By: Mark Glennon*

JB Pritzker didn’t just consult Dr. Anthony Fauci during the pandemic, he publicly attributed much of Illinois’ pandemic governance to him through at least the first two turbulent years of Covid. Pritzker regularly and forcefully endorsed Fauci’s pronouncements in his daily Covid briefings and elswhere. In September 2020, for example, Prizker said he “would not hesitate to follow the advice of Dr. Anthony Fauci” whenever case surges required action. Fauci was a “very reliable source of information, Pritzker also said. “I rely on the guidance I hear from him.”

Even in April 2022, well after Fauci’s credibility was broken by dissenting epidemiologists and other experts and Fauci himself had changed course on some matters, Pritzker was still clinging to Fauci’s authority, saying he “hoped and prayed” Fauci was right that the worst was behind us.

But Pritzker and Fauci were wrong on fundamental issues from the start. Just two months after the pandemic started, it had become glaringly obvious to us at Wirepoints that facts were being grossly distorted and that Illinois’ policy response was patently irrational. Many mistakes were obvious even as they were made, which we documented with dozens of articles collected here.

It wasn’t about measured differences of opinion about science. It was a governor – and many others — who repeatedly hid behind a federal bureaucrat’s pronouncements to justify sweeping, often indefensible mandates on 12.7 million Illinoisans. Among the other guilty is the Illinois General Assembly, which stood aside as Pritzker ruled by executive fiat through his 39 consecutive emergency orders lasting from March 2020 to May 2023.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or relying on legacy media), you probably know that Fauci has already been exposed as a world class fraud. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci was the face of establishment “science” on Covid. Most recently, his published diary exposes levels of narcissism and megalomania for the record books. The diary describes some of Pritzker’s phone conversations with him and Pritzker’s expressed admiration of him. On Thursday Fauci took the Fifth Amendment before Congress on most everything — over 100 times — despite the blanket pardon President Joe Biden gave him.

Among the topics during the pandemic on which Fauci was wrong or dishonest are these: probable leak from Chinese lab as the original virus source, asymptomatic spreading, fatality rates, blanket lockdowns, school closures, impact on youth, relevance of acquired immunity, social distancing, outdoor spread, masks, variant impact, vaccine efficacy and vaccine risks.

Overlay that against the list of Covid policy errors made by Illinois that we printed earlier and is copied below in full. I urge you to read it fully to appreciate the gravity and length of the list. Pritzker’s obedience to Fauci is linked to most but not all of it.

Here is just a sampling:

• Social distancing and masks:

Pritzker, like Fauci, repeatedly used emergency orders, public briefings, and even a paid ad campaign to push social distancing and masks.

But it turned out that social distancing – staying at least six feet away from others – was made up out of thin air – no study or science behind it. Even Fauci belatedly admitted that in 2024.

Mask efficacy likewise has been debunked by multiple studies. When finally pressed for evidence supporting masks, Dr. Emily Landon, one of Pritzker’s top Covid policy advisors, effectively had nothing to offer. Masking kids in schools was particularly misguided. Illinois maintained mask mandates in schools for nearly two years. Pritzker demonized those who did not wear a mask. “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.”

Fauci later conceded there was minimal scientific justification for mandating masks for children.

• Vaccines: 

During the initial vaccination push, Illinois public health officials, referenced Fauci’s guidance as vaccines were being rolled out in phases starting late 2020. In February 2022, Fauci himself praised Illinois’ vaccination progress, saying the state’s rate was “as good or better” than national benchmarks, with 70.7% of residents over age 5 fully vaccinated. Illinois and Fauci began to diverge about vaccines, however, in 2023, with Pritzker taking a firmer pro-vaccine stance than Fauci himself expressed at the time

Debate over Covid vaccines continues on many issues, but this much is clear: In 2025, the FDA withdrew approval of COVID vaccines for children, pregnant patients, and adults under 65 without underlying risk conditions. Illinois, however, clings to universal vaxxing, recommending vaccination for all adults and children, explicitly diverging from the narrower federal standard now in place

• School closures:

Illinois allowed schools to stay shut down long after even the Centers for Disease Control recommended against school closings, inflicting perhaps the biggest health policy error in history on children who faced negligible personal risk. Chicago Public Schools was among the worst, not fully reopening until August 2022

• Contempt for dissent and the rule of law:

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.”

Illinois’ imperious attitude toward its version of Covid “science” is illustrated by what happened in May 2020 when the 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.”

Yet Illinois has seen no reconsideration of its Covid response beyond self-congratulations and award ceremonies for public health officials, including a 2024 award to Fauci for “highest standards in public service.” No apologies to school kids. No discussion whatsoever has been heard and no accountability has been imposed. That absence of accountability begins and ends with Pritzker, who used a Fauci-style “trust the science” posture to shut down dissent rather than engage with it.

The most damning indictment isn’t rhetorical — it’s empirical. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found Illinois was the nation’s fifth-worst performer overall, ranking 46th in economic performance and 43rd in keeping schools open, Most importantly, Illinois’ Covid mortality rate of 284 per 100,000 was actually worse than Florida’s 277, according to the study, despite Florida’s dramatically lighter restrictions. The state’s ranking was about in the middle, ranking twentieth from the top. In short, Illinois inflicted maximum economic and educational pain on its residents for a public health outcome that was, at best, average and, compared to less-restrictive states, arguably worse.

Pritzker sold Illinoisans on the idea that unwavering obedience to Fauci-style federal science would save lives while critics were smeared as reckless. The record shows the opposite: harsher restrictions, worse economic devastation, shuttered schools, and a mortality rate no better — arguably worse — than states that trusted their citizens with more freedom. That a governor who staked his entire pandemic legitimacy on “science” has never had to answer for results this poor is not evidence of good governance. It’s evidence of a political class immunized from consequence by the very authority figures it hid behind.

-Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.

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From October 2022, our list of Illinois’ Covid governance mistakes:

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

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.

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.