Chambana Sun

Former Champaign County Board member Rich Berner opposes Gov. J.B. Pritzker's vaccination mandates, especially those for doctors, nurses and others employed in health care.

“If they feel that the vaccine isn’t right for them right now, they should have that choice not to vaccinate or possibly lose a job,” Berner said. “My wife, the nurse, was the last of two nurses that didn’t get vaccinated. They were basically giving her trouble almost every day about it. They basically said 'you have to get vaccinated, otherwise you will be terminated,' and we had a nursing shortage before there was a phobia.”

Republican lawmakers are sounding off over the governor’s handling of the pandemic and his latest order requiring all students at public and private schools across the state to mask up at all times. The order also requires all teachers and staff members at every grade level to wear masks regardless of vaccination status and for all state employees working at congregate settings, such as long-term care facilities or veterans' homes, to be vaccinated no later than Oct. 4.

“His continued go-it-alone approach is actively undermining the state’s ability to have broadly accepted mitigation strategies,” Senate Republican Leader Dan McConchie (R-Lake Zurich)  posted on Twitter. “So much for being ‘all in’ for Illinois.”

McConchie is far from the only Republican lawmaker taking a stand against what they see as the governor’s habit of putting his agenda ahead of the interests of the people he’s supposed to represent, with state Rep. Tom Morrison (R-Palatine) going as far as to question his legal authority to make the move he’s making.

In a statement, Morrison argues the new policy “violates constitutional checks and balances, public input, and local control."

A digital privacy group recently rated the state’s new Vax Verify system as “horrible.”

The harsh assessment of the system being promoted by the governor and the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) as secure comes from Electronic Frontier Foundation director of engineering Alexis Hancock, who reviews such systems around the country.

Among the many criticisms, Hancock takes issues with the way the system requires users to verify their information through consumer credit rating firm Experian.

“Using Experian is definitely one of the worst ones I’ve seen yet,” he said. “If you have frozen your credit for whatever reason, you have to unfreeze your credit with Experian in order to actually access a vaccination record from this Vax Verify system. You don't have to do that every day, right? You don’t have to swoop out your vaccination records every day and that frequency and that scope can become an issue when companies who are holding this information and databases are holding this information aren’t necessarily being held accountable to the stricter standard of how long they should log information, if they should log information at all.”