Pritzker Revives Bid To Pawn Off Pet Virus-Test Project On CPS

Mark Konkol
Updated ·5 min read
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CHICAGO — A political ally of J.B. Pritzker blogged about how the governor has been trying to save Chicago Public Schools for weeks by offering up his pet coronavirus saliva test, SHIELD Illinois.

"I then asked what state help Pritzker had directly offered CPS. I was told the state had offered SHIELD tests, vaccination clinics and masks for the past several weeks. The city has not yet taken the state up on those offers. Sigh," the Springfield gadfly wrote.

Chicago Teachers Union bosses leading an in-person learning boycott expected to stretch into next week quickly seized on the detail.

"Mayor has yet to agree to offers from Gov. Pritzker to provide SHIELD tests to CPS in wake of holiday testing fiasco, as parents, electeds urge mayor to pause in-person instruction, implement critical mitigations, address massive vaccination gap among Black and Latinx children," CTU bosses wrote in a news release.

So far, public school officials haven't responded to questions about the alleged lack of response to Pritzker's reported offer of SHIELD spit tests.

But, as I've reported before, the governor's pet coronavirus testing project at the University of Illinois hasn't delivered on its promises.

Last year, SHIELD Illinois officials gave CPS leaders the hard sell to cash in on providing testing to the nation's third-largest school district.

Emails obtained by Patch show that SHIELD managing director Ron Watkins was eager to make a huge push to get CPS as a big-money client.

"Things are moving quickly with Chicago Public Schools. They want assurances over the test. The head of the school health care would like 15 minutes with one of you. It that possible? We try hard to protect your time, but this one is big. She is not going to get technical, she just wants assurances," Watkins wrote to SHIELD staff in January 2021.

"She asked for anything that shows our sensitivity and specificity. Her and many others ask for the data. I let them know that I do not have it to provide. I show the covid dashboard and send the pre-print. What I really need is something to share that proves the 99.8-.9% specificity and gives a sensitivity. I tell them 8-fold better than the Yale test on sensitivity, but they all want something in writing with some science behind it."

Back then, officials at Chicago Public Schools — the only public school district in the state that doesn't have to rely on the Pritzker administration to dole out federal coronavirus relief dollars — balked at the offer of federally funded SHIELD testing.

Top city sources told me CPS turned down the spit-test pitch due SHIELD's inability to provide assurances about accuracy, including the ability to scale up the testing operation. And they were right.

SHIELD Illinois' testing roll out was severely delayed statewide. So much so that, in October, weeks after students returned to schools, the federal government had to step in to provide testing at schools that were left behind due to SHIELD's in ability to keep up with testing demand.

As for SHIELD officials' claims the tests delivers near perfect diagnosis, their numbers don't match what's in the FDA's Aug. 26 summary of SHIELD's emergency use authorization report.

The FDA reported results of "usability study" produced results that don't jibe with either Watkins' email claim of 99.8 percent specificity or the assessment of test effectiveness in the program's frequently asked questions brochure.

The SHIELD test's sensitivity — how often the test accurately identifies samples actually positive — was calculated at 95.8 percent. The test's specificity — how often a negative sample produces a negative result — was 98.9 percent, according to the FDA report.

The difference in specificity means SHIELD's test could produce over five times as many false positives as it claims. And the "limitations" of those calculations have "only been established with saliva specimens from symptomatic individuals," according to the FDA.

A SHIELD Illinois spokesman did not respond to several emails Friday requesting details about the testing program progress and whether the organization had the capacity to boost testing at CPS.

But Pritzker told Bloomberg that he has asked President Joe Biden's administration to provide coronavirus tests to CPS in hopes of resolving the rift between the teachers union and the school district that has led to three days of canceled classes.

The governor didn't offer any specifics about his request for federal help.

Pritzker dodged the question with the verbal cue, "to be honest," that experts say often signals insincerity, when he told reporter Shruti Singh: "We’ve asked for anything and everything they could provide that would help us fulfill the need for testing in all Chicago Public Schools.”

The governor's White House request is kind of baffling, though.

Last year, Pritzker's administration was busy trying to create a school testing monopoly for SHIELD that included telling school districts that they wouldn't get reimbursed for coronavirus testing unless they signed up for the testing program, developed through the U of I.

That ended after state Rep. Michael Zalewski introduced a legislative amendment blocking the Pritzker administration's policy after reading a Patch investigative report.

Pritzker then set aside a quarter of a billion dollars in federal relief funds just for SHIELD testing.

All the while, the State Board of Education and state health department made failed attempts to kill SafeGuard Surveillance, a tiny coronavirus testing company started by a suburban scientist, that beat out SHIELD for several school district contracts.

Now that classes have been canceled for 330,000 Chicago public school kids, the governor goes begging for a White House testing bailout.

SafeGuard owner Ed Campbell didn't miss the irony.

"I saw that headline, and I laughed a little bit," he said. "It was a frustrated laugh."

Pandemic politics in Illinois will make a guy chuckle even when there's nothing funny.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

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This article originally appeared on the Chicago Patch