 Hello everyone and welcome to Hawaii Together on the ThinkTech Hawaii broadcast network. I'm Kaylee Ikeena, your host and president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. Today's topic is Hawaii's puzzling coronavirus rules. As you know, there have been a multitude of government proclamations, mandates and shifting rules during the coronavirus pandemic. But you may be wondering, have Hawaii officials been fully transparent about the data and the reasoning behind their actions? Maybe sometimes you've scratched your head. It's been puzzling to say the least. Well to find the answer today we're going to talk with a good friend, Cam Napier, who's the editor-in-chief of Pacific Business News. We'll be discussing what the government could do to be more responsive to the public and more transparent. I'd like to welcome Cam to the program now. Welcome glad to have you back with us today Cam. Well thanks for having me on the show. It's always a pleasure to be here chatting with you and all the Grassroot Institute fans. Hello everybody. Well we love to tap into your expertise and your wisdom. You are one of the most respected journalists here in the state. As I talk to people, your name comes up. When I ask who do you respect in terms of journalism and you've certainly earned your place in here, give me a little bit of your background. One of the things you do is once in a while address a controversial issue. How did you start doing that and how did you get into journalism here? Oh my. Well I've been writing since I was a child. It just comes naturally to me. It's how I learn about what's going on in the world is to read and ask questions and then kind of synthesize it. And I've been a columnist I guess by nature in my whole career all the way back to the cane tassel at Waipahu High School in the 80s, full paper. And I was an English major at the University of Hawaii. I had no idea how to make a living as a writer. But one thing led to another. I was freelancing around town for publications like Honolulu Magazine, Honolulu Weekly. A lot of people might remember the weekly. That's right. They were around for a good long time. And I ended up being on staff at Honolulu Magazine for about 19 years. The last eight is editor and then I've been at PBN now since 2014. Well how about that? I'm live at PBN. Yeah when people think of some of the magazines and newspapers you've worked for, the term mainstream comes to my mind. You've worked for some of the most well read, well respected instruments out there. And yet every now and then I'm delighted and surprised. You'll come forth with some column that is filled with unconventional, even unpopular analysis of a controversial issue. I've always wondered, Kim, how do you get away with it? Oh my goodness, I don't know. Well, I've been lucky to work in supportive environments that appreciate having a range of viewpoints. I do worry about my industry overall in the long run in terms of how much permission people in my industry feel to have dissenting opinions. I think overall it's becoming much harder for folks. But I've been very lucky all along. I do try to do a lot of homework. Each one of those columns every week, I think, oh my goodness, why did I want a weekly column? This is taking me hours to pull this together. I'm on deadline, I'm never going to be finished, especially through the last 18 months of COVID where there's so much to research from the public policy standpoint. I've tried to be comparative looking at what Hawaii's done in comparison to what other jurisdictions have done. There's the epidemiology aspect, there's the cultural aspect, there's the industry, my industry aspect in terms of the reporting and how good a job it's, how well it's being done. I've already wandered away from your question. You mentioned the coronavirus era and throughout it we've been mystified at the reasons government officials have given to justify their actions. You've been a great student of this and so I wanted to ask you and you've written on this, how transparent has our government been? What kind of grade would you give them? How do you assess their transparency? What do you think is going on there? I've been frustrated all along with the lack of transparency in terms of data-driven public policy and it's at the state level as well as the county level when Safe Access came along I asked the city and county of Honolulu with the new mayor, my question to them was when they announced Safe Access with the new restrictions and requiring that customers show their vaccine card or a negative test result, my question was how many cases, hospitalizations or deaths is this estimated to prevent? What's the estimated economic impact and who did the modeling for both of these that informed this decision and the answer back was that Safe Access Honolulu was designed in collaboration with health, business and restaurant leaders as part of our collective efforts to aggressively counteract the surge of COVID-19 cases. That's not the same as telling me or more importantly my readers, I mean I'm trying to gather this stuff so that all the business owners and business leaders, everyone interested in a good economy who reads PBN can learn from what I'm able to get or learn from what I'm not able to get and there's no modeling right, they didn't have any to share and that's not any different than the Caldwell administration, Caldwell was quite irritated with me in an interview format just like this when I pressed for specific data so I can you link a thing that you're requiring of all of us to a specific outcome and no one yet has been able to do that. Well one of the people like a range like a like like give us a guess