Pritzker Administration Keeps Trying To Kill Coronavirus Test Co.

CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker's administration sure seems to want to get rid of the tiny coronavirus testing company competing for school district contracts with the University of Illinois' SHIELD saliva test operation.

SafeGuard Surveillance was founded last year by Dr. Ed Campbell, a suburban virologist and LaGrange School District 102 board member, as a spin-off of a testing effort he launched to help his kid's school get back to in-person learning in the fall.

While SHIELD's testing rollout stalled waiting for FDA emergency use approval of its saliva tests, SafeGuard expanded to suburban schools with a type of COVID-19 test allowed under federal laboratory regulations that were relaxed during the pandemic.

In response, Pritzker's public health department quietly asked Attorney General Kwame Raoul to investigate SafeGuard Surveillance.

State public health officials forwarded "anonymous" complaints about the company to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees scientific laboratory regulations.

An Illinois State Board of Education employee gave the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general's office and the FBI a "tip" that SafeGuard owner Ed Campbell received $700,000 from LaGrange District 102, where he serves as school board vice president.

The results: The state attorney general didn't pursue a probe.

Officials at the CDC and CMS took no regulatory action against SafeGuard.

The federal education department's investigator found "no evidence of wrong doing" by Campbell.

And, on Friday, federal officials said the FBI closed its investigation based on a tip (that turned out to be bogus) floated by an anonymous Pritzker's administration bureaucrat.

SafeGuard acted within federal guidelines while winning testing contracts in direct competition with SHIELD, which Pritzker said he would make Illinois taxpayers the U of I coronavirus testing operation's biggest customer.

When Campbell met with the investigators at a Forrest Park Starbucks this month, the conversation segued into a chat about the feds interest in the Pritzker administration's efforts to promote SHIELD saliva testing.

The feds asked Campbell about a Patch report detailing emails and public records that raised questions about whether the Pritzker administration tried to rig the market for coronavirus testing in public schools to favor University of Illinois' budding COVID-19 testing operation, Shield Illinois.

MORE ON PATCH: Is Pritzker Steering School COVID-19 Testing Contracts To U of I?

"They asked me to walk them through my understanding of all that," Campbell said Friday, after the feds cleared him of wrongdoing.

"I explained that after seeing emails that had been [obtained through the Freedom of Information Act] from the state of Illinois that I became enlightened that [the Pritzker administration] had obviously taken steps to be injurious to me or defame me despite the fact that I knew that CMS officials had told them that what I was doing was completely consistent with guidance."

Campbell said FBI agent Todd Rathbun and U.S. education department special agent Justin Burt asked for his take on the Pritzker administration's decision to set aside nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in federal coronavirus relief funding exclusively for SHIELD testing in local school districts.

"They asked if there was any bidding process. I almost spit up my Frappuccino," Campbell said. "I said, 'No, there was not a bidding process that was related to SHIELD getting awarded $225 million.'... They said they found that surprising. They told me they were interested in the [FOIA'd emails and] materials. I provided those materials to them."

If the feds go fishing for the truth they'll find — as easily as I did — evidence the Pritzker administration attempted to block school districts from being reimbursed for SafeGuard testing with federal coronavirus funding.

In one email, state board of education lawyers said the policy changed after the U.S. Education Department informed the Pritzker administration that federal grant money can be used to reimburse districts that purchased SafeGuard saliva tests.

And that didn't happen until state Rep. Michael Zalewski (D-LaGrange) introduced a bill that would force the state to pay for SafeGuard testing that Pritzker set aside federal cash for SHIELD testing in public schools.

MORE ON PATCH: Illinois Drops Policy Blocking Schools From COVID-19 Test Funding

Since then, Pritzker's administration seems to keep pushing for other ways to promote SHIELD testing statewide in addition to the federal coronavirus cash set aside.

As of Monday afternoon, Democrats with campaign cash and loyalty ties to former House Speaker Michael Madigan and Gov. Pritzker were still pushing a controversial bill that would give the state control over coronavirus testing in public schools controlled by locally elected boards and public universities, among other things.

"What they've been doing is acting secretly to scourge my efforts to keep schools safe, and it seems clear they're doing that because of how slowly SHIELD rolled out and how desperate they are to get SHIELD in the testing game, even though its the end of the game [as more people get vaccinated]," Campbell said.

"That's true of the $225 million they're awarding for SHIELD surveillance testing in schools next year. And the bill under consideration also seems to give [the Illinois Department of Public Health] power to make SHIELD the exclusive surveiller in Illinois. … It's really amazing how much thought an effort has gone into me competing with their multimillion-dollar testing operation. … Obviously, I'm viewed as a tremendous threat to their statewide empire."

By the start of school in the fall, Campbell's said he knows his company could either not be needed by his school district clients either due to the success of coronavirus vaccines or being aced out of contracts by way of a state law signed by Pritzker.

""I have no regrets. We have accomplished amazing things for our school district clients," Campbell said.

"I don't know if what the state has done rises to anything illegal or unethical. … But it's obvious the state has acted with a pattern of behavior to defame me and what we've done to help schools."

I asked Campbell if he plans to give Pritzker's administration a taste of its own investigative medicine in civil court.

"I'm a scientist, not a lawyer. So, I'm preparing to talk to an attorney about that," he said. "I certainly think the discovery process would be one of the more interesting things I've been part of, and we can determine what to do from there."

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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