Prairie State Wire

Republican Congressional candidate James Marter argues the new vaccine passport system enacted by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has nothing to do with keeping the city healthy. 

“This is about power and control,” Marter told the Prairie State Wire. “This isn't about health; it's not about making anyone safe. You can argue science or whether the vaccine is good or not, but as we know, vaccinated people get COVID also. People like myself that contracted COVID have natural protections, why don’t we recognize that?”

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established that anyone, regardless of vaccination status, can likely spread the omicron variant of the coronavirus to other people and the variant likely will spread more easily than the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, Marter said he rejects all mandates as being patently unconstitutional.

He charges that Lightfoot, following in the footsteps of New York City officials in instituting the passports, isn’t concerned with health or science.

“This isn’t about medicine or data,” he said of Lightfoot adopting the policy even though COVID numbers in NYC increased after it was put in place. “It’s all about having power over other people. You’ve got people asking about your medical history that aren’t doctors. When will it stop?”

Marter said he stands with businesses that decide not to enforce the mandate.

“I am 100 percent of the belief all the mandates are unconstitutional,” he said. “People that think this is a great idea only think so because of the fear that they’ve created. These are medical protocols being dictated out of Washington D.C. and not from unbiased doctors.”

Marter said he worries all the mandates will cause the entire state to suffer.

The more crazy, tyrannical things Lightfoot and Pritzker do, the more people want to get out of here,” he said. “This is a death knell for many of those businesses. Right now, no one wants to come into Chicago for anything. The only hope I see is many businesses are ignoring all of these so-called mandates and they’re doing it to be able to survive.”

Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski recently told WXAN radio he senses a direct correlation between the mandates and the state’s record-breaking population losses over the last 12 months. Dabrowski said the measure of population loss is meaningful because it captures all of the factors affecting the quality of life in Illinois: taxes, pandemic mandates, crime rates, finances and family values

Since the pandemic hit, the Chicago Tribune recently placed the number of businesses that have been forced to close at 4,400, including 2,400 that say they won’t reopen. With all the data coming from crowd-sourced business review platform Yelp, researchers reported across the country more than 132,500 businesses have permanently or temporarily closed since March, with Chicago being home to the fourth-highest number of closures, behind only Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco.