From the way the Hawaii Department of Health is treating Jennifer Smith, you would think it was Barack Obama’s real birth certificate that she posted on the internet. A whistleblower who discloses the real numbers isn’t welcome but daring to question the word of Dr. Deep State can lead to really stiff consequences.
Whistleblower out in the cold
Epidemiologist turned whistleblower Jennifer Smith used to work for the the Department of Health in the island paradise of Hawaii. She’s been fired not once but twice now, the most recent time was in May.
She’s suing the state alleging she was fired in retaliation for telling the truth about what really goes on behind the scenes in COVID-19 contact tracing programs, at least the one she worked in.
Ms. Smith first caught national attention last year when she busted the Hawaii Health Department lying “about the number of contact tracers it had on staff.” They claimed a lot more than there were. The whistleblower and her colleagues were working every day which ends in “y” for a while, scrambling to keep up with all the new cases and not able to get to all of them.
Smith ended up “briefly suspended with pay in September” after she revealed that “current staff had been working six to seven days a week to try to keep up with an increase in cases.”
The public spirited whistleblower swore up and down that “she had been falsely accused of making threatening comments at work.” Investigators with the state agreed and “found such claims to be baseless.”
They had her back on the job in October, but not the same desk. She got fired again in May, but until then the department decided to make her life miserable.
Punished for speaking out
No good deed, they say, goes unpunished. Jennifer Smith is a case in point. Before getting fired for “inappropriate social media posts” and “releasing confidential information” in May, they made her life a living hell.
According to what lawyers for the whistleblower wrote in the lawsuit, “health department officials were vague about their specific concerns.” Smith believes that she’s “being punished for speaking out last year about the failures of leadership to increase capacity to respond appropriately to the outbreak.” At least that’s what she said to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
“When I returned to work at the end of October, I was very nervous because I knew I would be targeted for sure. I made sure that I did all my assigned work, that I did it to their satisfaction. There were no performance issues mentioned to me. This kind of came out of the blue.” When you’re a whistleblower, the Deep State can make up reasons.
When she returned to work in October she was “reassigned to document and report on influenza cases.” Administrative Siberia. Her “workload was reduced to nearly nothing. She was underutilized and isolated from the rest of DOH staff and managers.”
On May 14 they handed her the second pink slip. Health department officials declined to comment on the allegations but “a review of Smith’s social media posts” shows the concerned whistleblower the mistake of crossing Dr. Deep State.
“Fauci claims that those questioning him are criticizing science. Fauci is NOT a Nobel price winner and has not been a scientist for a very long time. He’s an administrator.” They might have let her slide for revealing that the figures they release aren’t actually based on science but criticizing Anthony Fauci is the kiss of political death.