Emails, Secret Report Show Politics Of Science Guiding Pritzker

CHICAGO — 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."

MORE ON PATCH: Pritzker's COVID-19 Positivity Rate '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.

MORE ON PATCH: Don't Buy Gov's Coronavirus Test Promises Until Swab Goes Up Nose

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.

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

Weeks later, after being blasted by state Rep. LaShawn Ford for promising the Black community tests that turned out be "fake news," Pritzker finally admitted the failure, saying it was due to his "optimism" that the testing plan would work.

Five months later, Pritzker appears to still be governing on unscientific optimism as he points to coronavirus positivity rates and hospitalizations as the critical metrics for shutting down indoor dining in the suburbs and Chicago.

MORE ON PATCH: Pritzker 'Optimism' About Coronavirus Testing Was Never Realistic

City Hall has quietly avoided bashing Pritzker's pandemic response, but behind the scenes the tension is palpable.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot's administration learned the governor was set to announce forced restaurant shutdowns on Chicago after getting a call from the Tribune on Tuesday, a City Hall source told me.

Lightfoot told "PBS NewsHour" she would try to convince the governor to look at the city's data before enacting a lockdown on indoor dining. Pritzker's administration has said that's not going to happen. On Wednesday, after an hourlong "frank discussion" with the governor, Lightfoot told reporters she dropped her protest.

There's still a problem, according to a source who described Pritzker's coronavirus data as "garbage."

Hyperbole? Maybe, but I doubt it.

Early on in the pandemic, city public health officials didn't even acknowledge the state's coronavirus positivity rate, which is calculated based on the fraction of all positive test specimens, as the standard for monitoring the virus spread.

Chicago public health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady, an epidemiologist— whose second in command is the state's former head epidemiologist Dr. Jennifer Layden — opted for tracking the spread of COVID-19 in Chicago by monitoring "person positivity." That's the fraction of people who test positive for coronavirus. Many times, multiple specimens are taken for each person tested, making the state numbers a less-precise metric for interpreting the virus's spread.

In a recent COVID-19 update, Arwady said the city added the state's metric to its coronavirus dashboard because that's how COVID-19’s spread in the city was being judged by the state.

Physics vs. Epidemiology

If percent positivity rates shouldn't guide public policy on coronavirus mitigation, what's a better solution?

Emails from Cobey, the University of Chicago scientist who publicly criticized Prtizker's coronavirus metrics, shed some light on that, too.

Cobey told Pritzker's administration that in order to figure out how to best ease off "obviously costly" social distancing mitigations, the state should institute "community-level serology" testing that provides an "extremely good barometer of the risks of outbreaks, especially their speed and size."

She knows because her group has previously done epidemiological and evolutionary modeling with "age-stratified serology for influenza to estimate true infection rates by age."

Data on the presence of antibodies in communities "will greatly improve these predictions, especially in light of the highly uneven surveillance in place," Cobey wrote on April 8.

Cobey's team already had a "well-validated assay up and running" that was being used extensively in New York. The team tested University of Chicago health care workers and pregnant women at the hospital to estimate the prevalence of coronavirus antibodies in the general population, collecting data that would "improve forecasts and assess impacts of possible interventions."

On April 21, emails show there was already tension brewing over the Pritzker administration's decision to lean more heavily on the work of University of Illinois physicists rather than scientists with public health expertise, Cobey among them.

"You're probably already aware of this, but if you could avoiding (sic) statements that the [U of I] model "is the state model, and to the extent you can, acknowledge the other modelers that would be great. Esp. because [U of I scientists] are physicists, not epidemiologists. Sarah [Cobey] and Jaline [Gerardin of Northwestern] are the ones experienced in public health. It would help us avoid a lot of friction here at ground level," a lead health care analyst for Civis Analytics wrote.

A Pritzker administration staffer wrote back with "some nuance to messaging on the model."

"We're going with the [U of I] model because they appear to be the furthest along on statewide modeling," according to the emailed reply.

Three days later, on April 24, Pritzker publicly rejected serology data as a viable option for guiding his pandemic response, telling the public that tests couldn't be trusted — even as public health officials in Los Angeles, for instance, said antibody testing data might force officials to "recalibrate disease prediction models and rethink public health strategies."

Pritzker's public health department — led by Dr. Ngozi Ezike, an internist and not an epidemiologist, and her chief of staff, who has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from University of Missouri at Rolla — continued to cast doubt on the reliability of serology testing for months.

Reporters across the state, myself included, sought details that might explain the state's decision, copies of Pritzker's "master model" and details about how the state's coronavirus statistics are collected and tabulated, only to be dismissed.

Pritzker's administration also placed a gag order on scientists from the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory contributing modeling data.

University of Illinois professors said so in an email.

"We were very surprised to receive the email request below from the Chicago Tribune, especially since you had asked that all modelers do not engage with the press except through you guys," the professors wrote.

In Pritzker's administration, the science guiding him is supposed to be top secret.

What if ...

Last month, Cobey told a downstate reporter she has a "real problem in some ways defending what the state is doing because I think it is very precarious."

Her prophesy that Pritzker's decision to balk at "actual science" because it's "too complicated" and "people won't like it" might erode credibility has started to come true.

MORE ON PATCH: Pritzker's COVID-19 Positivity Rate 'Not Scientifically Founded'

First, downstate Republicans sounded an alarm on the validity of Pritzker's metrics.

Last week, the Illinois Restaurant Association expressed "serious concerns over the consistency of the data."

And Tuesday, Mayor Lightfoot argued the city's coronavirus data is a better indicator of what restrictions would mitigate the spread of COVID-19 than the state's controversial data.

The public records suggest Pritzker's administration at some point decided to rely heavily on the work of scientists without public health expertise to determine his course for combating COVID-19. That only strengthens suspicion that politics may have scrubbed too much science from the data and research that Illinois' governor says guides him.

Coincidentally, the Cobey recommendations Pritzker rejected mirror key aspects of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's more-effective pandemic response announced April 27.

Cuomo's public health department said antibody and antigen testing — along with a massive contact tracing effort — are vital to controlling the virus spread and rolling back economic restrictions.

As of Tuesday, New York's average person positivity rate was 1.8 percent, the nation's second lowest infection rate, and public health officials there are combating outbreaks in clusters, a block at a time.

We all know the situation in Illinois, where Pritzker has responded to spiking cases with a hammer rather than a scalpel.

It makes a person wonder if life might be different in Illinois if Pritzker took the advice of scientists who repeatedly pushed the governor's staff to work closely with Cobey's research team.

In emails, they describe her as a "world expert in modeling how population level immunity influences viral transmission dynamics" and "one of the best people in the world to help guide decision making on serological testing roll out and targeting."

Even renowned University of Illinois physicist Nigel Goldenfeld warned that not including Cobey's team would be a "most glaring omission."

The scientists tried to guide the governor's decisions.

Politics got in the way.

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."More from Mark Konkol:

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