A distinguished critic of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Covid response made “unsubstantiated” and “unfounded” claims that state well being officers had fired her as a result of she refused to current manipulated knowledge on-line, in line with an inspector common’s report obtained by NBC News on Thursday.
The 27-page report from the Florida Department of Health’s Office of Inspector General mentioned it discovered “insufficient evidence” or no proof to help Rebekah Jones’ accusations that she was requested to falsify Covid positivity charges or misrepresent them on the state’s dashboard she helped design. The report additionally “exonerated” officers accused by Jones of wrongdoing as a result of they eliminated an information part from the web site to make sure that personal particular person well being information was not launched publicly.
The impartial report paints a portrait of an worker who didn’t perceive public well being coverage or the importance of epidemiological knowledge, didn’t have high-level entry to essential information and leveled claims that made skilled well being officers “skeptical.”
The report didn’t look at one of Jones’ most explosives claims: that Florida deliberately hid deaths to make the pandemic appear much less lethal.
That conspiracy idea, which Jones alternately promoted and recanted on Twitter earlier than her account was suspended for violating the platform’s phrases of service, has continued on social media for greater than a yr, regardless of the shortage of proof. The Florida Democrat who ran the state’s emergency response on the time bemoaned how Jones unfold “disinformation.” Independent epidemiologists say the declare has no foundation.
Jones, who parlayed her Twitter and media fame into fundraising success, is now a Democratic congressional candidate difficult Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz in Florida’s Panhandle, the place she moved to run towards him.
Jones was broadly hailed as a “whistleblower” after the Department of Health Inspector General final yr decided she met the minimal standards for whistleblower protections beneath state regulation because it carried out this investigation, which has now discovered no substantiation for her claims of wrongful termination in May 2020.
But her lawyer, Rick Johnson, maintains that his consumer remains to be a “whistleblower” and mentioned that she is going to nonetheless press her declare of wrongful termination in court docket. He mentioned the investigative report governs the actions of state employees and doesn’t have an effect on her rights or capacity to sue for wrongful termination in court docket.
“It’s simple: She was fired for refusing to manipulate Covid data,” Johnson mentioned, noting that his consumer had issued a prolonged rebuttal to the division earlier this yr when it launched its preliminary findings, which have been confidential.
Johnson additionally accused the Florida Commission on Human Relations, which has to assessment her wrongful termination declare earlier than she will go to court docket, of slow-walking the case for political causes as DeSantis runs for a second time period this November.
“They’re not going to do anything until after the election,” Johnson mentioned.
A spokeswoman for DeSantis, Taryn Fenske, mentioned the declare was “the latest absurd allegation from a discredited conspiracy theorist.”
Another DeSantis spokeswoman, Christina Pushaw, has a long-running feud with Jones after writing a 2021 article for the conservative Human Events publication titled “The ‘Florida Covid-19 Whistleblower’ Saga Is a Big Lie.” DeSantis employed Pushaw shortly after the article ran.
In response, Jones filed a restraining order towards Pushaw after which falsely advised Pushaw violated it.
Jones faces a felony cost for allegedly accessing and downloading confidential well being division knowledge following her termination for insubordination. She additionally has an unrelated misdemeanor stalking cost tied to an affair she had with a former pupil, which led to her dismissal as a Florida State University instructor.
As Jones gained fame and notoriety within the news media in 2020, DeSantis bristled at her accusations and famous her termination from FSU.
“I’ve asked the Department of Health to explain to me how someone would be allowed to be charged with that and continue on,” DeSantis advised reporters. “I have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment.”
DeSantis additionally criticized reporters for calling Jones “a data scientist” as a result of she operated as a web site and dashboard designer for the state. Jones isn’t an epidemiologist.
Under DeSantis, nonetheless, the state routinely slow-walked public information requests and hid some knowledge within the early months of the pandemic. DeSantis was additionally criticized for reopening the state at the same time as epidemiologists urged a slower method.
Florida grew to become one of the primary states to broadly reopen in 2020, making DeSantis a lightning rod for controversy that catapulted him onto the nationwide stage — together with Jones’ allegations, which he mentioned have been echoed by critics as a result of “they’ve got to try to find a boogeyman. Maybe it’s that there are black helicopters circling the Department of Health. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.”
After Florida reopened in the summertime of 2020, circumstances and deaths jumped. But by the early winter of 2021, Florida’s loss of life charge was within the center of the pack, beneath states like New York however greater than California’s. Since the introduction of vaccines, Florida has had a better loss of life charge than many different states, which officers attribute to its massive aged inhabitants and which critics blame on widespread anti-vaccine attitudes, particularly amongst conservatives.
The inspector common’s report, which interviewed 17 present and former well being division officers, was triggered by Jones when she filed her wrongful termination grievance in July 2020 with the Florida Commission on Human Relations and alleged wrongdoing by Department of Health officers. The fee in January 2021 referred the allegations of official misconduct to the state’s chief inspector common, who then referred it to the division’s inspector common, which should examine such allegations to find out their credibility.
The inspector common examined 4 separate allegations made by Jones, three regarding Covid positivity charges and one regarding downloadable knowledge units that listed particular person Covid circumstances.
Beyond the 4 particular allegations of official wrongdoing, the report mentioned that different complaints she made regarding Florida’s Covid response “conflict with the totality of the information obtained during the OIG investigation.”
The principal targets of Jones’ accusations — Dr. Shamarial Roberson, Dr. Carina Blackmore and Courtney Coppola — all denied the accusations that Jones or workers have been directed to falsify Covid positivity charges on-line to justify reopening the state. Colleagues of Jones indicated that she didn’t know what she was speaking about, and so they have been “skeptical” of her claims, the report mentioned.
“Complainant was not an epidemiologist and did not have system access to underlying COVID-19 data in Merlin and ESSENCE,” the report famous, referring to the state’s restricted well being knowledge techniques.
Officials mentioned it will make no sense to falsify knowledge on-line anyway as a result of, ethics apart, it will have been immediately found because the world watched Florida.
“If the complainant or other [Department of Health] staff were to have falsified COVID-19 data on the dashboard, the dashboard would then not have matched data in the corresponding final daily report,” the report famous. “Such a discrepancy would have been detectable by [Bureau of Epidemiology] staff conducting data quality assurance, as well as other parties, both within and outside the DOH, including but not limited to [County Health Departments], local governments, researchers, the press/media, and the general public.”
In two of these circumstances, investigators mentioned there was inadequate proof to help her claims and decided her allegations have been “unsubstantiated.”
The report additionally discovered that Jones made an “unfounded” declare that the state modified its Covid positivity calculation with nefarious intent. But the specialists interviewed indicated she didn’t perceive the way it was formulated, and Jones received her information mistaken, the report mentioned.
“DOH never calculated the rates of positivity in the manner alleged by the complainant,” the report mentioned. “Based upon an analysis of the available evidence, the alleged conduct, as described by the complainant, did not occur.”
It wasn’t the one time that Jones misrepresented knowledge. Early on within the pandemic, she launched a Twitter assault on former University of Florida epidemiologist Natalie Dean for accurately mentioning that Jones didn’t perceive the distinction between antigen and antibody assessments.
Jones additionally savaged University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi on Twitter — and briefly drove him off the platform as a result of of the assaults from her followers — when he, like Dean, discounted Jones claims about Florida hiding Covid loss of life knowledge.
“The widespread notion that the Florida Department of Health is ‘cooking the books’ on COVID data is unsupported and unhelpful,” Dean wrote in a March 2021 tweet. “If we aim to have a real conversation about Florida, folks need to move past this.”