Last May, a Florida Department of Health employee named Rebekah Jones accused Governor Ron DeSantis (R) of firing her for refusing to minimize the number of COVID-19 deaths, so he could reopen the state. In the last week, Charles C.W. Cooke has posted a definitive refutation of her claims at National Review, but one item has been missing from the story: the role the legacy media played in spreading Jones’ false claims.
Cooke shows how Jones claimed she had constructed Florida’s COVID-19 “dashboard” on her own, despite the fact that she merely entered other people’s data into the database. In addition, he shows that while she claimed she was ordered to change the original data, she had no access to that data to begin with. After changing her initial story in the first few days, Jones accused the well-respected Deputy Secretary of Health Dr. Shamarial Roberson, of asking her to change data and called Roberson a “liar, fraud, murderer.” Jones has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through multiple GoFundMe pages to set up an alternate COVID-19 website which, Cooke argues, overestimates the number of coronavirus-related deaths because Jones lacks adequate statistical knowledge and nuance. Police, whom Jones called “Gestapo,” raided Jones’ home in December after she reportedly stole the personal information of 19,000 state employees, and she turned herself in to authorities in January on a felony hacking charge.
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