I have studied Maine history my entire adult life and spent 20 years in state government and politics, and it is clear to me that there has never been a candidate for Maine governor who has proven by their actions to be more utterly unqualified for the job more than Nirav Shah.
Shah’s story of administrative incompetence began in Illinois where, for reasons no one has been able to articulate, former governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican, appointed him as the Director of Public Health in January 2015. Rauner’s nomination of Shah cited only two career jobs, one as an economist where he worked one year in Cambodia, the other as an associate attorney in a Chicago law firm where he was not a partner.
When Maine DHHS Commissioner Jeanne Lambrew announced the appointment of Shah as director of the Maine CDC in 2019, she cited his work on opioids and children’s health in Illinois—two of his biggest failures—as justification. On opioids, a seemingly bewildered Shah appeared on Illinois Public Television in January 2018 and plainly laid out his deadly record of failure on the subject. “In the past three years deaths attributable to these fentanyl synthetics have gone from around 90 deaths to over 900, a 10-fold increase in just a few years.”
Despite Lambrew’s praise, Shah’s record on “Children’s health” was also deadly. In October 2017, he was summoned by a Legislative committee to answer questions about the death of as many as five children from Krabbe disease, a rare and deadly gene mutation that, if identified immediately after birth, can be treated to prolong the life of the child. Illinois has a law on the books that requires that all children born in the state be tested for the mutation. As director of Public Health, Shah simply ignored the law and did not facilitate the required testing. Investigative reporters from the Chicago Tribune published a series of pieces on the fiasco. One headline read, “Parents of dead, dying children blast Public Health director for newborn testing failure.” Afterward, it printed a summary of its investigation into Shah’s inaction which it called “How Illinois bureaucracy robbed parents of a chance to save their children from a deadly disease.”
At the legislative hearing, then committee chair Rep. Mary Flowers, a Democrat, told Shah, “I need to know what it is about the law we passed that the agency doesn’t think they have to implement it.” When Shah provided no satisfactory answer, Flowers minced no words. “You and your department have made us all sick and you have caused the death of our children.”
This was not the first time that Shah was called to account by the Legislature, not to mention the Illinois media, government investigators, and even the Illinois judicial system.
In June 2016, while Shah was Director of Public Health and a licensed attorney, Cook County Illinois Judge Neil Cohen ruled that he violated department rules, state law, and the U.S. Constitution in a case brought by an Illinois veteran who argued that the state’s medical marijuana policies should include treatment for PTSD. A ten-member advisory board voted unanimously to allow the change, but Shah rejected the board’s opinion. According to the judge’s ruling, Shah engaged in a “blatant denial of procedural due process – the most fundamental precept of our system of government.” Judge Cohen wrote that “Director Shah went beyond the rule to conduct his own investigation, add his own evidence to the Record, and rendered his decision based upon that investigation. Neither the Department’s rules nor the Act itself empower the Director to conduct his own investigation or add materials to the Record which were not considered at the hearing.”
The most famous of Shah’s numerous failures began in August 2015 when he was notified that a number of veterans at the Illinois State Veterans Home in Quincy had become ill. It was soon learned that they had contracted a serious respiratory illness identified as Legionnaires Disease most likely from a contaminated water source at the facility. When a second case of the dangerous illness had been confirmed while other state officials were raising alarms and pushing for immediate action, Shah downplayed the importance of the problem, saying “it is not unprecedented or atypical.” As if to dampen the growing concern, Shah wrote, “Fortunately, Legionella is a disease we know how to diagnose and treat. And from an epidemiology standpoint, we know how to track it down.”
Two cases turned into a full-blown outbreak and eventually a dozen veterans at the home died as a result. In a damning report after a lengthy investigation, the Illinois Auditor General laid the blame for the outbreak squarely at Shah’s feet. “The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) did not go on-site at the Quincy Veterans’ Home,” it reported” until midday on Monday, August 24th. That was nearly three days (approximately 67 hours) after the 2nd case was confirmed late in the afternoon on August 21st. The site visit focused on one building where the two confirmed cases were located.”
The investigation also confirmed that Shah’s failure to recognize and respond to the outbreak and to communicate with other agencies or the families of the sick veterans worsened its impact. From the report: “During the 2015 outbreak, auditors determined that there was limited communication between IDPH and the Quincy Veterans’ Home staff. IDPH officials often did not know the seriousness of the problem at the Quincy
Veterans’ Home.”
On day five of the outbreak, Shah finally acknowledged his woefully inadequate response to the crisis. Again from the report: “IDPH Director (Shah) emails another IDPH official and states, ‘I honestly didn’t realize that so many other residents and
employees at the facility are ill.’
Despite this list of deadly failures, Governor Rauner refused to fire Shah, and it cost him his re-election. Political leaders from both parties and from the state and federal levels all called for Shah’s firing or resignation. U.S. Senators Richard Durbin and Tammy Duckworth (a veteran) called on Shah to resign—twice. “Director Shah’s response to this tragedy,” they wrote, “reflects the height of irresponsibility and negligence, and it’s time for him to go.”
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, a Democrat, announced a criminal probe of the response to the Quincy veterans home Legionnaire’s outbreak and WBEZ Public Radio published a report titled, “Surviving War, But Not The Veterans’ Home.”
All of these investigations and revelations came to a head weeks before Governor Rauner’s re-election bid, and the enormous scandal played an important role in his loss to J.D. Pritzker in the 2018 election. With Rauner’s removal from office by the voters,
Shah’s tenure as Director of Public Health finally ended.
