In Hopes Of Doing Better Next Time, Here’s A List of Illinois’ COVID Policy Mistakes – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

A recent Washington Post headline said it all. “The coming storm: America is not ready for a future pandemic.”

The editorial detailed why a solid retrospective on the failures in America’s COVID response is essential to avert the next disaster. “The action needed to turn the lessons from the nation’s covid-19 response into reality must be an urgent priority.… Preparedness means having everything in place the day before it is needed, and no one knows when that will be.”

Illinois should confront its mistakes for the same reasons.

The state and national response is properly seen as a national security failure. COVID was apparently not a terrorist attack or intentionally released bioweapon, but it might as well have been because the effects would have been much the same. It turned out that the nation and the state had no plan ready to roll out to deal with a comparable emergency. The frightening reality of how unprepared America was for a national security emergency has yet to sink in.

Despite particularly harsh restrictions causing inordinate damage to its economy, Illinois did no better than average on limiting deaths from COVID. Deaths per capita in Illinois are almost precisely average compared to other states. That’s consistent with any number of other studies showing no connection between lives saved and harsh restrictions.

But the state has seen no reconsideration of its COVID response beyond self-congratulations and award ceremonies for public health officials. No discussion whatsoever has been heard and no accountability has been imposed for mistakes made.

And mistakes were made. Lots of them.

A list of what we regarded as mistakes follows. Some were small and some were historic tragedies. A few became apparent only with hindsight but most were errors that had no excuse, having been evident as they were being made.

This list is about mistakes Illinois itself owns, though fault is shared with the federal government on some. We have not attempted to list the errors made primarily at the national level, which is long, except where the failure was poor coordination and lack of planning with the state. It’s mostly about state-level errors, but some were local.

Here’s our list. If you question our view on these, fine, but fix the list and ensure that the mistakes are never made again.

Massive fraud in pandemic cash relief.

Both the extended unemployment benefits managed by the state and a range of relief programs extended by the federal government are historic embarrassments. Unemployment insurance fraud alone is turning out to be the largest financial scam in American history. Other federal programs were properly described in a recent Chicago Sun-Times editorial as a “tsunami” of fraud.

Those programs were thrown together ad hoc. It’s inexcusable that the federal government and the states did not have in place reliable options that had been thoroughly vetted for rapidly and efficiently dispensing financial aid in the face of a similar national emergency.

Brute force broadly applied – a fundamental mistake.

Broadly speaking, both Illinois and the federal government set out from the start on a policy that asserted that the entire population was at risk, thereby justifying universally harsh lockdowns and other mitigations. Dissenting experts argued for a more targeted approach, which seemed clearly sensible to us as early as April 2020. That targeted approach later became known as the Great Barrington Declaration, which was signed by thousands of experts but deliberately suppressed and ridiculed by the federal government, tech platforms and the press. Those dissenting experts were proven correct. States and nations that followed that approach ended up controlling the virus at least as well as the others, at less cost.

The establishment’s brute force approach directed at the entire population and economy was premised on misleading fatality rates that failed to distinguish the minimal risk that most of the population faced from COVID. Policy thereby became upside down, disregarding the need to focus on the elderly and particular comorbidities. Seriously targeting the elderly for vaccination didn’t start until April 2021.

An initial reopening plan that made no sense on its face.

Among the conditions for reopening announced in May 2020 were that a vaccine or highly effective treatment become widely available or that no new cases be reported over a sustained period. At that time, we had no idea whether such a vaccine or treatment would ever be available or how long it would take. It also imposed a one-size-fits-all regime on the state, that was only later relaxed by dividing the state in zones where COVID conditions varied. The plan also required 90% of victims to participate in contact tracing even to move to the next phase of the reopening plan. That 90% goal was entirely unrealistic.

The public at that point understandably began to conclude that establishment health officials were irrational.

Initial data collection on infections entirely inadequate.

