Third Time's the Charm?
Third Time's the Charm?
A post-election Pritzker answers the covid school vax question. Again.
For the third time in 15 days, a member of the press asked the Governor of Illinois about the covid-19 vaccine being required for K-12 school attendance. Audio of the reporter’s question fades in and out. The gist was asking him to clarify what IDPH and his administration might do to make the shot mandatory for students.
They meet on a regular basis to look at vaccines and what requirements there ought to be. There are no policies or plans to expand to include a covid-19 vaccine in those requirements.1
- J.B. Pritzker, November 9, 2022
Who’s “they”?
NBC 5 News Chicago’s interpretation was that Pritzker meant the Illinois Department of Public Health. (Screenshot from their reporting below).
Maybe, but IDPH doesn’t meet on a regular basis to look at vaccines and required shots for school. One of the two potential ways of adding any vaccine to the Illinois school schedule starts with an IDPH advisory group called Immunization Advisory Committee (IAC). An archive of past IAC agendas and meetings shows the committee meets on an ad hoc basis, not regularly.
There’s no IAC meeting on the calendar yet, but when attorney general candidate Tom DeVore called IDPH on Monday, a staffer said, “The best we know right now is the second week of December.”
A set of late-October emails between IDPH staff that I’ve shared previously suggests a meeting was in the process of being scheduled, with Heidi Clark, IDPH Division Chief of Infectious Diseases, saying the IAC liaison “was working on putting something together for a meeting” before the end of the year.
In a same-day response to Ms. Clark, IDPH Director Sameer Vohra said he wanted to “get a better sense of how to mobilize” the IAC, adding, “I imagine we will face continued challenges in promoting vaccines in the short term.”
It’s not clear from the full email chain what the catalyst for scheduling this meeting was, or whether plans to schedule a meeting came before or after the CDC’s own advisory committee voted to recommend that children receive the covid shot for school.
While Vohra could be talking about the covid-19 vaccine for schoolchildren, he could also be referring to vaccines for other populations and/or uptake for other vaccines that are already required to attend the states’ public & private schools.2
Earlier this week, the Chicago Tribune reported a 5-7% decline in rates for required vaccinations among Illinois kindergartners for the 2020-2021 school year. Data the Tribune obtained from the Illinois State Board of Education shows “(89%) of Illinois kindergartners were reported as vaccinated against measles, mumps, polio, rubella, chickenpox, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis…down from about 94% to 96% during each of the previous four school years.”3
Back to Pritzker…
In two weeks, we’ve heard the Governor go from saying The Legislature will decide, to We’re not looking at doing this and there are no conversations about it, and then There are no plans for or policies in place to do this.
I’ve seen this movie before. You have too. Future scenes include statements like, “I am leaving it to the experts,” “This is for the safety of all children,” and “To be clear, this is a health equity issue,” to justify a rule, law, or other scheme to bully parents who have already decided against a shot that has very little to no direct medical benefit for their child, and/or that the risks outweigh any potential benefit.
Let’s say my prognostication is baseless — that there will be no effort to either a) add the shot to the school schedule or b) otherwise coerce or bribe parents into making a choice that violates their knowledge of data and philosophical convictions.
Then why did Pritzker pretend covid-19 posed a *threat* to pediatric age groups? He closed their schools, subjected them to illegal exposure-quarantines, spent millions of dollars on viral testing, and battled parents in court over masking. Nothing he did failed to stop anyone, including teachers and their students, from contracting SARS-CoV-2.
Now, he wants us to believe his administration has no intention of trying to require — or of coaxing Legislators to require — a shot that he insists is highly efficacious against the disease he insisted was so dangerous to kids? If that’s the case, how can he justify the damage they caused to children with their purportedly *protective* policies?
He can’t, yet he thinks he was pretty awesome regardless.
The same reporter who asked Pritzker about the school vax on Tuesday also asked what he might have done differently the past four years. He responded,
“I think everybody can look back and say, ‘Look, could I have done something better along the way.’ And I’ve certainly answered that question with regard to the emergency that we dealt with in covid-19 that we’re continuing to wind down.
Look, I don’t know that I can tell you that there are things that I regret exactly, but I can tell you that I wish we had had more of an opportunity to work more in a bipartisan fashion.” [emphases his]
I don’t recall Pritzker talking about actual regrets he’s had with respect to handling covid. If he has, it’s been in terms like, I wish I would’ve convinced more people to get vaccinated, or I regret that there was so much disinformation from the minority of Illinoisans who don’t care about public health. 🙄
As to missed opportunities for working "in a more bipartisan fashion,"that’s awfully hard to do when you & your Supermajority have rendered your political opponents impotent (at least on covid matters) with a steady stream of emergency orders and unilateral mandates.
Pritzker apparently also has a strange definition of “winding down” an emergency. Incredibly, he reissued his covid disaster proclamation for the umpteenth time today. The man can’t quit covid, because he can’t quit the power & money linked thereto.
Sharpen Your Sword
Look, I’ve been an Illinois resident for all except two years of my life. I know to hope for the best but expect the worst of any election. For me, the most irritating part about pro-lockdown Governors like Pritzker winning their races is that victory sends a false signal to their egos — namely, that their harmful & pointless covid-response policies were good. Heck, The New York Times felt emboldened enough by the election results to defend mandatory masking in schools. (For a take-down, see Emily Burns’ excellent post.)
In retrospect, no one should have expected the same Blue States Electorates that loved or tolerated Covid Crazy to suddenly wake up, survey the destruction, & remove the tyrants. The battle for truth and common sense isn’t over, clearly.
The best we can do is sharpen our swords and continue to fight.
Note the use of present tense.
For school-level data, see https://www.isbe.net/Pages/Health-Requirements-Student-Health-Data.aspx
Illinois was one of three states that did not report kindergarten vaccination coverage for the 2020–21 school year that could have been included in an April 2022 CDC study of vaccination coverage and exemption rates among U.S. kindergarteners. Alaska & West Virginia were the other two states.
The closing: there are people everywhere in the country who've been impaired by lockdowns. You see specific states and urban areas where the damage is worst, but even in, say, rural Arkansas, some adopted the "careful" mindset, and they aren't going to change that mindset on their own.
Much like the country in general, the internal climate of states is amassed with a significant population of people who be perfectly comfortable with not only a "national divorce," but also a partitioning within the states. There is never again going to be any unity in the country. Even those who would be our adversaries would find allies with many in the "blue" cities, counties, states. Peaceful, or not, it would seem inevitable that "something" is going to happen, and it never needed to come to this extremity. We are both spectators and stakeholders in the destruction of our country, and are effortless at doing anything about it. Sad.