Prairie State Wire

Barring an unexpected challenge this fall, Dr. Bill Hauter, an anesthesiologist from Peoria, will be the only medical doctor in the General Assembly when he takes his seat representing the 87th House District next January.

Hauter was the focus of a heavy spending campaign on behalf of House Minority Leader Jim Durkin (R-Burr Ridge) and establishment House Republicans who funneled $200,000 to his opponent in an unsuccessful attempt to torpedo his candidacy.

On June 28 Hauter, who also serves on the Tazewell County Commission, won his primary on the message that the state was wrong about how it approached COVID protocols, which many establishment Republicans like Durkin are accused of going along with.

Now Hauter says he is on a mission to ensure lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates do not reoccur in the state.

“I have a problem with the fact that I thought that their risk analysis of the state at the beginning of this was wrong in that they locked down, they shut down, they tried to quarantine and all these things. I thought that it should have been more directed at the people who are at high risk, the elderly,” Hauter told Prairie State Wire.

“Those people should have been – we should have tried to protect them more and not so much on the general population, the healthy people, the school kids, and to shut down schools I thought was so wrong," Hauter said. "So I thought their risk analysis was off. And then when that was mostly the left and you saw it mostly of the blue states, they seemed to lock down harder and they had these severe travel limitations and the more severe lockdowns than you would see in a red state like Florida or something like that."

“In the end, they probably couldn't really tell any outcome difference between all of them. If you put them into a bucket and tried to pick out which one had better outcomes, you couldn't tell if it was because they locked down or not,” Hauter said.

“I thought the risk analysis was wrong and then when they came out with the vaccination and the risk analysis of the more conservative people was wrong in that they thought that there was more risk to the vaccination than there was to getting COVID," Hauter said. "And so they didn't want to take the vaccination because they were scared of the risks of the vaccination, which I would argue that it's much riskier for you in general to get an uncontrolled infection than to get the vaccination. So I was dealing with, I thought the risk analysis of the left was wrong and mostly of the right was wrong. I mean, I know it's a generalization, but in the end, if you're talking about immunity, I think you can get more complete immunity from getting the disease.”

Hauter said he was similarly unimpressed with the performance of former Illinois Department of Health Director Ngozi Ezike over her tenure as the state’s top doctor.  

“I'm a pretty conservative guy and I just felt like she was part of the system of mandates,” Hauter said.

“And we know we will decide for you. And, you know, some of it is that she was all in that system and she was part of (the Pritzker) administration. I think she became a ‘yes’ person to J.B. and all his mandates and his emergency powers – where there's this excessive use of emergency powers.”

“That's another thing I feel like that is something that needs to be curtailed. Other states don't have that much power given to one man, and that's not how it was supposed to be," Hauter said. "It wasn't supposed to be that one man could decide to empty jails or to limit worship. And how many people used to have one worship service? But there's a Black Lives Matter protest, and he agrees with that? It didn't matter how many people. It was actually condoned instead of condemned, because at the same time he's saying, ‘Oh, you can't have over ten people in your worship service.’”

“I mean, that whole thing was just so unpopular downstate that, you know, it just it was all part of this mandates and passports and emergency powers and everything that they used to control us. That it's hard for me to judge (Ezike’s) performance as being good.”

“I just thought it was all she just became a tool and her advice maybe was ignored because it didn't toe the line exactly with all those mandates and passports and and lockdowns and everything that was going on.”

Hauter said the vaccination mandate by Pritzker and Ezike was wrong.

“That's why it's so wrong to mandate something, because then when you mandate it, you take away informed consent,” he said.

“That's a buy-in from the patient. Knowing the risk, they say, ‘yes, go ahead, I know the risk.’ And then when you have that buy-in with informed consent, if anything happens to them, they say, ‘Yeah, they told me about that and I accepted it.’ When you coerce consent, then anything happens to that person, whether from the vaccination or not, they think it's because of the vaccination. And they will have regret, anger for the rest of their life. They were like, 'I wasn't given the opportunity. They told me I was going to lose my job. And now I have myocarditis or I have Bell's Palsy or I have something else from it, or it is different from the vaccination,' but they think it is because they felt coerced and they feel in the end they feel assaulted.”

“So it was so wrong to go that direction and to mandate something and especially in the low-risk age groups and the young people and the healthy and and ignore natural immunity to say the gold standard is you get the shot and that the gold standard is you have immunity already,” Hauter said.

Hauter said the general focus was on the wrong treatment.

“They focus on only the vaccination and not on that person already has immunity. They don't need the shot. Right? They have the antibodies and they have maybe had better antibodies than the people who got the vaccination. And then they really ignored that. They ignored the actual therapies. Instead of focusing on treating those with COVID, they focused on making sure that everything was on passports and mandates and immunization levels and not on how are we going to treat these people in the hospital so that it can be controlled and antivirals and immunoglobulin and all the things, the therapies that we should have focused on," Hauter said. "So all of this was swirling around and I just feel like this was a unique opportunity for me and maybe I can help the discussions in Springfield, you know, going forward and on other issues related to health care as well.”

Hauter said mask and vaccine mandates in his Peoria district were unpopular, spurring his run for higher office.

Hauter was endorsed by GOP gubernatorial primary winner state Sen. Darren Bailey (R-Xenia). He won with 8,795 votes to Tazewell County Treasurer Mary Burress' 6,722 votes.

Meanwhile, former IDPH director Ezike is under investigation after taking a job with a state medical contractor immediately after it became clear her reappointment to the $178,000 per year job was going to be disputed.

Ezike took a position as CEO of Sinai Health System - at an undisclosed salary. The problem, according to the Better Government Association, is that she did not wait the prescribed period of time under the Illinois Ethics Act.

That law was created to ensure former regulators are not paid off with big jobs immediately after leaving public service.

“The law is designed to prevent the cozy revolving door between state officials and the companies their agencies fund and regulate,” the Better Government Association reports.

Under Ezike’s tenure at IDPH the institution granted $2,160,803 to Sinai Health System.

On the vaccination mandate front, Pritzker – who is facing Bailey this fall - signed an amendment to the Illinois’ Health Care Right of Conscience Act allowing employers to terminate employees for not getting vaccinated.

Earlier this year, Pritzker's state of emergency - under which he wielded extraordinary powers that affected the daily lives of Illinois’ nearly 13 million residents - including obligatory masking and vaccination, was declared "null and void” by Sangamon County judge Raylene Grischow.

In particular, according to Grischow, Pritzker and his agencies pushed such conditions on underaged students without their consent.

The Fourth District Appellate Court later upheld the decision. However, many institutions have indicated they’d like to return to masking and vaccine mandates.

According to Pew Research, the majority of unvaccinated survey respondents oppose compulsory immunization for everyday use of public facilities, such as what Pritzker has sought.

Eighty-eight percent of unvaccinated respondents agreed with the statement: "There’s too much pressure on Americans to get a COVID-19 vaccine.”

Another 81 percent of unvaccinated respondents agreed with the assertions, "We don’t really know yet if there are serious health risks from COVID-19 vaccines" and "Public health officials are not telling us everything they know about COVID-19 vaccines."

According to an Axios/Ipsos poll in August 2021, 20% of Americans say they will never be vaccinated, which was down from 34% in March 2021.