Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, Minority Witness

The politician and formerly practicing physician attributes the low COVID-19 death count to vaccination. The published data doesn't support this assertion.

Hawaiian Governor Josh Green is scheduled to serve as minority witness for Democrat members of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

The Committee is holding a hearing today titled The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies: How Health Officials Downplayed and Hid Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Associated with the COVID-19 Vaccines.

My brother and his family have lived on Maui for 25 years, and I have lived on the island for a total of three years. During the years 2020-2023, I frequently spoke with my brother and other island residents, including Ed Dowd, about the COVID-19 situation on the island.

I first became interested in the background and profile of Hawaiian Governor Josh Green when Lahaina was incinerated on August 8, 2023. The disaster—about which I have been researching a book for the last two years—was emblematic of catastrophic mismanagement in terms of both prevention and emergency response.

An eerily similar fire struck Lahaina in on August 24, 2018 that came very close to penetrating the old town center. A review of the incident yielded an action list of measures that needed to be done to prevent total disaster from striking the historic town in the future. Of critical importance were bolstering power lines and poles and clearing desiccated vegetation from the hillside about Lahaina. None of these measures were taken.

Josh Green was elected lieutenant governor of Hawaii in November 2018 and was serving in this office during the COVID-19 pandemic. His previous career as a family doctor and ER physician at rural hospitals on the Big Island made him an obvious candidate to lead the state’s COVID-19 pandemic response.

Lt. Governor Green’s response was typical of Democrat Party administered states in its vigorous advocacy of lockdowns and masking, and equally rigorous suppression of early treatment modalities.

Especially stupid was his decision to close Hawaii’s beaches, which were certainly the best place for people to be—getting lots of sunshine and fresh air—after the virus began circulating in the islands.

The Hawaiian islands have a resident population of 1,455,274. The largest urban centers are Honolulu, with a resident population of 337,338. Outside of Honolulu, most of Hawaii’s residents live in relatively small towns and suburbs.

The lieutenant governor was widely praised in the media for his quick decision to close nonessential travel to the islands, which achieved nothing apart from demolishing the local economy.

In spite of travel restrictions, the contagion still—by official accounts—arrived in the islands around March 17, 2020.

The COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Hawaii began with great fanfare on December 15, 2020, with healthcare workers at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu receiving the first shots that prevented neither infection nor transmission.

With Lt. Governor Green and the local media erroneously proclaiming that vaccination would stop the spread and allow the state to go back to normal, the vaccine was rolled out out in two phases.

The first phase—rolled out in the winter and spring of 2021— was for healthcare workers and other cohorts deemed at higher risk of grave illness. The second phase—rolled out in the summer of 2021—was for all other persons 16 years and older.

Despite widespread vaccine coverage by the autumn of 2021, by far the biggest spike of hospitalizations and deaths in the islands occurred in December 2021.

An informal survey of my brother’s large circle of friends revealed that most of those who’d gotten vaccinated nevertheless fell ill during the winter of 2021-22 spike. Within his own family on the island, the one adult who received the shot was the first to fall ill and also suffered the most severe symptoms.

Rates of COVID-19 hospitalization and death closely corresponded with the number of nursing home residents in a given population. After Alaska, Hawaii has the lowest number of nursing home beds per 1,000 persons 65 years and older. As the graph below shows, Hawaii has less than half the number of nursing home beds per 1000 of the elderly cohort.

On March 25, 2020, the New York State Department of Health issued the following directive to nursing home administrators:

No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.

By forcing nursing homes to readmit residents confirmed or suspected of being infected, the New York Health Department greatly increased the state’s death count.

At least Lt. Governor Green did not force administrators to admit COVID-19 infected residents into nursing homes, in effect forcing foxes into henhouses. In terms of dreadful mismanagement, Governor Cuomo was a very tough act to follow, and the catastrophic death counts in New York nursing homes made many other states look comparatively much better.

Since Josh Green was elected Governor of Hawaii, he has frequently proclaimed his commitment to “green” or “renewable” energy—as though reducing the “carbon footprint” of the islands’ 1.4 million inhabitants is going to affect the climate of planet earth.

Note that the Hawaiian islands feature some of the most active volcanoes on earth—Kīlauea, Maunaloa, Maunakea, Hualālai, and Kohala—which release thousands of tons per day of water vapor (H₂O), carbon dioxide (CO₂), and sulfur dioxide (SO₂). During a major eruption, Kīlauea emits between 30,000–40,000 tons per day of these gasses.

It requires a special kind of dedicated obtuseness and ideological intoxication to claim that humans living on active volcanic islands need to erect windmills and drive electric cars to reduce their CO2 emissions.