rookie Representative Bobbi Andera (R-10/Sioux Falls) wants to waste more Legislative time rehashing the conservative covid war. Last year she pushed a measure (2025 House Bill 1223) to allow people to claim conscience exemptions from vaccines or any other treatment for any disease that, like covid, was declared a public health emergency. The House rejected that invitation to prolonged pandemics by just two votes. This year Rep. Andera wants to beat that dead horse with horse medicine. Rep. Andera’s 2026 House Bill 1068 seeks to give pharmacists broad immunity to hand out ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, two of the biggest bogus covid treatments to bubble out of the pandemic.
Andera, who calls herself a scientist apparently based on her work as a laboratory business manager and compliance consultant, offers this obfuscatory justification for her bad medicine [I’d better translate line by line; Andera in bold, me in brackets]:
What led me to introduce HB 1068 is a concerning observation encountered during 2020, respectively.
[I’m not sure what “respectively” means here. Andera is speaking of a single observation, not multiple observations at multiple times. Right off the bat, Andera is showing symptoms of word salad, vocabulary thrown together without a clear sense of meaning… or maybe a desire to hide her real intent in words that sound smart, self-assured, and assuring.]
Anecdotal evidence identified these drugs as potential options for early treatment of COVID-19
[“Anecdotal evidence” is bunk, not good medical science. Why can’t Andera say so? Why doesn’t Andera precede “identified” with “incorrectly and harmfully”?]
Regardless of lacking medical community support…
[Again, Andera is derelict in her duty as a public official, relegating the proof we had in 2020 that people were making a very wrong decision to a rather pallid subordinate phrase…]
…people across the country resorted to dangerous practices of self -medicating from concerning sources such as out-of-country drug dispensaries and OTC veterinary medicine.
[…and plowing forward to misdiagnose the danger as buying drugs from bad sources, not taking drugs that science was telling us did not work against covid, posed serious health risks, and were better left for use as proven treatments for other diseases.]
This was born out of the public exhibiting a growing distrust of some in the medical community, whether this was deserved or not.
[Andera can’t even stick up for real scientists here. She allows her constituents to entertain the notion that doctors and nurses may have brought distrust on themselves and doesn’t the fact that such distrust blooms more virulently among political conservatives like herself, as well as Trumpists and conspiracy theorists.]
This legislation closes the gap in efforts to provide safe access to these drugs directly through a pharmacist who dispenses the drug directly to the consumer/patient utilizing a protocol developed in concert with a physician. This bill additionally provides protections for the pharmacist and the physician, also a set of standards must be followed.
[The “gap” Andera sees is the gulf between the Mayo Clinic and all the other reputable doctors who will tell you ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine don’t cure covid and the ignorami Andera is coddling who keep saying, I gotta get me some horse pills!]
Safety for the citizens of South Dakota is at the forefront of this bill.
[No—finding a way to excuse the quacks who will write “protocols”—HB 1068 doesn’t mention prescriptions!—for ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, the pharmacists who will sell them, and the science-ignoring Trump-voting fools who will take them is at the forefront of this bill. A legislator focused on safety would simply turn to her constituents and say, “Every reliable study says neither ivermectin nor hydroxychloroquine helps you get over covid. Trust your doctor and get your shots.”]
People continue to go outside medical professional channels for these medications.
[Hmmm… if ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine actually worked on covid, wouldn’t doctors already prescribe it? Passage of HB 1068 won’t change science; responsible doctors still won’t prescribe those medications, and they won’t write the “written protocols… containing a non-patient-specific prescriptive order” for medications that don’t work, and people will still have to go outside medical professional channels in their unquenchable thirst for bad medicine.]
In turn, this leaves room for potentially dangerous outcomes where South Dakotans feel they need more access options [Rep. Bobbi Andera, FB post, 2026.01.16].
[For cripes sake—the problem is not that South Dakotans need more access options. The problem is that some of them feel they should take certain drugs that science will tell them will not cure what ails them!]
In an illustrative intersection of interests, 14 of HB 1068’s 22 sponsors have their names on one or both of the proposed bans on cell-cultured protein (HB 1057 and HB 1077). Rep. Andera co-sponsors both of those test-tube meat bans. Andera and her fellow horse-pill advocates would prohibit South Dakota consumers from choosing from a variety of FDA-approved meaty substances they want to put on their plates and in their tummies, but the same legislators are eager to help misinformed people gulp down pills for reasons the FDA and science say are wrong.
Hospitals, send Tim Rave again to talk some sense into Rep. Andera and kill HB 1068.
