Dr. Ngozi Ezike's Empathy Transcended Pritzker's COVID Blunders

CHICAGO — Dr. Ngozi Ezike wept Tuesday as she announced plans to step down as Illinois' public health director in mid-March.

I suspect, and sincerely hope, hers were tears of joy — an expression of great relief that she no longer has to endure the unexpected consequences of accepting a dream job that turned out to be a nightmare.

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An internist and pediatrician, Ezike was appointed to lead the Illinois Public Health Department in 2019 after a stint as medical director at the County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center with special interests in obesity, diabetes and breastfeeding.

On Tuesday, she read notes from 2019 journal entries predicting that she was ready for the challenge to lead the state's public health department, and the prospect of influencing efforts to improve wellness among Illinois' diverse population.

There's no way anyone could have predicted that Dr. Ezike would have to endure the tortuous job of attempting to lend credibility to the political science that has led Gov. J.B. Pritzker's pandemic response from the beginning of the coronavirus crisis.

There's little evidence that Ezike was at the forefront of Pritzker administration's final decisions on pandemic policy.

For months in early 2020, Ezike's public health team responsible for the state's new coronavirus response that Pritzker says was based on "science and data" lacked a chief medical officer and state epidemiologist until May of that year.

In March 2020, the Pritzker administration relied on pandemic modeling created by data gurus and ignored the input of a world renowned epidemiologists on the advice of bureaucrats, according to emails and confidential reports.

And the governor's decisions on closing schools, restaurants and non-essential businesses, bungled efforts to ramp up COVID-19 testing in minority communities and more were based on the governor's misplaced "optimism" and reliance on scientific advice filtered through political operatives.

More On Patch: Emails, Secret Report Show Politics Of Science Guiding Pritzker

In 2020, we got to know Ezike through her appearances at Pritzker's side during 160 coronavirus news conferences, where the governor dished pseudoscience and politics-filtered public policy that didn't control the spread of COVID-19.

Through it all, she somehow was a calming presence who always seemed focused on the human toll of the coronavirus crisis, despite pandemic policy blunders brought on by a billionaire governor guided by the advice of status-quo bureaucrats and political ambition.

Pritzker seemed to acknowledged that political reality Tuesday when he confessed to being "loathe to accept" Ezike's unexpected resignation.

"I ran for office. She did not," the governor said. "But throughout the crisis, she has stood by me every step of the way."

Dr. Ezike showed Illinoisans, regardless of their pandemic and political beliefs, empathy and grace amid so much turmoil.

For that, Dr. Ezike deserves our thanks.

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" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

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