It's Time To Stop Picking The Scab On Loretto Hospital Vax Fiasco

CHICAGO — It's time to quit picking the scab on The Loretto Hospital vaccination "scandal" that's gotten national attention for the salacious details of vaccine eligibility line-jumping.

Kudos to Block Club reporters, who turned a tip into the juiciest scoop of the pandemic. It's a tale packed with irony, political intrigue and outrageous details. A hospital in a poor Black neighborhood vaccinated workers at ritzy Trump Tower. A politician's clout list angled to get vaccine jabs for otherwise-ineligible VIPs. Cook County judges (and a guest of their choice) allegedly were offered chances to jump the vaccine line, among other things.

So far, it seems Loretto officials skimmed at least a few hundred coronavirus vaccine doses out of about 14,000 shots and gave them to people who might not have been eligible under Chicago public health recommendations.

In response to the news, Chicago officials stripped Loretto of access to further coronavirus vaccine doses. The hospital executive at the center of the trouble, Dr. Anosh Ahmed, resigned. Loretto CEO George Miller, who organized 200 shots for people who attend his south suburban church, got suspended without pay.

The lone safety-net medical center in Austin — one of Chicago's poorest Black neighborhoods — screwed up and let people down.

Now, it's time to move on.

Let's face it: There's no way Loretto is the only vaccination provider to gig the system in our crooked state where recommendations for who is eligible for shots varies by ZIP code have created a Hunger Games-like scramble to get inoculated.

In early January, there was no outcry when University of Chicago epidemiologist Sarah Cobey blew the whistle on her employer for offering about 4,000 vaccine doses meant for front-line health care workers to a group that included young, work-from-home researchers.

“I have no idea how this decision was made,” Cobey told the Tribune. “But I think it’s tragic that we can’t even coordinate responses at this level.”

Another prestigious Chicago hospital, Northwestern Medicine, got away with ignoring the Tribune's "specific questions about how broadly Northwestern has offered to vaccinate its other employees."

So far, there has been exactly one day of stories after City Hall canceled a $5 million contract with Innovate Express Care after a tipster told public health officials the for-profit clinic was using vaccine doses earmarked for Chicago Public School employees to inoculate as many as 6,000 other clients.

The same urgent care group founded by former Northwestern Medicine Dr. Rahul Khare had its vaccine supply cut off by the DuPage County Health Department for unspecified reasons that local and state health officials still won't talk about. Not that there's much interest. Only a few news outlets have asked about it, a DuPage health department spokeswoman told me.

I know an unemployed suburban guy who cut the vaccination line by signing up at Walgreens claiming to be a health care worker.

"It's the honor system," he told me. "You hear about people cutting the line all the time. What so honorable about the system, anyway?"

Heck, the federal government put the kibosh on Gov. J.B. Pritzker's vaccine eligibility requirements for the United Center inoculation depot because they resulted in mostly white suburbanites gobbling up appointments meant for Black and Latino Chicagoans living in neighborhoods the hardest hit by the coronavirus.

There is nuance missing in the extended coverage of the Loretto line-jumping story that amounts to "death by a thousand cuts," as Mayor Lori Lightfoot put it.

On Monday, two weeks since the Loretto "scandal" broke, reporters wanted to know if Lightfoot thinks Loretto's board of directors should fire Miller. An affirmative answer from Lightfoot certainly could have sealed Miller's fate. Instead, the mayor demurred. And thankfully so.

What's so wrong about Loretto officials wanting to keep the hospital's first Black chief executive — one of just a few Black hospital CEOs in Illinois— for the mistakes he didn't make when nobody was looking?

Since 2017, Miller kept Loretto afloat when reporters weren't investigating the tiny safety-net hospital's significant financial struggles.

At a time when the state of Illinois under former Gov. Bruce Rauner rejected 26 percent of its Medicare claims and took 154 days to send reimbursement for the rest, Miller directed an administrative overhaul that cut $10 million from its budget.

In April, long before city and state officials rolled out coronavirus testing in medically underserved Black neighborhoods such as Austin, Miller's administrative team put up a testing tent in the Loretto parking lot to check the COVID-19 status of as many neighbors as possible.

Miller worked with Rep. La Shawn Ford to successfully pressure Pritzker's administration to make good on unfulfilled promises to expand testing in Austin.

"There were mistakes made, no doubt about it," state Sen. Kimberly Lightford said. "But is it fair that all that good that's been done is put on the chopping block because of a story — and I can't say it enough, a story that really got sensationalized and is affecting how we move forward beyond COVID. … We can't keep chasing the media when all these details now have zero to do with the vaccinations."

Lightford, who sits on Loretto's board of directors, is talking about a story that seemed to suggest a $2,500 donation from Miller to a campaign she controls with two other state senators saved Miller job.

She's talking about suburban state Sen. Marty Moylan's public call for an investigation to expose every detail about vaccination favoritism in a Chicago neighborhood he doesn't represent.

"If you want to do an audit on Loretto, audit every site providing vaccinations in the state," Lightford said. "I guarantee no one is doing it right 100 percent of the time."

Maybe that kind of review of well-funded hospitals, the ones with mostly white clientele that get million-dollar gifts from Chicago's elite, would give us some insight on the state of vaccine distribution beyond the struggling safety-net medical center on the West Side.

Loretto officials went rogue in spectacular fashion and took well-deserved lumps.

But now's a good time to let the tiny hospital repent, heal and move on.

Loretto's poor, neglected neighborhood needs it to survive this vaccine fiasco.

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:

• Could Illinois Become Leader In Vaccine Passport Gold Rush?
• More Vax Reservations You Can't Get, Brought To You By Pritzker
• Pritzker's Cannabis Pledge Was Another Vow That Went Up In Smoke
• If You Love Mom, Don't Let Her 'Wait And See' On Getting Vaccine
• Pritzker's 'Fakequity' Problem Surfaces At United Center Vax Site