The day a hospital executive reportedly gave COVID shots to ineligible Trump Tower Chicago employees, he bragged to friends that he’d also vaccinated the ex-president’s son. “Vaccinated Eric Trump,” Dr. Anosh Ahmed, a resident of Donald Trump’s namesake luxury tower, wrote in a text message, sharing a photograph of him posing with the former president’s “cool guy” child. Ahmed would later deny having given the jab to Eric Trump, calling his text a “joke.” But controversy has continued to boil over the improper Trump Tower vaccinations and others Ahmed’s West Side hospital have administered in recent weeks.
“We have a finite amount of vaccine in the city,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot told reporters Wednesday, authorizing Dr. Allison Arwady, the city’s public health commission, to “dig deeper” into the mass vaccination on March 10. “We’ve been really, really careful to make sure that we’re using it in a way that prioritizes the most vulnerable people who are most at risk and most at risk of spreading it. We’re not gonna do what we’ve seen in other parts of the country and just have a free-for-all.” Of the Trump Tower incident, she said, “I was disappointed to hear about it.”
Block Club Chicago first reported this week that dozens of staff members at the hotel and residence were given COVID vaccinations on March 10, though they were not yet eligible, by Loretto Hospital, a West Side safety net hospital serving primarily low-income Black and brown Chicagoans. Ahmed, the hospital’s chief operating officer, is a resident of the downtown skyscraper. Initially, a Trump Tower official said the shots were administered as part of the Protect Chicago Plus campaign, which prioritizes the underserved communities on the South and West sides that have been hit especially hard by the coronavirus pandemic. But Loretto President and CEO George Miller said in a letter to staff Tuesday that the shots had come from the hospital’s regular supply, not the Protect Chicago Plus program, and that they had been administered to the 72 Trump International Tower employees—“predominately Black and brown restaurant, housekeeping, and other hotel support personnel” who lived on the West Side, he said—by mistake. “We were, at the time, under the impression that restaurant and other frontline hospitality industry workers were considered ‘essential’ under the City of Chicago’s 1B eligibility requirements,” Miller wrote. “I now understand, after subsequent conversations with the Chicago Department of Public Health, that we were mistaken.”
Sure, it have been an honest mistake. But it appears that last week’s mass vaccination event was not a one-off. Employees told Block Club that they’ve received vaccinations at Trump’s Chicago building for months, though they were not yet eligible under city guidelines, and WBEZ on Wednesday reported that Loretto also vaccinated dozens of Cook County judges and their spouses, even though their turn in line doesn’t come until March 29, when Chicago is due to move into the 1C phase of vaccinations. “The board of the hospital must meet with the president and his team and there must be some assurance that this problem is no longer going to happen,” Democratic State Representative LaShawn Ford, a member of the Loretto board of trustees, said of the judges’ vaccinations. “We have the vaccines and they need to stay in the Austin community.”
Arguably, letting people skip the COVID vaccine line is only the second-shadiest thing to put Trump Tower Chicago in the news. The probe that Cy Vance has been leading into the former president and his business dealings is said to have expanded recently to scrutinize the loan Trump used to construct the building; the company had to pay only a fraction of said loan after it was forgiven in 2012. It’s not clear why Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization and persona non grata in the Windy City, was at the building in Chicago last week. But he did get to see the river dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day while he was in town.
Did he also receive an ill-gotten vaccine as a souvenir? Ahmed, the Loretto executive, told Block Club that his text was “meant as a joke.” The Trump scion would not have gotten his shots that day, Ahmed explained to the outlet, because he has an “anti-vaccine stance.”
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