What's So 'Equity Centric' About Pritzker's COVID Vaccine Plan?

Mark Konkol
Updated ·5 min read
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CHICAGO — One of my New Year's resolutions — "No J.B. column January," I called it — didn't last.

I blame it on Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who couldn't make it through his first pandemic update of 2021 without breaking out the same pandering political spin Illinoisans have come to expect during the coronavirus crisis.

The governor has refused to admit what everybody knows — our state's discombobulated process for inoculating folks with coronavirus vaccines is an imbroglio, to put it nicely. As of Friday, more than 535,000 vaccine doses haven't made it into the arms of Illinoisans. That's 70 percent of the doses the federal government has shipped to Illinois, where the rate of administering shots ranks 33rd in the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Instead, Pritzker announced last week that in a month or so, maybe, he will buck CDC guidance on who will be next in line to receive inoculations — which he pledged to follow last month with the blessing of an "independent" panel of experts — to reduce by a decade the age of people eligible for vaccines for the next round of shots.

There's no point nitpicking Pritzker for calling an audible. The CDC's guidelines for dolling out vaccine doses are a suggestion, and states, counties and hospitals are all doing it differently. The lack of a federal mandate — or any continuity on how to roll out vaccinations — makes it nearly impossible to discern who's got it right.

It's just that the governor's alleged reason for making the change brought back memories of previous broken promises. Pritzker says he lowered the vaccination age because, on average, Black and Hispanic Illinoisans die from coronavirus more than a decade younger than white residents.

He called it Illinois' "equity-centric" approach to dosing Illinoisans with COVID-19 vaccines. And the goal of an "equity-centric" vaccine rollout is to "save lives in a truly equitable manner, recognizing that multi-generational institutional racism has reduced access to care, caused higher rates of environmental and social risk, and increased co-morbidities for people of color," the governor said.

We've heard Pritzker make plenty "equity-centric" promises before, only to break them.

Among them is the governor's continued claims that his system for legalizing weed is the “most equity-centric in the nation,” even though there isn't one licensed marijuana business in Illinois that has a Black or Hispanic principal owner.

In April, Pritzker overpromised a boost in testing in Black and Hispanic Chicago neighborhoods that left minority communities hit hard by COVID-19 without equitable access to testing for weeks.

MORE ON PATCH: Pritzker Breaks Coronavirus Test Promise To Black Community

In November, Pritzker announced he would team with state lawmakers to push an "equity-centric" health care transformation plan that promised $150 million in funding for hospitals in minority enclaves, but it still hasn't been drafted as legislation for consideration in Springfield.

So, when it comes to coronavirus inoculation equity, minority communities in Illinois should believe the governor only when they get a couple vaccine needles in their arm.

After all, you didn't hear Pritzker explain the science that guided his decision to lower the age for the second round of vaccinations to 65 from age 75 — which the CDC says aims to ensure safety, effectiveness and equity — that makes him so sure the age change will provide increased access to the state's largest Black and Hispanic populations in the Chicago suburbs and the Metro East region in Southern Illinois.

"I believe strongly that we ought to protect more of our seniors, earlier, than [the federal government] has recommended," is how the governor put it.

If you think that sounds like a politically motivated cocktail of fuzzy math and pseudoscience, you're not alone.

State Rep. LaShawn Ford, among the first Black elected officials to publicly call out Pritzker for breaking testing promises to African American neighborhoods early in the pandemic, remains skeptical about the governor's latest "equity-centric" announcement.

"Decreasing the age in the general population reduces the chances of Black people and brown people getting the vaccine if you don't specifically send it to the areas they live. That's a big deal. That's very hard to dispute," Ford told me. "[Pritzker] thinks he's slick."

Data from Chicago's public health department, which is responsible for citywide inoculations, shows that, so far, people in wealthy, white ZIP codes received vaccine shots at higher rates than folks in poor, minority parts of town.

Chicago public health commissioner Dr. Alison Arwady told Crain's Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz that the data Pritzker cited to justify reducing the age for vaccinations didn't "recognize that many minority people get COVID at … work and therefore die in their 40s and 50s.”

As a matter of equity, Arwady told Crain's, government needs to push vaccine to those minority groups faster than to elderly white people in good health.

Pritzker hasn't offered anything close to an actual plan that might ensure minorities disproportionately affected by the worst complications of COVID-19 get vaccinated as soon as possible.

His administration still hasn't released demographic data showing a breakdown of vaccinations by race and ZIP codes that have helped residents in states — including North Carolina, which showed only 8 percent of Black residents got an initial vaccine shot — keep tabs on how government prioritizes inoculations for the most vulnerable populations.

For Illinoisans, the new year brings more of the same: lacking transparency and "equity-centric" promises from a governor who's all talk and no action.

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" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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This article originally appeared on the Chicago Patch