Until April 2020, Illinois failed to collect daily information critical to assessing and managing the COVID-19 crisis – numbers on hospitalizations, bed capacity, ventilator availability and the like – which most other states collected and published. The initial focus on case numbers meant little. Hospitalization numbers are what count, which the state eventually acknowledged. It began reporting hospitalization numbers only under pressure, in which Wirepoints played no small role. The federal government made the same failure as well, which was rectified only through a system that senselessly duplicated the state’s. A single reporting process should have been established early.

Junk projections.

Pritzker initially refused to provide the projections he claimed supported his science. When he finally did, his projections proved to be wrong before they were even released.

Parroting the government instead of reporting.

From the start, obvious questions were rarely asked (with the major exception of unemployment insurance fraud, which the press did cover). Still today, the Illinois press rarely mentions the mountain of criticisms made by credible experts of the establishment’s response to COVID. Illinois media seem to regard it as their civic duty to repeat government messaging, a fundamental betrayal of their purpose. Dissent like that contained in the Great Barrington Declaration was entirely suppressed.

Officially authorized line jumping for the vaccine: fundamental unfairness bred cynicism.

Healthy, young teachers and low level politicians got access to the vaccine before those truly at risk.

A reservation system for the vaccine that was a nightmare to navigate, especially for the elderly, wasting millions of hours in Illinois (yes, millions).

A de facto vaccine mandate on all Illinoisans, which was fundamentally wrong.

The supposed rationale for a vaccine mandate was that they would protect others, not just the vaccinated. But vaccine mandates or arm-twisting continued long after it became apparent that vaccines were not serving that purpose. At the University of Illinois, vax mandates remain in place.

Treatments for those already infected deprioritized and information about them abysmal.

Focusing almost exclusively on prevention through the vaccine and masks, to the exclusion of therapeutics, never made sense and those prevention measures proved to be far less effective than promised. Even after therapeutics became available and their efficacy established, information and advice about them was nearly nonexistent in Illinois.

“Shared sacrifice” often stated as a goal, but not required from public school teachers.

In March 2020, the state declared COVID an “Act of God” in a joint statement of the Illinois State Board of Education, the office of Governor JB Pritzker, Illinois Education Association, Illinois Federation of Teachers, Illinois Association of School Administrators and the Illinois Principals Association. That gave teachers a green light “to unleash a kitchen sink of demands that might have been unthinkable before the worldwide pandemic,” as the Chicago Sun-Times put it.

Goals for available hospital beds not matching projections.

In April 2020, for example, Chicago Mayor Lightfoot was demanding 40,000 hospital beds in Chicago for COVID patients, though projections at the time indicated that the peak number required in the entire state would be just 9,300. Nothing close to what was provisioned for ever materialized.

Hectoring underaged kids themselves to get vaccinated.

Totally improper no matter what the science, and the science ultimately showed no need for children to be vaccinated.

Antibody testing and the role of natural immunity ignored.

Mere discussion of the topic was often censored. Inexplicably, the Pritzker Administration openly rejected antibody testing

Willful indifference to the rule of law.

Illinois’ imperious attitude toward its version of COVID “science” is illustrated by what happened in May 2020 when U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois said, “The Governor of Illinois owes it to the people of Illinois to allow his state’s courts to adjudicate the question of whether Illinois law authorizes orders he issued to respond to COVID-19. But Pritzker’s response essentially claimed that his science trumped the law. “Taking these things to court,” Pritzker said, “does not resolve the public health matter. Listening to the science and the data — that’s completely different than taking your political position to a court and trying to have it resolved by somebody who has been elected as a judge. So that’s my response.”

Our courts turned their backs on a long list of serious constitutional violations. The Illinois Supreme Court never even saw fit to take up any of the legal challenges except once, in a dispute it ruled moot.

Beleaguered restaurants senselessly pounded.

Restaurants were hit particularly hard by COVID, but Lightfoot showed no mercy. In May 2020 when some began adding surcharges to try to make up for the rules that limited them to take-outs, Lightfoot immediately demanded that sales taxes be collected thereon. She further said restaurants could not open in Chicago though the rest of the state allowed it.

Obsession with masks and vaccines.

