After months of lobbying to keep her job, Dr. Allison Arwady, the health commissioner who steered Chicago through the COVID-19 pandemic, was fired Friday without ever getting a chance to meet with Mayor Brandon Johnson.
The termination was confirmed by Ronnie Reese, Johnson’s spokesman.
Arwady was told shortly after 5 p.m. that she was terminated, a source told the Sun-Times. She still has never met with Johnson, the source added.
Another source familiar with the situation said Johnson’s chief of staff, Rich Guidice, delivered the news to Arwady, who did not have a chance to say goodbye to her staff.
In a Twitter thread posted Friday evening, Arwady described her tenure leading the health agency as the “best chapter of her life (so far)” and noted that it was “critical” the city’s health department receive the funding it needed to “remain strong.”
“My top priority has always been protecting the health of all Chicagoans,” Arwady wrote. “Public health must always be driven by science and medicine, and never politics. … As a physician and public health leader, my work to advance health, equity, and justice, particularly for those on the margins, will continue.”
In a debate shortly before the April runoff election, Johnson was adamant that he wasn’t going to keep Arwady when he took office. Later he said in interviews that he planned to sit down with her, but he also noted displeasure about her role in sending students back to Chicago Public Schools amid COVID-19 concerns.
An infectious disease expert and pediatrician, Arwady was appointed by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot. She told the Sun-Times in April she would like to continue under Johnson.
“I am hopeful to stay on in my role,” she told the newspaper in April. “I’m looking forward to the conversation.”
Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady vaccinates Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Vaccination Awareness Day at Michele Clark Magnet High School in November 2021.
The public health commissioner is an important job, and the department head oversees a number of programs that include mental health, opioid addiction, HIV and other infectious diseases and environmental protection.
Just a day before her firing, an advisory board to the city health department touted the agency’s accomplishments under Arwady’s leadership in a letter to Johnson, though they didn’t specifically endorse her return.
“[Arwady] is a consummate public health professional who guided the city’s response to the COVID pandemic and has worked tirelessly and diligently with her team to transform the way in which the City of Chicago approaches mental and behavioral health as well as threats to physical health and well-being,” the board wrote in the Thursday letter.
The board also listed what it wants to see in candidates being considered for health commissioner, such as experience with racial equity and commitment to transparency even amid lack of progress, among other things.
Arwady has been given credit for her leadership role during the COVID years, but she also has been in the crosshairs of the powerful Chicago Teachers Union, a significant backer and ally of Johnson.
The teachers felt Arwady sent students back to classrooms too early as COVID continued to infect Chicagoans.
Hundreds of Chicago Public Schools students protested outside the Chicago Public Schools headquarters in January 2022 during a district-wide walkout to demand Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Chicago Department of Public Health Dr. Allison Arwady and Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez to include them in the conversation about COVID-19 safety in schools,
Lightfoot’s hardball tactics of threatening to withhold teachers’ pay and locking them out of their online classrooms during the back-to-school dispute also harmed Arwady’s reputation among the educators.
Arwady tried to downplay those tensions, calling them “differences of opinion.”
The Yale-educated Arwady, a former epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said she and Johnson share a number of common goals, including narrowing the life expectancy gap that exists between white and Black Chicagoans.
On average, white Chicagoans live a full 10 years longer than the city’s Black residents.
Arwady and Lightfoot also drew the ire of environmental activists, especially in the early stages of the planned relocation of the General Iron car-shredding operation to the Southeast Side. Arwady ultimately blocked the operation but that followed many protests, including a month-long hunger strike.
“It should never have taken a 30-day hunger strike” to sway public health officials, said Olga Bautista, who heads the Southeast Environmental Task Force.
Contributing: Fran Spielman
Brett Chase’s reporting on the environment and public health is made possible by a grant from The Chicago Community Trust.
For Halloween 2020, Mayor Lori Lightfoot (left) and Allison Arwady, the city’s health commissioner, dressed up in costume to promote pandemic precautions for trick-or-treaters.