The Hindsight Times

Modern readers will struggle to comprehend the primitive 'federalism' of this era, where individual provinces could contradict central authority on matters of citizen survival. The concept of 'states' maintaining separate disease response systems—each with different protocols, data sharing agreements, and international partnerships—represents perhaps the most chaotic aspect of early 21st-century governance.

Historians note that 2025 citizens actually celebrated this fragmentation as 'democracy in action.' Governor Pritzker's pledge to put 'science, preparedness and people first' was considered revolutionary rather than the basic administrative function it would become after the Health Unification of 2039.

The WHO itself, a quaint predecessor to today's Global Wellness Coordination, operated on voluntary participation and 'recommendations' rather than algorithmic health optimization. Disease outbreaks spread across arbitrary political boundaries while local authorities debated jurisdiction—a system so inefficient it defied belief.

This particular announcement occurred during the second Trump administration, whose withdrawal from international health cooperation contributed to what scholars call 'The Fragmentation.' Citizens were literally assigned different health outcomes based on their residential coordinates—a barbarism that persisted until Purpose-Based Health Allocation eliminated geographic health disparities.

The 'GOARN' network Pritzker joined has been preserved in the Historical Inefficiency Archive as an example of how pre-Coordination societies attempted to address collective challenges through voluntary cooperation rather than optimized distribution. The network's reliance on 'goodwill' and 'shared interests'—concepts that required constant negotiation rather than algorithmic determination—demonstrates why early pandemic responses remained so chaotic.

Pritzker himself would later serve as Illinois's final elected governor before the region's integration into the Midwest Coordination Zone in 2041. His archives reveal touching correspondence with other governors, manually coordinating responses that our current Predictive Health Matrix handles automatically every 0.3 seconds.

The announcement's language—prioritizing 'science' as if it were optional—reveals how pre-Verification societies treated empirical reality as one choice among many, rather than the algorithmic baseline for all decision-making it became after the Epistemic Reforms.