Incessant message to “get vaccinated, get boosted and wear a mask.” Even after much of the public had come to recognize that those measures weren’t working anywhere close to what was promised, that message dominated.

Blind obstinance on masking kids in schools. Pritzker’s insistence on demanding masks for school kids is simply inexplicable and persisted long after the evidence was overwhelmingly against it. We collected some of that evidence in February of this year, when Pritzker was still insisting on school masking, and the evidence against that policy has on become stronger since then.

No scientific basis for mask mandates in any environment. It was not until February of this year that a reporter finally asked for that basis. The question was directed to Dr. Emily Landon, one of Pritzker’s COVID advisors and a mask fanatic, and she had nothing of any substance to offer. School masking was a “kids last” policy.

Demonizing those who did not wear a mask particularly divisive. “The enemy is you” if you don’t wear a mask, Pritzker said. “It demonstrates a callous disregard for the people in your community and in your county and in our state and in our nation.”

Disregard for risk adjustment and over-reliance.

We may never know how many of the very elderly and those with comorbidities relied on assurances that they would be safe if vaccinated and masked – assurances that were very strong from both the federal and state government. Many of the very elderly were commonly seen in public settings, masked and presumably vaccinated, even while the initial, more deadly strain of the virus was rampant. They should have been advised to stay home.

Politicized briefings.

For the first part of the pandemic, Pritzker used his daily briefings for political rants against Donald Trump. Some of those criticisms were valid, but many were transparently political.

In July 2020, he even testified before the US Congress that he had gotten COVID under control and made Illinois a model for the nation, despite Trump’s policies, thanks to his mask mandates.

Censorship of dissent.

A national scandal in itself is the level of censorship imposed by technology platforms acting at the direction the federal government to suppress dissenting opinion. We will be writing separately about that scandal, which is being exposed in litigation now. While there is no evidence that Illinois officials were part of that censorship, much of it was obvious while it was transpiring, and it should have been condemned.

Multiple problems in policy for nursing homes; reliance on advice from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Both the Chicago Tribune and The Reader have published detailed criticisms of Illinois failure to protect nursing home residents. Earlier, Pritzker said he called Cuomo who gave him “tremendous advice” on COVID and nursing homes. Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes is now widely regarded as among the nation’s worst COVID failures, resulting in some 15,000 deaths.

Smug dismissal of fair questions. 

On one of the rare occasions when Pritzker was asked to respond to critics, he smirked as the question was asked and said contemptuously, “Those are not the audience for what we are saying. It is clear to me that those who are willing to protest against the vax or against masks are not listening to the science.

Abuse of emergency rule.

The General Assembly abrogated its duty allowing Pritzker to rule by executive fiat, which is now in its 34^th month. Reliance on constant emergency proclamations is fundamentally wrong and rightly bred pervasive contempt for abuse of power, particularly given Pritzker’s claims to certainty on his “science.”

Lockdowns, shutdowns and most other compulsory measures that simply didn’t work.

More than 400 studies now show that these measures failed in their purpose of curbing transmission or reducing deaths, but caused immense harm especially to the poor and vulnerable.

School shutdowns: perhaps the biggest health policy error in history.

Illinois kept most schools shut even as the evidence turned against school closings. Learning loss, developmental handicaps and psychological trauma caused by school shutdowns are now widely regarded as catastrophic. Illinois kept most schools closed long after even the CDC, which it generally relied on, recommended against school closings.

School children, who faced no material risk from Covid, were used as human shields by adults who wrongly believed that school closings would reduce spread and risk to themselves. Many of our young people will never recover.

Illinois appointed a new director of its public health agency in July, Dr. Sameer Vohra. His credentials are superb in both science and public service. His real test, however, will be willingness to call out past mistakes and ensure that they never recur. That will require finger pointing – at the very politicians to whom he answers.

Whether he has the courage to do so remains to be seen. We already know that Illinois’ political and medical establishments do not.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.

Our stories written through the course of the pandemic are collected here.

This column was updated in the fourth column to clarify that COVID was apparently not a terrorist attack or intentionally released bioweapon.