Against the backdrop of COVID-19, seeing new students take their first steps into medical school is particularly profound. So it was on Aug. 29, when the University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) welcomed 77 first-year medical students in its annual White Coat Ceremony — handled virtually via Zoom, of course.

Taking the pledge to care as well as cure, these students will be among our healers in a public-health future that COVID has revealed to be more precarious than ever before.

We wish them all well — and hope JABSOM can keep expanding its medical-student cohorts.

Honua Ola, fake emails and the PUC

In this age of Russian bots with social-media accounts surrounding presidential politics, now the Honua Olu Bioenergy plant proposal has been snagged in Hawaii’s own small online fakery issue.

The concern is every bit as real, though: The state Public Utilities Commission has received multiple reports of email hacks and comments supporting the project being sent out without the purported emailers’ knowledge.

With public participation largely online, it’s sad that government agencies now must stay on top of this.