Gov. Ron DeSantis questioned the motives of a dismissed state employee who claimed that Florida is trying to mask its coronavirus numbers.
The Republican was asked to respond to Rebekah Jones, a former employee of the Florida Department of Health behind the state’s COVID-19 dashboard, who said she was fired on Monday for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 data to “drum up support for the plan to reopen.”
“Our data is available. Our data is transparent. In fact, Dr. [Deborah] Birx has talked multiple times about how Florida has the absolute best data. So, any insinuation otherwise is just [a] typical, partisan narrative trying to be spun,” DeSantis said on Wednesday.
“Part of the reason is that because you’ve got a lot of people in your profession who waxed poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York. ‘Wait two weeks. Florida’s going to be next. Just like Italy. Wait two weeks.’ Well, hell. We’re eight weeks away from that, and it hasn’t happened,” he said.
DeSantis said that Jones has a background in communications and geography, not data science or epidemiology. He claimed she was fired for being insubordinate. He said the data Jones claimed she was ordered to “manipulate” was data the doctors in the Department of Health did not believe was sound. DeSantis also said that Jones was under criminal charges for cyberstalking and cybersexual harassment.
“I’ve asked the Department of Health to explain to me how someone would be allowed to be charged with that and continue on because this was many months ago,” DeSantis said. “I have a zero tolerance policy for sexual harassment. So, her supervisor dismissed her because of a lot of those reasons, and it was a totally valid way, but she should have been dismissed long before that.”
DeSantis said that Florida has fewer deaths per capita than most states despite being the “No. 1 landing pad” of New Yorkers leaving their state during the pandemic. Florida has had 2,096 coronavirus deaths since the pandemic began. That is approximately 10 deaths per 100,000 residents. The neighboring state of Georgia has 16 deaths per 100,000, while the hardest-hit state, New York, has 147 deaths per 100,000.
As DeSantis said, Birx, the response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, praised Florida’s data collection and reporting.
“We’ve succeeded, and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative. It challenges their assumptions, so they’ve got to try to find a boogeyman,” DeSantis said.