at least, right? Well one of the problems I hear you stating is that it's been difficult to get data in the first place, it's been difficult on a more general level to get answers to the questions that you have as a journalist when you're told them to government agencies and to government leaders how's that make you feel? Well you know personally frustrated, I do see I think it was at Sybil Beter the advertiser recently had a big story talking about the lack of transparency right so I'm glad to see that there's finally some some momentum building to demand some of these some of these answers. Well this certainly begs the question you were raising earlier about the basis on which government officials are making their decisions. So what is your assessment so far? Can you tell as a journalist whether government has been looking at the data in an objective way and basing and basing their decisions on data? I think that they have been globally not just in Hawaii I mean anyone who's following this should should read what's going on all around the world. There's been a fairly uniform approach towards dealing with this pandemic towards having it be very top down from from governments and very much handled as an economic intervention more than as a public health intervention. So I think that what they're looking at more than I mean this is a guess on my part right I'm not a fly on the wall in these meetings I think that they're they're looking at kind of a shopping cart of public policy options more so than than data. Well let's switch to the media now over the last year and a half the coronavirus has been front and center in the media what do you make of the quality of the media's reporting about it? Well my second only to government in my my criticisms in the column have been criticisms of my own industry but that's that's nothing new I've been grumbling about my own industry as long as I've been in it because it's such a privileged position to be in you know as the institution is supposed to help the public know what's going on and we do have access that that the average citizen doesn't have right when you when when a politician knows that you represent tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of citizens through your audience they'll answer your your questions and then when they don't that's also significant from the from the very beginning I noticed that and again this is global it's not just Hawaii's media it's the national media it's the media in other countries from the from the very beginning there was this broad acceptance in the media of the of just the face value explanation that there's this pandemic and because of the pandemic we in government need to do xyz and I think that very early on a lot of folks in media thought that their path to looking after the readers and asking the hard questions of government it took the form of you say this is a crisis so why aren't you clamping down harder instead of asking you say this is a crisis so why are you choosing this policy instead of these others that we're aware of or why are you doing these actions when they're different from other actions in past pandemics so there's been a lack of comparative analysis there's been a lack of historical perspective and and and I think an outcome of this is that media and government have fed into each other in this feedback loop of of increasing clampdown well you know that's very interesting focusing primarily on what to do rather than the rationale behind it talking more about what is going on rather than asking the question why is it going on right we're bringing up all kinds of correlations but never getting to the actual causality of what's right right you know there's some interesting psychological tells in in the language that we all use to describe this time that we're in when you see media or government or just even everyday people you talk to and they say well because of kovat xyz well kovat it's just a virus it doesn't make any decisions for us only humans can make decisions about what humans are doing and and so if if we were being more complete in our understanding of what we were going through we would more often be saying because of kovat policies this has happened and that has happened and this was closed and that's open and that's not open and this is being asked of us right but no one says because of kovat policies it's very rare to see that formulation understand that you know it's extra work to add that word in and at pbn we probably aren't doing it as often as we probably should uh it's it's it's easy and shorthand to say well because kovat but really it's because kovat policies you know cam today i was reading in the halloween star advertiser uh the the following statement flu proves deadlier than kovat and and what it said is that the the flu and pneumonia have killed over 800 people this season and when i read that i i was kind of shocked for a minute because that hasn't really been in the headlines no and the number 800 for this season for flu and pneumonia alone uh dwarfs the number of deaths from the coronavirus which has constantly been in the in the media what are your thoughts about this i'm a little flummoxed very early on in the pandemic when i was trying to put the threat of coronavirus into a historical context i was using state department of health influenza surveillance reports to point out that every single year there there's x number of fatalities in hawai from a communicable viral disease while pneumonia is bacterial but it typically starts with you catching some sort of upper respiratory viral infection uh you know and and to say well if we were to panic every year in the exact same way we're panicking