Prairie State Wire

Gov. Pritzker has received an F on a recent Brownstone Institute report that rated how states handled the initial 14 months of the pandemic.

The article rated state governors on the efficiency of their COVID mitigations with Gov. Pritzker’s response listed as a  “complete fail.”

"The biggest issue I have is there was no legislative oversight of all the orders and mandates,” Oak Park Village Trustee Jim Dodge told the Prairie State Wire. “Yes, it was a public health emergency and I think everybody agrees that the science and data weren’t clear early on except for two things: the virus had a big impact on older people and those with comorbidities.”

Dodge said that the pandemic could have been handled better and that overreach on behalf of the administration led to more problems.

“There’s a special place for governors that locked kids out of classrooms for a year and a half, ordered sick COVID-19 patients back into nursing homes, did not practice their own orders, shut down tens of thousands of businesses and still couldn’t beat the U.S. average in COVID-19 deaths or excess all-cause deaths,” the Brownstone Institute said.

The governor is no different than other people in position of authority to make decisions on interpreting data and deciding what needs to be done, Dodge said,

“I'll leave it to the people of Illinois to decide if that's OK,” he said. “Every resident will look at the circumstances and decide if this is what they want in leadership.”

Dodge said that he believed mask mandates helped change the probability of getting the virus.

“The question has always been, is it enough to make changes to our lives the way we've had to?” said Dodge. “I think the governor missed out by not being honest with everybody from the start about this being about managing the load on our health care system.”

Dodge said that Pritzker’s daughter celebrating New Year’s Eve in the Bahamas without a mask was not a good look when he urged state residents to cancel their plans for the occasion.

“It's just more hypocrisy,” he said. “I guess as a lifelong conservative I can say that nothing ever really changes with Democrats in complete control when it comes to taxes, safety and budgeting and I think people will take that all into consideration in the upcoming elections.”