Department of Health official retires after career marked by public health crises

Although her name and face are not widely known to the general public, reporters covering everything from dengue fever to President Barack Obama’s birth certificate had Janice Okubo on speed dial as the point person for the state Department of Health.

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic was dragging on toward its third year and the Red Hill water contamination crisis was coming to light, Okubo, 59, retired in December after 21 years as public information officer for DOH.

“I think she had one of the toughest jobs in the state of Hawaii,” said Gary Gill, former deputy health director for the environment. “Every day at the Department of Health, there’s a new issue or a crisis, and she, for the most part, single-handed it for decades. In my experience, she was always very helpful and professional and thoughtful, and one of those people I enjoyed working with.”

Okubo joined the Health Department in 2000 and would serve under seven directors. After so many years dealing with the media pressure cooker, she said she’s still learning to relax in retirement.

“I still jump when I hear a phone call or a text,” Okubo said.

Kristen Consillio, former Honolulu Star-Advertiser health reporter, who now works for KITV, said that during the coronavirus pandemic, Okubo was on the job 24/7 to help reporters convey the seriousness of the public health threat.

“You could tell she was doing this job with all her heart,” Consillio said. “There’s not one time when I called, even on a Saturday, that she didn’t pick up. I said, ‘Don’t you have a day off?’ She said, ‘No, this is a pandemic.’”

Before COVID-19 the DOH Communications Office consisted of Okubo and another staffer, plus a part-timer from another division. With pandemic-related federal funding, the office is now staffed with seven.

As the coronavirus began to spread in Hawaii in 2020, Okubo found herself in the difficult position of not only trying to meet media demands for information on the fast-moving developments, but also representing the Health Department as two of its top leaders — state Epidemiologist Sarah Park and then-Director Bruce Anderson — came under intense fire for their handling of the initial outbreak and their resistance to mass testing and getting outside help for contact tracing.

Park was placed on paid leave Sept. 4, 2020, four days after Anderson announced he would retire. Park left the department Dec. 31, 2020.

Okubo politely sidestepped questions about former DOH officials, but Consillio said it must have been disheartening for her to speak for the department during the controversy.

“Everything was going so fast. It was hard to get the most accurate information out when it was changing minute by minute, and that’s not an easy job,” Consillio said. “She did this while the DOH was getting such a bad rap and getting so much criticism from the public.”

Another challenge throughout Okubo’s tenure was the wide-ranging scope of the Health Department’s responsibilities, which encompass everything from air and water quality, mental health and chronic disease to emergency preparedness and food-related illness, to name just a few.

Okubo would sometimes assemble a group of experts from within the department to answer the questions she fielded from the media on complex topics. They included chemists, microbiologists and epidemiologists as well as physicians and district health officers spread across the islands.

“Public health … impacts everyone every day, and people don’t realize it but so much work goes on behind the scenes, and it requires a lot of expertise and a lot of experience,” she said.

Okubo’s Bachelor of Fine Arts degree helped her land a job as an illustrator to create ads for the Army’s Morale Welfare and Recreation activities, which evolved into a marketing office. That led to her position in 1990 as information specialist at the Hawaii Housing Finance and Development Corp., under the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

In 2000, Anderson hired her at DOH. Shortly after, Okubo was thrust into Hawaii’s first dengue outbreak in decades, with two more to follow.

Then came the anthrax scare. Okubo fielded numerous phone calls and emails while DOH’s laboratory tested hundreds of packages for the potentially lethal substance as the state prepared a bio-terrorism plan.

“It was a really great learning experience” on how to respond to the various possible threats, she said.

Another memorable crisis occurred in 2001, when some children found mercury in an abandoned warehouse in Halawa, leading to contamination and evacuations at the Puuwai Momi housing complex and Makalapa Manor homes; several dozen people were sent to the hospital for possible exposure.

“We had to call in the EPA,” Okubo recalled. “We did mercury testing. We had to bring in these industrial dryers to clean items. … We had to rip out carpets, remove furniture, confiscate clothing. It was unbelievable. From my end, it was trying to find the best experts to send out a clear message and get it out as broadly as possible.”

Okubo’s two-decade-plus stint at DOH was marked by many other high-profile events, perhaps none more so than the furor that erupted during the 2008 presidential campaign from claims by so-called birthers that the Hawaii-born Obama was not born in the United States.

The Health Department was inundated with inquiries from members of the public and local and national news media, and Okubo said officials held daily meetings with lawyers on how to respond.

DOH set up an FAQ page on Obama’s birth certificate on its website, and then­-Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino issued statements in 2008 and 2009 verifying she had seen the original document and that he was indeed born in Hawaii and is a natural­-born U.S. citizen.

There were many other controversies, disease outbreaks and public health scares over the years.

Gill recalled one quality that might help explain Okubo’s longevity in the job: When he was leaving DOH, she baked molasses cookies decorated with a goldfish to commemorate the 2013 Matson molasses spill in Honolulu Harbor.

“She maintained good humor throughout,” Gill said.

Ironically, Okubo said that upon leaving the Health Department in early December, she made a concerted effort to get healthier — resuming daily gym workouts, eating healthful meals and getting some much-needed stress relief.

“I just decided I need to take care of my own health, so it was time for me to focus on those personal things, because this pandemic has been going on for so long,” she said.