now uh you know we'd never we would never have an economy we would never leave our homes well not too long after that those those weekly reports vanished from the state department of health website and they stayed gone for the longest time i haven't had a chance to look yet to see if those weekly reports have returned to the website and that's what star advertiser was basing their their article on so that my gut reaction was well this is interesting to see and and i read the piece and i can't quite tell if it's an attempt to return to perspectives or if it's softening us up for the idea that we need to keep acting like this now because of the flu every year where are we going with this comparison and one of my concerns has been if we lower the threshold for what justifies this all-encompassing response to a problem to do something you know to a level of threat that that we used to just accept as normal then we then we're inviting in a permanent state of crisis so yeah i guess that's that's my reaction to it well that's something worth pondering we're going to take a quick break now and my guest today is cam napier editor-in-chief of pacific business news we'll be right back and don't go away because when we come back i'm going to ask cam a question about u.h. football welcome to cooper union we look at what's happening with human rights around the world and we invite you to tune in every tuesday where we feature the voices of the people from the front lines sharing the struggles for self-determination for the importance of sustainability and solidarity with one another to make the world a better place for all of humanity if you can't catch it live you can also look at think tech hawaii.com as well as on vimeo and many other places to catch the amazing shows where we hear from authors activists academics analysts and artists who are contributing to positive social change around the planet hallelujah make up ono thank you for joining us for justice back and you're still here thank you very much i'm kaley akina you're watching hawaii together on the think tech hawaii broadcast work and my guest today is cam napier we're talking about the the puzzling way in which government justifies what it's been doing during the coronavirus pandemic and uh one reason that happens to be with u.h. football a parent our mayor of honolulu and our governor have reversed their original stance and are now opening up the stadium so that some spectators can come in which is a great thing i mean i'm all for that and i'm excited about that and i do think our our rainbow warriors need to have an audience but when i sit back and i try to answer the question why what was the data did something change that i i i didn't see uh i i'm a bit puzzled about this cam what are your thoughts about that well to me it it fits into a larger pattern that's been consistent from the the very beginning of the policy response which is uh seemingly arbitrary distinctions made between essential and non-essential businesses uh that and and you know i i wrote about it a bit when safe access was announced that uh it's very strange that you know a bar is dangerous but a bank is not a restaurant will kill you but grocery shopping is totally okay um and and i think a lot of people have seen the weirdness of this right that this was a big source of of tension earlier in the pandemic when a lot of local businesses were essentially shut down but major corporate stores um were were declared essential and allowed to stay open uh and and apparently it in great safety right we did not see like a wave of deaths of of wal-mart employees or shoppers or cosco employees or shoppers which then you know if you observe that you might start to wonder well why are we making these these these distinctions if things are apparently fairly safe for most people most of the time well yeah yeah it's kind of like the ineffability of the changing goalposts right originally we were going to quote unquote flatten the curve right right and then we got to the place where we were eager to to get through these different tiers one two three four um and we discovered at the end of tier four there was a tier five and um we've all been rooting for the day when we would get 70 percent immunization and that would change things but apparently that's not the goalpost's position any longer what are your thoughts about these shifting goalposts well that's been an enormous frustration for a lot of people uh it's it's been difficult for for the pbn readers or like i've said they're business owners and business leaders you know and the uncertainty is as much a problem as as the restrictions right so if they there's a specific direct connection between saying well a restaurant could only have 50 capacity and and a restaurant's revenues uh that's almost mathematical precision but there's the broader uncertainty of the moving goalposts the changing regulations where it makes it very difficult for businesses to plan you know whether or not they should bring employees back for example uh whether or not they should be ordering more supplies or fewer supplies uh whether or not they should even stay in business uh we we spoke to uh ahead of kolo chamber of commerce as part of a panel discussion recently and his his business robert reich his his day job he uh helps people with financial planning for their businesses their exit strategies he's got clients that are telling him look i want out faster i know i had a plan to exit my business uh pre-covid on a certain timetable but i want out much faster now uh so that that broader uncertainty has been a big challenge for business in hawaii certainly and with with respect to what the goal really is it