There are 10,000 active cases of COVID in Hawaii right now and it continues to climb each day. Hospitals are filling up and ERs are inundated. Like places around the US, things are not at a good place.

Vaccinations had served as a hope to end this pandemic continue to be taken up slowly in many places despite it been given billions of doses with very few bed being filled with those experiencing vaccination side effects. Disinformation continues to flow all over the social media while the unvaccinated are filling hospital beds on ICUs.

Public health messaging has been on the safety of vaccines over and over again. It reminds me of how we farmers would say that GMOs are safe based upon scientific evidence, yet the fearful public refused to believe it. The same emotional responses are being repeated now. I even see science based farmers refusing the vaccinations too and angry about having to wear masks.

Farmers know that when their fields are being hit with pests, they have to treat the fields. If they wait too long to address the issue, they stand to lose the entire crop. Farmers are always scouting fields trying to stay ahead of their problems. This is how they remain resilient and sustainable.

The story of our papayas are very much like the pandemic. When the ringspot virus hit a tree here and there, we’d chop it down, much like the quarantining process. However, a virus is highly infective and spreads rapidly destroying the entire farm.

It is the same with COVID. This disease is the pestilence. Quarantining and isolating only can do so much at this point which is why we need that tool to give added protection to the community. For the papaya, it was the GMO technology that protected our fields and allowed us to sustain ourselves. The same goes for the vaccine to protect our health in the community. The more of us protected, the more we can sustain a healthy population. Basically we need less sick people around us.

Too many on the social media downplay the reality of COVID. This is a highly infectious disease. For some it can be a ticking time bomb that unleashes devastation to your lungs and eventually all of your organs. Like the farmer taking time to apply crop protection ahead of major problems, our community has to do the same if we are to curb this disease.

The anti-GMO activists were so afraid of pesticides that they’d wear hazmat suits to protests. Many of them see those suits on COVID wards and do not get the same level of concern and have even decided to take unapproved, untested remedies. It really shows how they do not understand what they speak upon. It would be a like a farmer with a mite problem spraying their crops with the wrong product that doesn’t work. It’s a waste of time to not use the proper treatment.

Right now, the best defense against infectious disease is to prevent it to begin with. If you value your health and value it, it starts with using the right preventative measure.

Just today, Senator Roz Baker and other senators called for the firing of Dr. Lorrin Pang, a long time anti-GMO touter and source of disinformation for his association with a group promoting quackery for COVID. It is quite funny to see this because the anti-GMO folks will fight tooth and nail against Senator Baker because she fought against buffer zones on farms, even if Dr. Pang is wrong.

I was reading a post of a long time anti-GMO activist who remains mad about Senator Baker because she still feels like they are allegedly still in danger from farms. As I read the comments, I saw the same old followers admitting that they are taking the quack cure of ivermectin to protect against COVID. Mind you, these same folks claimed that they have done their research on this and can attest to it.

Well, let me chuckle a bit more because their whole mantra was that farmers were poisoning them. Let’s really dig deeper on that shall we?

The mean lethal dose, or LD50, of the pesticide they banned, chlorpyrifos is 90-270 mg/kg in rats. That means it will take that amount to kill 50% of the testing population. Source: http://extoxnet.orst.edu/pips/chlorpyr.htmhttp://extoxnet.orst.edu/pips/chlorpyr.htm

The LD50 of glyphosate is 4320 mg/kg in rats. Source: http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/glyphotech.html#acute

The LD50 of hydroxychloroquine is 1240 mg/kg in rats. Source: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/236412374.pdf

The LD50 of ivermectin is 11 mg/kg in rats. Source: https://go.drugbank.com/drugs/DB00602

So, if we want to talk about the toxicity of these substances, the smaller the number, the higher the toxicity. So can you guess which one is the most toxic?

Yes, it’s Dr. Pang’s Pono Coalition’s recommendation that so many of his anti-GMO followers are taking over the vaccine. I have to laugh because they mocked me as being sheep but, uh, they are the ones taking enough of a toxic substance made for sheep!

When I was a young kid, I grew up with terrible asthma. As soon as I caught a mild cold, the stuffiness immediately went into my lungs. I remember being so congested with constant wheezing waking up my . I remember having dreams of feeling suffocated only to wake up way short of breath. I’d nudge my sleeping parents telling them I could not breathe. They’d get dressed groggily and jump in the car to take me to Kahuku Hospital.

Immediately there, the nurses knew exactly what I needed. They’d grab the nebulizer and inject the medication in and I’d be puffing away. Within minutes, my wheezing would subside and I could feel my airways open up giving me relief. My asthma was so bad that I’d spend several days there getting prednisone and nebulizers to manage the exacerbations.

These asthma exacerbations would happen multiple times and when that feeling of suffocation came on, I’d tell myself I was going to die. I thought I’d not make it to my 18th birthday but somehow, thanks to the great care I got as a kid, I made it.

As a mother, I now can empathize how my parents felt when a kid gets sick. To have to take my then 3 year old to the ER because his respiratory rate was over 50 breaths per minute, O2 sats below 90%, and heart rate racing over 150 beats per min scared the bejeebers out of me that I could lose my kid without proper care. I didn’t want to cry in front of him but I could not help it being so scared to not be able to provide comfort.

With school coming up and seeing COVID cases rise, I knew had to take action to protect my kids as well as my clients in home health. Their exposure could prevent me from caring for my homebound clients or potentially expose them. I was not going to take that chance.

There was a lot stress with trying to figure out what needed to be done to plan for this and fortunately, we were able to get into distance learning. Yes, it is not the same for kids but for their safety, it is worth the sacrifice.

What is even worse right now is the utterly disgusting self-entitled attitude among adults, including many parents, who are worried about their kids but are not vaccinated themselves. Then there are the teachers who have only 80% vaccinated but complaining about the DOE return to school plan. There’s always some excuse as to why they have not taken the vaccine. If you are worried about your kids and your own families, you’d do everything in your power to protect them. I hate hearing the selfish excuse of “my body, my choice” because it shows they don’t give a damn about others they infect.

I knew that my exposures from last year put my kids and others at risk and I jumped to get vaccinated. I didn’t even consider not getting it despite the side effects. I learned early on that the risks of COVID was way worse that the effects of a vaccine. I grew up knowing how awful it is to be short of breath. COVID steals people’s ability to breath.

The cases continue to rise and kids are now at higher risk. The years of disinformation has shown us how dangerous it is and many continue to believe it. Will we ever learn to trust the science again or will it take someone getting close to us very sick to realize that we have to follow the evidence? It is looking like the latter.