Emails, Secret Report Show Politics Of Science Guiding PritzkerCHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker keeps telling Illinoisans that his coronavirus mitigation efforts are guided by science.
"Science twice removed" might be closer to the truth, public records show.
After combing though hundreds of pages of emails and a confidential coronavirus report obtained through the spoils of another man's Freedom of Information request, the big takeaway is that scientists advising Pritzker say coronavirus test positivity rates that guide his pandemic response are unreliable.
That's not an opinion.
It says so on page 18 of a confidential May 9 "Epi-Modeling Task Force" update — produced by the data analytics team running point on coronavirus modeling for the governor — that found its way to my email inbox thanks to
James F. Holderman III, executive director of Protect Parents Rights, a group dedicated to defending a parent's right to be free from the "
abuses of government and entities that collude with government."
Under the heading "The Limitations Of Data We Have Today," the report states: "Changes in the total number of test-positive cases or the fraction testing positive are an unreliable measure of shifts. These numbers should not be used to determine policy."
The next bullet point says: "Hospitalizations, ICU occupancy, and deaths are all later events in the course of the disease, so these events are too late to estimate the rate of transmission in the community."
Five months later, every time Prtizker issues an executive order to enact coronavirus mitigation restrictions — shutting down businesses, bars, indoor dining and schools, for instance — he cites those statistics anyway.
Those are among the same Pritzker pandemic metrics that a University of Chicago scientist who advises Pritzker's administration recently described to a downstate newspaper as "not scientifically founded."
In an interview with the Belleville News Democrat,
associate professor Sarah Cobey said she told Pritzker's administration it risks "losing scientific accuracy and probably credibility in the long run" by making policy decisions based on metrics such as COVID-19 positivity rates.
She said Pritzker's people were "pretty adamant that actual science is too much" for Illinoisans to understand.
How could that be?
Well, an email seems to lay out the process for how Pritzker is listening to experts: Actual science gets twice-filtered (at least) through political insiders.
Pritzker's chief of staff, Anne Caprara, shared details with scientists in a March 26 note sent from her private email account.
"Per the Governor's instructions, we want to merge the various models that your teams have been creating into one master model for the state for the purpose of helping inform policy decisions moving forward. This will be critical to helping us make decisions about when and how to loosen and tighten stay at home orders and other measures as we move forward. The Governor and I have asked Dan Wagner, who is copied here, to help lead the discussion about how to achieve this. Dan has a great deal of experience both in modeling as well as public policy and can serve as a good convener for this group. We'd like him to serve as our central point person in getting this central model built with all of your help," Caprara wrote.
Wagner is best known as the analytics guru who crunched data for then-President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election bid under the watchful eye of campaign adviser David Axelrod. He currently provides
data analysis to Vice President Joe Biden's presidential campaign.
Wagner's firm, Civis Analytics, which is financially backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, has been paid more than $1.5 million for producing scientific models that Pritzker uses to make pandemic decisions and public statements, public records show. (Data scientists doing the actual science have provided their services for free.)
The firm founded by Wagner, Obama's data guy, prepared the confidential report that warned against basing public policy on coronavirus test positivity rates, a detail Pritzker has ignored.
But that's not the only instance that Pritzker's administration has sought scientific input, only to disregard warnings from scientists, emails show.
Decisions 'Degrading the public trust'
On April 8, the Illinois Department of Public Health's chief of staff emailed William Jackson, head of Discovery Partners Institute — a group that Pritzker's administration gave $500 million in taxpayer cash to build a technology hub in Chicago's South Loop — pushing scientists to deliver a plan for pushing antibody testing.
"I need a project plan for wide distribution of antibody testing by [close of business] tomorrow," IDPH Chief of Staff Justin DeWitt wrote. "Don't need the test identified, but a plan for how tests will be widely deployed throughout IL (sic) to identify who has recovered from COVID. Remember these require a finger stick, but maybe we could do this in pharmacies, drive thrus, etc."
Jackson reached out to University of Illinois associate professor Christopher Byron Brooke, who replied with a warning: "Pushing out a garbage test for community testing just to say we are testing would be dangerous."
Brooke said some research labs in Illinois had gotten serology testing off the ground, but "probably can't be scaled for widespread community testing without massive effort/ investment."
"Was on a call with [Abbott Labs] today, the test they are developing is likely to be solid and can be run by multiple hospitals in Chicago, but won't be approved until end of the month," Brooke wrote.
In a separate email, Brooke stressed "pushing out a serological test that doesn't perform well enough may do more harm than good by prolonging the duration of this whole thing and degrading public trust."
Two days later, on April 10, despite those warnings, Pritzker announced at a news conference that widespread serology testing using Abbott Labs machines would begin in Black and Hispanic Chicago neighborhoods within a week.
Brooke was right, right of course. The state didn't have swabs needed for the Abbott machines, and hospitals and community health centers didn't have capacity to roll out the tests. Black people living on the South Side and West Side of Chicago had to be turned away from testing sites.