MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell is a nutty conspiracy theorist.
He is spreading disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic that is contrary to what the experts say. Yet MSNBC has not yet had its YouTube account canceled — strange, considering the video-sharing service is supposed to be monitoring for coronavirus-related misinformation.
O’Donnell this week hosted Rebekah Jones, who alleges she lost her job at the Florida Health Department because she refused to manipulate coronavirus infection and fatality data.
Jones, whom the MSNBC host repeatedly calls a “scientist,” speaks as if state officials are engaged in a broad, shadowy effort to bury the real COVID-19 numbers so that the governor’s office can move forward with its plans to reopen. Jones has even launched her own coronavirus dashboard, which claims to show that the reality of the virus in the Sunshine State is much deadlier than the official figures suggest.
But there’s a lot less to this story than meets the eye, and you won’t be able to tell that by watching Jones’s interview on MSNBC:
The really important thing here, the thing that breaks this story, is that Jones’s numbers do not even diverge very much from the state’s official tallies. We are talking about a difference of 90 deaths out of something close to 3,000 total based on counting nonresidents who died in Florida. Her number of cases differs by a bit more than that, but there’s nothing sinister afoot. She’s adding two numbers together — the state’s number of those who have tested positive plus the number of people who have tested positive for antibodies. It’s not a rigorous approach, and in general, other states aren’t doing that.
Yet watching O’Donnell’s interview, you would get the impression that Florida officials are hiding bodies all over the state, or propping them up a la Weekend at Bernie’s to make it seem like the coronavirus situation there is significantly better than it actually is.
If you’re wondering why this story has gotten attention, Jones casually mentioned to the Washington Post that she is “open to talking with the health department about selling her dashboard to the state.” It may also be worth mentioning that there is a GoFundMe page for her dashboard and that it has already raised more than $166,000. It seems like someone is under the misapprehension that there’s some kind of massive discrepancy in the data that needs to be exposed. Nope, not really.
Jones has offered no proof that she was ordered to falsify COVID-19 data. In fact, she uses the state data on her new dashboard — it’s just that she also adds more coronavirus cases and a few more deaths by counting them slightly differently.
Moreover, Jones is not an epidemiologist or any other sort of health expert, such that her title as a “scientist” would seem to justify — at least by any ordinary use of the word. She has a dual bachelor’s degree in geography and journalism as well as a master’s degree in geography.
The Washington Post reports on the reasons why Jones turned up slightly different numbers:
“The case count on Jones’s dashboard is also higher because it includes people who have tested positive for antibodies, or proteins that indicate that the virus has been in someone’s body. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that antibody tests are not foolproof and that a higher percentage of positive results may be incorrect in areas where few people have had the virus.”
A spokesman for the Florida Health Department said further in a statement to the Washington Post that the dates Jones uses to count and track coronavirus numbers are not sound. But remember, as you read this explanation, that the numbers still just aren’t very different from one another.
“Epidemiologists collect information that informs the Department of Health of an individual’s symptoms, contacts, and location of where they may have acquired COVID-19,” said Alberto Moscoso. “The first date of entry in answer to any question, COVID-related or not, is designated the event date.”
He also said Jones’s dashboard “aggregates disparate sets of data without considering many of the important guidelines utilized by epidemiologists.”
O’Donnell’s entire segment is intended to whip up hysteria over the virus by making it seem like there is a shadowy conspiracy to hide vast numbers of cases. If O’Donnell had given any context at all, especially the very small discrepancy in the number of deaths based on differences in counting, the segment would have been too boring for air.
What is crazy is that MSNBC’s video of the interview is available to view on YouTube, which is supposed to be controlling for misinformation about the virus. Go figure.
