(The Center Square) – Acknowledging COVID-19 was a “traumatic period for everyone,” Gov. J.B. Pritkzer defended his handling of the pandemic Wednesday and said vaccines work despite Dr. Anthony Fauci recently casting doubt on their efficacy.
In February 2020, the Pritzker administration said the risk to the public from the novel coronavirus was low. Two weeks later, Pritzker ordered restaurants to close to in-person service, ordered schools closed and issued a weeks-long stay-at-home order followed by months of consecutive disaster proclamations and executive orders that persist.
Nearly three years since, Pritzker said he reflects back on the decisions he made and the mandates he ordered.
“One that I often think about is could we have had a mask mandate earlier, should we have, would that have saved more lives,” Pritzker said Wednesday. “As it is, we saved an awful lot of lives I think with the restrictions that were in place and people followed them importantly.”
Pritzker said he’s glad he didn’t follow Florida’s lead.
“Thousands and thousands of more people would have died in Illinois if we had followed the lead of a state like Florida,” Pritzker said. “If they had followed our lead, thousands fewer people would have died in Florida.
Florida Gov. Ron Desantis heralds his handling of the pandemic, criticizing states with strict mandates like Illinois as “lockdown states.”
A working paper released last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at overall health and economic outcomes from different states with different COVID-19 policies. Illinois got a grade of “F,” ranking at No. 46 in the nation while Florida got a grade of “A” ranking at No. 6.
Earlier this year in a published paper, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who left his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases last year, cast doubt on the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines.
While many of Pritzker’s vaccine mandates on people like college staff and students and K-12 staff have since been lifted, Pritzker defended the mandated shots.
“We’ve learned that the vaccines work, the vaccines work, let’s be clear,” Pritzker said at an outdoor event in Springfield Wednesday. “Many of us are able to gather indoors now because so many of us have been vaccinated and the vaccines work.”
In Fauci’s
From Fauci’s published article in Cell Host and Microbe:
“Considering that vaccine development and licensure is a long and complex process requiring years of preclinical and clinical safety and efficacy data, the limitations of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines remind us that candidate vaccines for most other respiratory viruses have to date been insufficiently protective for consideration of licensure, including candidate vaccines against RSV, a major killer of infants and the elderly, parainfluenzaviruses, endemic coronaviruses, and many other ‘common cold’ viruses that cause significant morbidity and economic loss…”
Research by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University found vaccine mandates imposed by city officials in Chicago and elsewhere made virtually no difference in stopping the spread of the virus.
“These mandates imposed severe restrictions on the lives of many citizens and business owners,” the study said. “Yet, we find no evidence that the mandates were effective in their intended goals of reducing COVID-19 cases and deaths.”
