Shots at noon. Cook County was set at 12 p.m. today to release 15,000 COVID-19 vaccine appointments …
■ Also effective—your Square columnist can attest firsthand—is the county’s toll-free hotline: 833-308-1988.
■ Gov. Pritzker is encouraging Chicagoans over 16 to visit the suburbs to get shots beginning Monday.
■ Chicago’s top doc recommends crossing state lines: “Indiana has got plenty of vaccine and not enough people taking it.”
■ WBEZ rounds up ways Chicagoans and Illinoisans can get vaccinated.
■ A mass vaccination center in Tinley Park was locked down Thursday, along with five schools, as police investigated reports of a car stolen and shots fired.
■ A woman asked to put on a face mask at a Chicago Dunkin’ Donuts has been accused of aggravated battery—hitting an employee with a tip jar.
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg offers some—oh, let’s say, extreme—ideas for persuading anti-vaxxers to get their shots.
‘You don’t have to be a howling paranoid … to appreciate the civil liberties issues.’ Politico’s Jack Shafer raises concerns about the push for “vaccine passports.”
■ A Michigan State University medicine professor offers guidance for people anxious about rejoining the world.
■ Tribune columnist Mary Schmich: Hugs are no longer forbidden for the vaccinated, but still: Ask first.
■ Chicago’s Riverwalk restaurants and vendors are back beginning today.
■ The Onion: “A swarm of rats scrambled to hide their miniature, fully functioning amusement park and resort before workers returned to a local office building.”
‘I regret that tone.’ Addressing critics of his column “urging a wait-and-see response to the police killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo,” Trib columnist Eric Zorn says, “I should have done better.”
■ As the boy’s family waited to see police video of the incident, they planned a private service to lay his body to rest.
■ Accounts conflict over who fired at whom before a 21-month-old was shot in the head as he rode in his grandfather’s car along Lake Shore Drive this week.
■ The Chicago Police Department is moving to fire two cops involved in the shooting of an unarmed man on a Red Line platform.
■ An Oak Park officer was listed in serious condition after trading gunfire with a driver along Harlem near the Eisenhower Expressway.
■ The independent National Catholic Reporter: “Catholic-led organizations and donors have pumped millions of dollars into voter suppression efforts.”
South Side celebrations.
■ The Trib serves up a minute-by-minute account of the White Sox home opener …
■ … at which Mayor Lightfoot and Gov. Pritzker got some boos.
■ The University of Chicago blames frat parties for a COVID outbreak that has forced a return to virtual learning and dorm quarantines for at least a week.
Chicago done wrong. The Trib’s Tracy Swartz rips Netflix’s new movie, Thunder Force, for being set here but failing to nail the city’s look, feel … or bus routes.
■ Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper rates it “a thunderously bad film.”
‘A nasty, unappealing thing.’ Variety’s chief TV critic, Daniel D’Addario, reviews Fox News’ entry in the late-night comedy biz.
■ Stephen Colbert on the saga of scandalized scandal-scarred Congressman Matt Gaetz: “I know Gaetz is from Florida, but ‘Bahamas sex trafficking with weed-peddling hand surgeon’ is almost too Florida even for him.”
■ Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger is the first Republican member of Congress to call for Gaetz to quit.