That same election cycle, however, brought Janet Mills into the Blaine House in Maine and in one of the most outrageous political appointments of our time, she named Shah as the head of the Maine Center for Disease Control. How Mills justified this action given his key role in a failed Republican administration and the thorough and negative coverage of his failures by the left-leaning Illinois media will remain a mystery for the ages. As soon as he arrived in Maine, however, Shah exhibited the same behavior that should have set off alarm bells with anyone in the Governor’s Office or at DHHS with access to Google.
In his first meeting with the Legislature’s HHS committee, Shah claimed he responded to the Legionnaire’s outbreak within 27 minutes. However, the State Auditor General’s report shows no such contact on its timeline and reports that the facility contacted Shah’s Department of Public Health about the outbreak, not the other way around. A major conclusion of the report is that the outbreak was worsened by Shah’s inaction in the first days after the second case of Legionnaires disease was confirmed. He waited 67 hours to act at all, six days before notifying the public, including families of veterans, and ten days before calling in the U.S. CDC.
In the end, Illinois agreed to pay the families of the veterans who died $6.4 million in settlement. On this record, Janet Mills scooped up Shah and placed him into what would become an enormously important role in state government.
Two years into Shah’s tenure in Maine, he became the face of the Mills administration’s at times disastrous response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Constantly seeking out media
attention despite his daily briefings to the media, Shah regularly provided false information to the public regarding significant events associated with the pandemic. The most outrageous of these was his declaration that a wedding dinner near Millinocket, Maine had become a “superspreader” event for the virus across Maine. After placing the event in the wrong county, and regularly overstating the number of guests in attendance, Shah espoused a bizarre theory that had no basis in fact. Specifically, he made a connection from the wedding to the Maplecrest nursing home in Madison, Maine two hours away. At his daily media briefing on August 25, he announced his theory to the public.
“Here’s how Maplecrest unfolded,” Shah announced. “A guest who attended the wedding on August 7th infected their parent. The parent then had contact with another one of their children. That child that person works at Maplecrest and infected five people at Maplecrest, four residents and one additional staff member and all of this unfolded in approximately two and a half weeks.”
The problem is, none of this was true, and his laying of blame for outbreaks as far south as Sanford, Maine devastated the families of the wedding party who knew the truth. At that time, I spoke in person with members of those families who detailed a familiar lack of communication between Shah and the key people who, as at the Quincy Veterans home, might have provided valuable details. In truth, there was no child to parent to child to nursing home chain of events and Shah new it. In a Statement of Deficiencies, state health inspectors from Shah’s CDC had collected logs and interviews from the nursing home and determined that the outbreak there began just four days after the wedding.
This would have required that the disease had traveled from its source through two family members and into the patients at Maplecrest in just four days, requiring an incubation period of less than two days for each infection—a biological impossibility. What Shah’s health inspectors found, and the family confirmed, was that a guest at the wedding worked at the nursing home and followed every protocol required of them before returning to work post-wedding only to test positive for COVID days later. By elevating his false narrative of the wedding/Maplecrest story to “superspreader” status, Shah became a national celebrity, scoring interviews on CNN, Good Morning America, and the Today Show. On September 4, in their Statement of Deficiencies health inspectors proved the wedding guest was an employee at Maplecrest. Despite this, Shah continued to espouse his multi-person theory on National Public Radio September 16 (twelve days later) and on CNN on the following day.
As he became aware of the impossibility of his timeline, however, he dropped one of the imaginary connectors from his theory, shortening, without explanation, the chain from wedding guest to family member to Maplecrest. By then the devastation endured by the families and the business that hosted the event was irrevocable.
In November 2020, three months after the wedding, scientists at Shah’s Maine CDC published a report that strangely excluded his name. It made two highly revealing conclusions about the wedding/Maplecrest connection. First, “A definitive linkage of outbreaks at these facilities to the event was not possible in the absence of whole- genome sequencing.” And, “staff members at the LTCF and correctional facility possibly had exposures outside the facilities.” In short, there was no definitive scientific evidence to support Shah’s superspreader theory. Though he was aware of this, Shah never explained or corrected his numerous public misstatements.
In a remarkable admission during his public briefing on September 2, 2021, Shah made this statement. “As you know, one of my rules is never, ever, ever speak definitively on anything.”
If the Maine people cannot rely on the director of the state’s CDC to make definitive statements in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, what is the point of his daily briefings and numerous other media appearances? If not him, who does the public look to for definitive information?”
On August 4, 2021, Dr. Robert Fauci appeared on a podcast hosted by Katie Couric and acknowledged that a vaccinated person is just as likely to transmit COVID-19 as a non- vaccinated person. The following day, USCDC director Rochelle Walenski discussed the efficacy of COVID vaccines with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, saying, “What they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”
Six days later, Mills announced a vaccine mandate for all state-licensed health care workers. She made this decision, she later said, “based on the best science the best medical advice possible,” presumably related to her by her CDC Director. In reality her decision directly contradicted the latest science as reported less than a week earlier by the federal government’s two leading COVID experts.
The result was devastating to health care in Maine. Nursing homes, already on the brink from understaffing, closed. More than thirty group homes for mentally challenged adults shut their doors. Emergency ambulance response in parts of the state became dangerously long. Soon, facilities began eliminating less profitable programs such as birthing care to cover their losses.
This is the legacy, both in Maine and Illinois, of the inability of Nirav Shah to manage government programs. Shah lived in Maine for just three years and has a record of failure that resulted in the deaths of five children, 900 addicts, and a dozen veterans. His abysmal leadership cost the State of Illinois millions in settlement costs and likely the governor his re-election. He violated department rules, state law, and the U.S Constitution, and repeatedly misled and lied to the people of Maine during a once in a
generation health crisis.
Now, Nirav Shah believes he is the right man to lead Maine’s state government into the future. I beg to differ.
