Dr. Ngozi Ezike, the public face of Gov. JB Pritzker’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been fined $150,000 for violating a state revolving-door ethics law when she left her job as director of the Illinois Department of Public Health in March 2022 to become president and CEO of Sinai Chicago hospital system.
Ezike agreed to pay the fine and admitted the infraction to settle a complaint brought in October 2023 after the state executive inspector general found she’d violated the ethics law, according to records released Friday by the state’s Executive Ethics Commission. Her final state salary was $180,000 annually, and tax records show she received about $490,000 from Sinai in the year ending June 30, 2023.
State records show the $150,000 fine is the third-largest in the ethics commission’s two-decade history. A recent story in the Tribune’s “Culture of Corruption” series detailed weaknesses in the state’s ethics oversight system, including that the vast majority of fines levied by the commission have come in just a handful of cases similar to Ezike’s.
In the settlement agreement with the Illinois attorney general’s office, Ezike admitted violating a revolving-door prohibition that bars high-ranking state officials from going to work for a vendor within one year of leaving government employment if the agency they helped lead had contracts with a company totaling more than $25,000 or that the agency was involved with regulatory decisions involving the company.
In Ezike’s last year with the state, the Department of Public Health had $4.2 million in contracts with Sinai Chicago and took part in numerous regulatory matters involving the safety-net hospital system, including license renewals for Mount Sinai and Schwab Rehabilitation hospitals on the West Side and Holy Cross Hospital on the Southwest Side, complaint investigations, and other issues related to the federal Medicaid program, according to state records.
While Ezike admitted violating the prohibition, her attorney said in a statement included in the ethics commission documents that Ezike didn’t do so knowingly and “relied on the advice of trusted staff and the legal opinion of private counsel before officially accepting the position and executing a contract with Sinai.”
“After guiding Illinois through the pandemic, Dr. Ezike was presented with an opportunity to lead a system of safety net hospitals providing care for the most vulnerable populations in Chicago,” wrote Ezike’s attorney, Heather Wier Vaught, who also is a statehouse lobbyist and onetime chief counsel to former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. “She consulted with her chief of staff; she consulted with her ethics officer; she hired private counsel. She thought she did everything right. She thought she was able to accept the job.”
Ezike’s response also blamed a lack of clarity in the law on whether grant agreements such as the ones Sinai had with the public health department qualified as “contracts” under the revolving-door prohibition, noting that an ethics officer and the agency’s chief of staff advised her that they did not. And because the agency’s director is required to be a doctor, the response said, “if the renewal of a hospital license is considered a licensing decision under the revolving door, a director would be precluded from working for any health system, in any capacity, for a year.”
In a statement Friday, Ezike didn’t address her admission. Instead, she said she took the job with Sinai because the health system “shares my personal mission to improve public health outcomes of those most in need.”
“As a public servant and physician, I have always been guided by integrity, ethics and justice, and I have dedicated my career to advancing health equity, particularly in underserved communities,” she said.
The possibility that Ezike had violated the revolving-door prohibition was first publicly raised in June 2022 when the Better Government Association reported the state Office of Executive Inspector General was investigating the matter.
In response to questions from the nonprofit news organization at the time, a Pritzker spokeswoman said in a statement: “Dr. Ezike demonstrated her strong moral compass and commitment to the people of Illinois every day for three years during an awful global pandemic.
“It is perverse to try to tarnish a strong and respected leader who could go anywhere she wants but chose to again serve the most vulnerable.”
In response to questions from the Tribune on Friday, Pritzker spokesman Alex Gough did not address why the administration previously characterized allegations that Ezike later admitted were true as “perverse.”
“We are grateful for Dr. Ezike’s commitment and public service to the state of Illinois that helped save lives during the largest public health crisis in modern history,” Gough said in an emailed statement. “We are pleased a resolution was reached and that the Executive Ethics Commission … followed their process.”
In a statement Friday, a spokesperson for Sinai also did not address Ezike’s admission but said the health system was “confident in Dr. Ezike’s exemplary leadership.”
At an April 2022 news conference announcing her new job, Ezike said: “There’s been a lot of talk about where I would go next, so I’m so excited to share with everyone that this is the place, despite many opportunities, many calls and emails with many exciting chances to do more great work that’s in line with my personal values, I know that the call to serve the communities that need help on Chicago’s West and Southwest sides is my next calling.”
State records released Friday show Ezike had been in talks with Sinai since November 2021, when she was contacted by a search firm. She was offered the job in February 2022, records show.
In addition to the ethics law violation, the executive inspector general also found Ezike violated a 2015 executive order prohibiting state employees from entering employment negotiations with entities that are registered to lobby their agency.
Ezike joined the Pritzker administration in early 2019 in the typically low-profile, bureaucratic role of director of the Department of Public Health. But she became a familiar presence on TV and computer screens across Illinois in spring 2020 as she appeared with the governor at his daily briefings during the early days of the pandemic.
Ezike provided a dose of empathy along with each day’s grim statistics and repeated pleas for social distancing, mask wearing and hand-washing. The governor came to rely on her not just for medical guidance but also for help communicating with Spanish-speaking Illinois residents.
In October 2020, early in the state’s second COVID-19 surge, Ezike displayed her sincerity when she began to cry and briefly paused her remarks as she encouraged Illinois residents to “fight the fatigue” and keep doing their part to slow spread of the virus.
When her departure was announced March 1, 2022, at a news conference, Pritzker declared it “Dr. Ngozi Ezike Day” and lavished praise on the first Black woman to lead the agency.
“I ran for office; she did not. But throughout the crisis she has stood by me every step of the way,” Pritzker said. “I am not putting it lightly when I say that she has had one of the hardest jobs in the world.”
Before being named public health director, Ezike was medical director at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. A board-certified internist and pediatrician, she earned her medical degree at the University of California at San Diego.
Ezike took the top job at the state Department of Public Health after the agency had come under scrutiny for its role in handling a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at a veterans home in downstate Quincy during Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration. Under Ezike, the agency again faced tough questions from lawmakers, particularly Republicans, about how it addressed a coronavirus outbreak that tore through the state veterans home in LaSalle in November 2020, killing 36 residents.
A review from the state auditor general, released about two months after Ezike’s departure, blamed Public Health for failing to “identify and respond to the seriousness of the outbreak.”
