Above it? That has nothing to do with anything. It isn’t a moral question, it’s a practical one. Most of the employees at the Florida DOH are not going to support DeSantis or Republicans. If there are political firings they will go to the papers.
You have no way of knowing this. Generously though, it’s no leap to expect that most would if the outcome of not doing as directed by the politician at the top would be to get fired
Except the politician is like six levels of management above Jones and has no idea she exists?
You’re right I have no firsthand knowledge of the Florida DOH, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that its workers are going to skew left. College graduates already have that skew, and people who decide to go into public health as a career even more so.
She always says stuff like “I was asked to fudge numbers to hide the truth from the public” but the only specific allegations she has ever made are stuff 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.
Or this, here’s how she characterises being told to make data temporarily unavailable, from an NPR interview:
And then eventually the night before the first phase of reopening, I was asked to actually delete and then hide data from the public. I said I wanted in writing that directive from my boss telling me to do that before I would do it. I said it was the wrong call, and it was a mistake to have this information that was available to the public and just take it away.
Here’s what actually happened:
According to internal emails reviewed by the Times , Department of Health I.T. Director Craig Curry emailed Rebekah Jones just before 5 p.m. on May 4. He cited Dr. Carina Blackmore, director for the Division of Disease Control and Health Protection.
“Per Dr. Blackmore, disable the ability to export the data to files from the dashboard immediately. We need to ensure that dates (date fields) in all objects match their counterpart on the PDF line list published,” Curry wrote.
The tables in the PDF documents did not include the column of data showing when symptoms were first reported, only the “Case Date” — the date the state recorded and confirmed the case.
“This is the wrong call,” Jones replied minutes later.
A few minutes later, she emailed Curry again. “Case line data is down.”
Then, just after 6 p.m., the I.T. director emailed both Jones and Dr. Blackmore. “Re-enable for now please.”
Jones replied, “10-4.”
For much of the next day, May 5, the column was either missing or empty, with every row listing “None.” Finally, it returned shortly before 8:02 p.m.
That’s not her being asked to “delete data” as she claimed. She was asked to make the data temporarily unavailable, for reasons that aren’t clear to me, but it seems like they were concerned they were putting out inconsistent data.
Her allegation that the Florida COVID plan was being driven by politics independent of the science seems likely, but that’s a very different claim to data being falsified.
By the way, FDLE released bodycam footage of the raid on Jones’s house, which shows them sitting outside for like 20 minutes, repeatedly knocking on the door and yelling “police, search warrant, open the door”, calling Jones’s phone and the calls being rejected, etc. They had guns drawn in her video because they were just about to break the door down when she finally answered it.
2 Likes
Yes because after more than a generation of GOP stranglehold on every level of power in Florida somehow magically 80% of the Florida Department of Health is comprised of stinky liberals I forgot 
Thats a bit like giving the NFL MVP to a punter who got cut in week 4.
6 Likes
Dan, I wish you actually would offer some comment or interpretation. Otherwise, I have no idea what the point of posting this is.
- LOL at Forbes for this?
- An “I told you so” of some sort towards people who are skeptical of Jones?
- Something else?
I don’t even know how to interpret this piece of it. The Florida Covid Action site that Jones promotes on her Twitter appears to show… exactly the same data that the offical Florida Covid site shows?
1 Like
5 Likes
She is either a total fraud and able to fool the msm or she isn’t.
We report. You decide.
We’ve been saying that idiot journalists have been lapping up her bullshit for months. So instead of actually engaging with our criticisms, you ignore them and then link to yet another credulous moron journalist, only this time giving this “brave” “whistleblower” a made up award. GTFO with this passive aggressive nonsense.
2 Likes
Pretty rich coming from the OFS crowd.
the fuck is that
Out of curiosity, how did you decide?
1 Like
He thinks you’re beef with her is about the school data she has been providing because you are a big proponent of Open For School!
1 Like
wow
Forbes is a hollowed-out clickbait site now. Fortune put her in their “40 under 40” as well though. Previously starring Elizabeth Holmes. This isn’t going to blow up like Theranos though because Rebekah doesn’t actually have to produce anything useful in the end.
This idea that she was “responsible for Florida’s highly praised Covid-19 tracking dashboard” is super overblown. The dashboard was built using the mapping tool suite ArcGIS. Rebekah’s job was to glue together the various required modules and load data into it. As I’ve mentioned before, Rebekah is not a data scientist, programmer or epidemiologist. She has a degree in geography. They hired someone with a degree in geography because the job description was “someone who knows how to use this mapping package”. If someone stuck together Wordpress modules you wouldn’t say they “built the blogging software from scratch”.
1 Like