Tammy Duckworth on Thursday said she strongly opposes Nirav Shah's run for Senate, reopening a fight over how he handled a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at the Illinois Veterans Home that killed veterans.
Duckworth said Maine deserves better than someone who put his public image before the safety of veterans, and she said too many of their heroes lost their lives under Shah’s watch as Illinois Public Health Director. She added that she had called for his resignation then and still strongly opposes his Senate bid now.
Shah served as Illinois public health director from 2015 to 2018, after Bruce Rauner appointed him to the post, and the controversy around his record has never fully faded. The outbreaks began in 2015, returned in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and left 13 dead in all, according to the facts released around the case.
What made the episode so damaging was not only the disease itself but the way the response was handled. The illness spread through the veterans home because of malfunctions in its aging plumbing system, and reports said Shah was aware of citable water system failures that likely caused the outbreaks. He said it was a citable offense and that if officials had wanted to cite them, they could have done so.
Duckworth and Dick Durbin put the accusation even more bluntly in 2018, saying there was definitive evidence of a serious public health crisis in Quincy and that the Rauner Administration and Shah sat on their hands while veterans and staff fell victim to the bacteria. They said the governor and his team put public relations ahead of protecting vulnerable veterans, their spouses and staff at IVH Quincy.
The delay remains one of the sharpest parts of the record. Shah and the Illinois Health Department waited six days after the first two confirmed cases before telling residents, families or the public, and multiple sources later suggested that pause was driven in part by an effort to avoid a public relations crisis. The outbreaks then led to lawsuits and a $6.4 million settlement with the families of those killed.
Shah has resisted calls for his resignation and has maintained that he handled the outbreak properly, which leaves Duckworth’s Thursday statement aimed directly at the campaign he is running now. The unanswered question is not whether the old wounds are real; it is how Shah intends to defend that record to voters after Duckworth brought it back into the center of the race.
