I just looked into Rebekah Jones some more. Despite her regular rants about “economists”, she herself is not a data scientist, an epidemiologist or a health professional of any kind. Her degree is in geography and at university she did research relating to tropical storms.
State records show that she was reprimanded several times for violating Health Department policy on public statements, including releasing information she was not authorised to release, before finally being fired.
miami.cbslocal.com – 24 May 20
State records show that Rebekah Jones, the woman who helped curate Florida’s COVID-19 dashboard, had been reprimanded several times and ultimately fired for violating Health Department policy by making public remarks about the information.
She accused the Health Department of directing her to alter case numbers before putting them up on the website, but when she finally gave details it was shit like this:
She has, however, suggested Health Department managers wanted her to manipulate information to paint a rosier picture and that she pushed back. In an interview late Friday on CNN she finally cited some detail, after several days of vague statements.
She said the state made changes in April to support its initial reopening May 4, for example by altering the way it reports the positivity rate of testing in a way she disagreed with. Instead of showing the rate of all positive tests, it began showing the rate of new positive tests — filtering out people who previously tested positive.
This was not a behind-the-scenes change. DeSantis announced it at an April 24 news conference, arguing it was the better figure for assessing trends in testing and control of the outbreak.
This is not the first time Rebekah has encountered workplace discipline, she was fired from Florida State from her teaching gig while doing her Ph. D. for having an affair with an undergraduate student.
news.wjct.org
A misdemeanor criminal stalking case against the self-described whistleblower at the center of a politically charged dispute over Florida’s COVID-19
Jones was later charged with misdemeanour stalking for, among other things, posting a revenge porn document online:
Rebekah Jones, 30, was charged in July 2019 with stalking a former boyfriend – long before the pandemic that catapulted her into headlines and television interviews. Police said she published a 68-page document online discussing private details of her relationship with her former boyfriend, including explicit texts and nude photographs , and shared the link with him.
The two had sex in a classroom in 2017 when Jones was his married professor at Florida State University, the man told police. She was fired from the university after threatening to give a failing grade to his roommate as revenge, he said. Jones said the two had a six-month affair until October 2017, and the man is the father of her daughter born in July 2018.
According to police, Jones wrote in emails to the man, “You’re going to be famous. We’re going to destroy each other. This is never going to end.”
This young man took out a restraining order against her and she was charged with felony robbery, trespass and contempt of court for violating that restraining order by coming back on campus, but those charges were dropped, I don’t know why. She did file a complaint of her own though:
In addition to the criminal charges, Jones sued her ex-boyfriend in June 2019 in civil court, accusing him of intentionally inflicting emotional distress, sexual battery, domestic violence, emotional abuse and defamation. She abandoned the lawsuit weeks later.
Jones said the 68 pages she was accused of publishing online were excerpts from a longer, 342-page collection of essays she wrote about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend. Those documents were filed in circuit court as part of her civil lawsuit.
You’re reading that correctly, she wrote a 342-page manifesto about this relationship (complete with explicit details about their sex life, apparently this dude had a big dick and it hurt the first time) and submitted it in a lawsuit. By the way, she was married to someone else while all this was going on.
This is an unstable fabulist who was fired legitimately for insubordination.
Dan’s tweet above alleges that the rate of COVID in high schools in Florida in the last two weeks is roughly three times the statewide case rate. This is an extraordinary claim. I challenge anyone to visit Jones’s data site and explain to me how this number is arrived at. The site is a mess. It relies partly on “public reports” which it is claimed are “verified”, but there are far too many reports for one person to verify, and it’s not explained how the site prevents duplication of reports, either multiple public reports of the same incident or duplication of official figures with public reports. In a word, the site is totally incomprehensible and any figures which Jones reports should be regarded as fabricated.
This garbage doesn’t belong ITT, Jones should be a proscribed source. I’d tempban @DanSpartan while I was at it because he knew full well that the data was not reliable.