As more and more government agencies and businesses impose vaccine mandates in an effort to reduce soaring Covid-19 infection and hospitalization rates, anti-vaccine activists are becoming more strident and more astounding in their opposition.

And now on social media, the hard-core vaccine resistant are promising new protests against Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s announcement Monday that starting Sept. 13, proof of vaccination or a recent Covid test will be required to enter certain establishments on Oahu.

Hawaii’s most vocal vaccine protesters are using the Hawaiian words for love and social responsibility — aloha and pono — in their continuing anti-mask, anti-vaccination, anti-public health campaigns that are anything but safety minded or responsible.

Consider: The Knights of Aloha, Aloha Freedom Coalition and the Pono Coalition for Informed Consent.

Their actions are clearly not pono and clearly not motivated by the sentiment of far-reaching love for community embodied in the Hawaiian word aloha.

About 100 unmasked Aloha Freedom Coalition protesters marched through Waikiki Saturday night, tightly bunched together, unmasked and unrepentant.

The group’s mission statement posted on Instagram is to “maintain freedoms, preserve aloha and protect ohana.”

What kind of aloha is it, when the group espouses masks are useless to prevent Covid-19 when masks clearly work?

How is it protecting ohana when the Aloha Freedom Coalition dismisses mandates to encourage vaccination as a communist plot, like a few of the sign wavers did on Saturday?

It’s not aloha to try to undermine the fact that Covid-19 vaccinations, although not a complete barrier to infection, are the best means available to prevent severe illness, hospitalization and death from the coronavirus.

And how can it be pono for the Pono Coalition for Informed Consent to spread inaccurate medical information while it promotes unapproved drugs to treat Covid, including the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin and the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine?

State Health Director Libby Char, who usually stays out of the fray when it comes to quack medical claims, quickly called out Pono’s false statements as un-pono.

“The Pono Coalition for Informed Consent is spreading misinformation about these lifesaving vaccines. This is dangerous. The Coalition proliferates misinformation about the severity of the disease and the safety of the vaccines,” Char said in an emailed statement.

“I want to be clear — hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin should not be used to treat COVID-19. Taking unprescribed large doses of ivermectin or doses intended for animals can cause serious harm,” she said.

State Sen. Roz Baker, in a Senate floor speech on Thursday, called for the state’s top medical adviser for Maui County and Pono Coalition co-founder Dr. Lorrin Pang to be fired after he was quoted as telling the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that he supports the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to treat Covid-19.

Pang has insisted that he is not against the vaccine and is vaccinated himself, but he also supports doctors who prescribe the controversial drugs for Covid even though the Food and Drug Administration has not approved them for that use.

Lt. Gov. Josh Green, a frequent target of vaccine opponents, said in an email: “I’m concerned that the spread of misinformation discourages our community from getting potentially life-saving treatments, like the COVID-19 vaccines.”

For sure, the spread of misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines is egregious, but even more disturbing is the way some vaccine mandate protesters compare themselves to victims of the Holocaust.

It is easy to criticize this kind of rhetoric but more difficult to understand why such inaccurate and hurtful narratives continue to be advanced.

You have to wonder which political faction got together to say, “We will get a lot of support if we compare the mandates unvaccinated people in the U.S now face to the discrimination and death the Jews faced in Nazi Germany; let’s roll with it.”

John Bennett, the chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party, posted a video on the party’s Facebook page that equated vaccination mandates to the Third Reich forcing Jews to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany. Bennett refused to back off his statements after other Oklahoma Republicans slammed him.

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky tweeted that Covid-19 restrictions in the U.S. were like the horrors suffered by Jews in concentration camps during the Holocaust. His tweet featured the image of a tattooed hand.

Georgia Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon adherent, was one of the first to try to appropriate the pain of the Holocaust and grossly and falsely analogize it to the supposed discrimination of having to show proof of a Covid-19 vaccination.

University of Iowa associate professor Sarah Bond carefully outlined what’s wrong with this appropriation.

“In appropriating deep symbols of Jewish pain, these bad actors undermine not only the gravity, nuance and suffering of the Holocaust, but also of centuries of historical anti-Semitism, in service to their own need to be public martyrs,” she said.

“They cast about for some touchstone for their perceived injustice, landing on the Holocaust as the ultimate exemplar of persecution in the modern era. In so doing, Holocaust-invokers add themselves to a long and sad history of borrowing the pain of others to lend credence to their own.”

Most of Hawaii’s mask and vaccination resistant have not been as fixated with Holocaust references as those on the mainland, although occasionally they grumble on social media that they “feel like they are living under Hitler.”

Such casual offhand comments make it clear they could never understand what it would have been like to live under Hitler and that they have no idea how to show aloha and be pono during the most critical medical emergency of this century.