Pritzker Skips Lolla, Lightfoot Says People Got Vaccinated To Go

CHICAGO — After formerly committing to attend Lollapalooza, Gov. J.B. Pritzker was nowhere to be seen during the weekend's packed music festival. The governor's press secretary told reporters he skipped the event out of caution for the spread of the delta variant, but Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was still a familiar face among the crowd.

The event, which drew roughly 100,000 concertgoers, was criticized as a superspreader event by some aldermen in the Progressive Reform Caucus. But Lightfoot said she has "no regrets" about continuing to allow the festival in an interview Tuesday morning, and even said there may have been a public health bright side.

"So I'm confident that thousands of people — mostly young people, which is our toughest demographic — got vaccinated simply because they wanted to go to Lollapalooza," Lightfoot said.

The average number of daily cases over the past week in Illinois rose to 1,914, the highest since mid-May. However, Lightfoot said she is confident about Lollapalooza's screening diligence due to some undercover work of her own.

"We checked with [Lollapalooza] every single day, multiple times a day," Lightfoot said in an interview on WVON Tuesday morning. "And I will tell you, Dr. [Allison] Arwady, the public health commissioner, kind of went a little bit incognito, didn't have all her paperwork right, and they wouldn't let her in."

Pritzker told reporters "there's no mixed message" Monday when asked about his last-minute decision not to go to the festival. The 56-year-old said during an unrelated press conference in Aurora that he still had faith in the safety of the event, but didn't feel personally comfortable going.

"I think those [safety measures] were reasonable things to do," Pritzker said. "It was also reasonable for people like me who got up to near the date and decided, 'You know what? I'd rather not go, just out of an abundance of caution.'"

Within the first days of the four-day festival, an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention memo prompted the Biden administration to change its tune on masks for vaccinated people. Health officials now say that vaccinated and unvaccinated people can spread the delta variant the coronavirus with the same ease, though vaccinated people are far less likely to get sick, be hospitalized or die from the virus.

Other public health scholars shared their uneasy feelings about the event through social media and public statements.

Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Northwestern University Institute for Global Health, said voluntary masking and vaccine incentives weren't going to work when unvaccinated people could hide among maskless vaccinated people.

"The numbers are going up," Murphy said. "When the case numbers go up, within two to three weeks, hospitalizations will go up. Then the ICU admissions increase, and then the death rate goes up. It's spinning out of control."

So far, fatalities lag behind the case numbers, especially as vaccinated people who contract COVID-19 are less likely to experience intense symptoms, according to CDC data.

Murphy also acknowledged the possibility discussed by Lightfoot.

"If everyone [who attended] Lollapalooza is vaccinated or has a negative test, that'll keep the numbers lower," Murphy said. "And I hope that happens. Maybe it's even made a lot of younger people get vaccinated in order to come."