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CHICAGO LODGE 7
Official Magazine
President’s Report
FRATERNAL ORDER OF POLICE CHICAGO LODGE #7
EXECUTIVE BOARD
JOHN CATANZARA JR.
President
Michael Mette
First Vice President
Daniel D. Gorman
Second Vice President
Fernando Flores
Third Vice President
Rob Noceda
Recording Secretary
Jim Jakstavich
Financial Secretary
Dennis McGuire
Treasurer
Sergeants-at-Arms
Nenad Markovich Frank Quinn III Daniel Sheehan
Trustees
Harold Brown John Capparelli Pablo Claudio Frank J. DiMaria David DiSanti Mark P. Donahue Patrick Duckhorn Tim Fitzpatrick Dan Goetz Ken Hauser Tom Lonergan Brock Merck Steve Olsen Monica Ortiz Dan Quaid Ron Shogren Daniel G. Trevino
Field Representative
Andrew Cantore
We made our case against the vaccine mandate – and it was a damn good one!
Obviously, the place to start is the vaccine mandate, which is foremost on every- body’s minds. As we filed our briefs in the grievance arbitration of the mandate on Jan. 25, we went at it Lodge 7 style. We didn’t hold anything back.
We probably could have wrapped this up in two days. But we had one day of medi- ation and five days of arbitration because of everything we included in it because we didn’t want to leave anything lying on the table.
We know the arbitrator rolled everything together in the decision regarding CFD Local 2’s arbitration. We wanted to make sure he didn’t go beyond his scope with ours. This grievance contends the City violated the contract by not negotiating the vaccine policy. The next step would be to review the policy line by line and see what’s fair and equitable.
There’s no question that there was a contract violation and an obligation by the City to bargain in good faith. And there’s no way you can get around that the City ignored it. The City pre- tended to be involved, then walked away a week before the deadline and just did what they wanted to do. That’s not a good-faith partner, but that’s what we have been dealing with from the beginning. And that is a big part of our case.
I think we presented testimony that the vaccines were not the be-all end-all as they tried to tout them. And we said from the beginning in negotiations that there need to be other considerations.
One of the simplest examples to use is that the NCAA is now considering athletes who had COVID in the past 90 days fully vaccinated, regardless of their vaccination status. That was one of the earliest points we made.
The City didn’t care. They never wanted to hear that argument. I think the facts are dictating now, like we said, that the vaccine is not the be-all end-all. You can still get the virus, pass the virus and die from the virus, even with the vaccine. Their argument that it lessens the severity of it is totally arbi- trary. And it makes a lot of assumptions that I don’t think there’s any scientific data saying as much.
We had a doctor testify who has a large urgent care clinic network in Jacksonville, Florida, and was at the center of Florida’s response to COVID in 2020. He was the go-to person for most of Florida. They had the testing, the ability, the personnel and the PPE to facilitate testing and treatment for COVID-positive people. So from early on, he was there, and his testimony was very powerful.
He said, “[Vaccination] should be an option. We do recommend our patients to get the vaccina- tion. We don’t demand it. We don’t insist on it. If they say no, they say no.” And he basically high- lighted that of all the people they’ve treated during the past year and a half, they’ve only had four patient deaths. And those four patients had very severe comorbidity issues. And that he believed that it should be an independent decision.
He talked about the simple reality that there are many vaccines that have been on the market for five, 10, 20 years before we realize there’s an issue with them. And then once you have mass trials by the millions across the world, you start seeing these repetitive issues and they pull the drug off the market. And now we’re talking about a vaccine that was put together in less than a year with very limited testing. We shouldn’t be forcing people to accept that it’s 100 percent good to go if their con- science tells them otherwise.
Another doctor was a Ph.D. who developed a saliva swab test for the University of Illinois that is used widely. It’s even used at the state capitol now. And his belief was the vaccine could be useful and effective, but testing is much more effective to know who is contagious at a given time. His testimony was all statistically based. And I think it was pretty powerful.
There was a third witness who challenged the Chicago Department of Health’s statistics that con- sistently get skewed to a specific result because that’s what they want to show. She dissected how they’re not accurate, how the numbers are not necessarily complete. And instead of attacking her testimony on the numbers, they attacked her personal character.
The rest of the testimony came from the other union presidents, Mike Mette, our first vice presi- dent, and then three officers who were articulating the process they went through at headquarters, the vital role they play in the Department, the unique positions they hold and that they would be otherwise forced out of a job. The Department has never considered many of the unintended conse- quences of its policy. Or the fact that there are more than 3,000 officers who are not vaccinated, still, to this day, and that many officers have still said, “I’m not getting vaccinated.” You can be assured
JOHN CATANZARA JR.
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CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ FEBRUARY 2022 5