This piece is OK but they are still way too gun-shy on explicitly pointing out when Rebekah is bullshitting them and their audience. For example:
“When I think of ‘warning shot’ I think it means ‘don’t trust the data in any capacity’ but it wasn’t that,” Jones explained. She said she had concerns about some data definitions that limited the scope of what was being measured and didn’t condone deleting or hiding published data. But mostly, she said, “They made policy decisions that were completely departed from all of the data.”
But “they made policy decisions that departed from that data” is not what Rebekah has been alleging for months, there’s a tweet from her like two posts up where she says Roberson told her to “delete cases and deaths”, she has been nonstop alleging that she was told to “delete data” and “fudge numbers”. “Don’t trust the data in any capacity” is a completely fair summary of Rebekah’s output for the last year, it’s ludicrous for her to now try to pretend that’s a media misread of what she was saying.
The most coherent accusation of shady behaviour is when Rebekah alleges that they created a “readiness map” scoring counties based on White House guidelines and that the idea was scrapped after it showed that few counties were ready to open. Or at least I think that’s what happened, because I don’t understand what this bolded sentence means:
The health metrics tab eventually launched on the dashboard later that week bore little resemblance to the initial idea put forth by Blackmore. Instead of scoring readiness, the page simply provided charts made with limited weekly surveillance data provided to Jones that the fine print attributed to the White House criteria.
Huh? But anyway, let’s assume Rebekah’s allegations here are accurate. The White House reopening guidelines were just that, guidelines. Plenty of states were openly disregarding them:
For example, in Missouri, gyms, restaurants, bars, retail stores, hairdressers and theatres reopened with limited capacity on 4 May. This was despite the state’s daily coronavirus cases and share of positive tests rising over the previous two weeks.
Kansas also reopened restaurants and retail stores on 4 May without seeing a two-week fall in either daily cases or in the proportion of positive tests.
The DeSantis administration evidently would have liked, for political reasons, to spin their data in a way that showed them in lockstep with the Trump Administration guidelines in an election year. (Again, I’m assuming Rebekah’s allegations here are correct). When they found they couldn’t do that, they didn’t “fudge numbers” or “delete data”, they decided to de-emphasise the federal guidelines. They’re not trying to evade a legal requirement there, it’s a question of political spin.
Consider the position Roberson was in here. She alludes to this a little in her sworn statement:
In response to Jones’ allegations in the complaint that misleading data, or perhaps no data at all, were being used to justify the governor’s desired policy, Roberson responded in a sworn statement: “The Florida Department of Health does not have the authority to reopen or close counties,” and reiterated her position that it wasn’t the health department’s job to make recommendations to the governor on reopening either.
It’s hardly the place of a state health department to insist on putting up infographics about conflict between state and federal policy against the wishes of the administration. DeSantis would justifiably consider that to be political campaigning against his administration from within the civil service. The civil service exist to implement the policy of the democratically elected government.
Obviously it’s fair to argue that DeSantis here was making “policy decisions that were completely departed from all of the data”, as Rebekah put it earlier. I agree with that. I doubt anyone in the thread disagrees with that. It’s just that no matter how hard you squint, that just isn’t what Rebekah has been alleging for the past year.
