In a complaint filed last Thursday, attorneys for Rebekah Jones, who designed a dashboard on coronavirus spread in the state, say she was fired for “refusing to publish misleading health data.”
“More people are gonna die,” Rebekah Jones wrote to her mother and sisters on Facebook. It was April 26, a warm spring Sunday in Tallahassee, Fla., and she was just finishing work at the Florida Department of Health, where she was managing the state’s much-praised coronavirus dashboard, which she had also created.The exchange marked the beginning of an exceptionally turbulent period for Jones, who was demonized by Florida Gov.
Story continuesLast weekend, the state recorded more coronavirus infections than the entire continent of Europe. “This,” Jones says, “is everything I was trying to warn people about.” Finally, on March 12, she got a call from Carina Blackmore, the head of the health department’s infectious disease division.
Others noticed too, including Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force. “That’s the kind of knowledge and power we need to put into the hands of American people,” she said of the Florida dashboard on “Face the Nation” on April 19, “so that they can see where the virus is, where the cases are, and make decisions.”
By this time, governors across the Southeast were indicating their impatience with lockdown measures they had imposed. Among them was DeSantis, who until 2017 had been an obscure conservative congressman. Deftly using constant appearances on Fox News, he had gotten Trump’s attention, using the president’s endorsement to become governor of the state in 2018.
“They want this live, like Sunday,” Blackmore told Jones, according to Jones’s recollection. Jones also discovered that she would be receiving coronavirus data only once a day from now on, as opposed to twice. “Leadership wanted to take a more active role in reviewing the data before it was made public,” Jones told Yahoo News. She says officials from the governor’s office were involved in those reviews.
Jones alleges that Courtney Coppola, the departmental chief of staff, told her it would be a “political nightmare” to allow urban counties like Broward and Miami-Dade to reopen while keeping rural counties like Jackson, Franklin and Suwannee closed, even though those rural counties were showing high infection rates.
Jones said she was ordered by Roberson to simply put a “Yes” or a “No” next to a county’s reopening outlook, without providing the kind of data-bolstered rationale she had figured would go into the decision. Roberson left for a meeting, so Jones evaded that order. Returning to work after the previous Sunday’s encounter with Robeson, Jones saw changes to the dashboard being made that she says were preparations to ensure that data would not call DeSantis’s plan into question.
Jones refused. “I’m not taking ‘the whole site’ down,” she wrote in a lengthy email to her direct supervisor, Craig Curry. Referencing the order from Pritchard, she said that she was “not pulling our primary resource for coronavirus data because he wants to stick it to journalists” asking questions. “If it’s in the dashboard, it’s public. Period.”
“I’m thinking about filing a whistleblower complaint about how I’m being treated, the dashboard mess, etc., for gross mismanagement,” she wrote to Curry on May 14. They met in his office the next day; she says he urged her not to file such a complaint. Tipped off by DeSantis, reporters quickly dug up the criminal records, including an unflattering mug shot of Jones, who had been arrested for stalking a Florida State undergraduate with whom she’d had a contentious relationship.
“I did build it,” she says of the tracker. “And I’ve rebuilt it. And I rebuilt it better.” The tracker went live on June 12, to national attention, serving as a kind of rebuke to Florida’s original dashboard, which she says became less useful, and less functional, after she was pulled off the project. Her dashboard appears to include more details, such as statistics about pediatric cases, prison outbreaks and nursing homes.
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