makes it very difficult to keep score if it's not clear as you know our governor has in recent press venues been uh vacillated between being the highly optimistic about the possibility that we can open up a little bit sooner to being pessimistic even making mention that there might need to be a universal vaccine mandate right and yet when pressed he says it's it's not known yet what the metric will be by which we make that decision right your thoughts about that well i think that's why a lot of people have a hard time with mandates when when the when the there's that much uncertainty a lot of a lot of people would rather government be upfront about the uncertainty and say here's what we think is your safest course of action but we we leave it to you to make your own decisions uh it's very difficult for people to accept mandates that that seem untethered you know and and especially when you keep in mind that uh we're still operating under emergency powers we still don't really have a true functional democracy at the moment uh you know i mean i guess the legislature can pass laws on anything but covet but when it comes to the public health emergency we're we're still very much at the mercy of unitary decisions uh and you know that to get public buy-in you got to be a little more persuasive and less coercive i think if you want to be an effective public policy leader you know the well that's a whole other thing to talk about vaccine mandates perhaps but uh yeah it's it's all been very strange we've seen in the recent past our healthcare system uh overwhelmed under the surge in demand and that has often been put forth as the main reason that government officials um have opted for various restrictions right it's based upon the limitations of our healthcare system uh one of the things that we've exposed at the grassroots institute is that that was the condition of our healthcare system even before the pandemic right right right it's nothing new it's the result of various government regulations certificate of demand uh certificate of need uh regulations uh the regulatory environment about around uh practicing a medical business and and so forth so why do you think that that is used as the main reason for the lockdowns rather than something that we actually solve well i think in the short term it seems much easier to control all of us than to overhaul an industry that's one answer that comes to mind and and you know to be fair on the on the previous question uh the delta variant seemed very different it was behaving very differently from the original version so yeah you know it's not surprising that some goalposts would move in response to that that that seems safe but um but yeah i think you know in the short term that's that's the explanation is is just like with two weeks to flatten the curve it is much easier uh to order all of us to stay home or to to operate our businesses at half capacity or what have you or vaccine mandates than than it is to to will a larger and better industry into shape there are things that are just outright missing in the workforce development picture in hawaii uh i recently interviewed kathy rathill she's uh retired recently as president and ceo castle medical center and we were talking about workforce development she pointed out there's no training in hawaii for physical therapists for example it's just one medical specialty right so hawaii kids go to the mainland for school for that and maybe they stay because they found a cheaper place to live and more professional opportunities but in any case they they have to leave for the training and then we we have to kind of entice them back but i have been puzzled at why nationwide there hasn't been more of this emergency crisis mindset applied to beefing up healthcare than to controlling the the broad general public or controlling the economy as a response to to the pandemic uh 18 months is is a long time you know i i i mentioned in my column this week uh if you're talking about like the federal government responding to a wartime emergency uh how many submarines the poor smith's navy yard could crank out at the beginning of world war two and at the end of world war two when it matters the the government can make production accelerate i haven't really seen a national effort commensurate to that or comparable to that uh in terms of of increasing healthcare capacity right i don't know why i don't know why that is and certainly increasing our healthcare capacity would be on the top of things to do yeah i can prepare for potential future pandemics right we've just got about 30 seconds left cam what could our government have done better what should we do in the future just real quickly oh real quickly uh you know more should have been uh voluntary guidelines and i and i think not just because it's ethically right but because it's more effective as public health policy as soon as people feel bullied then they react to the force that they feel coming at them whether or not it's the best health decision they could make and and so i think the mandates are counterproductive in that regard and and i think the the the public we all could do a better job of of asking better questions about what's going on around us uh rather than just jumping on to the drama of the situation i think that that's been a big factor and what's been going on for the last 18 months well cam thank you very much great information today and i hope people will continue to read you in pacific business news cam napier editor-in-chief and uh delighted to have you on board today and everyone else until next time we'll see you on hawaii together on the think tech hawaii broadcast network i'm kaley akina signing off now