Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Analyst says she was fired for challenging secrecy
DeSantis touts state’s website, calls controversy ‘a non-issue’
The woman who created and ran Florida’s online coronavirus data site has been fired, just days after she said she fought the state Department of Health’s efforts to make the data harder to access for the public, researchers and the media.
Rebekah Jones, whose work to build the user-friendly COVID-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard drew praise and publicity, said her commitment to maximum transparency resulted in her removal from the dashboard project. Then, days later, she lost her job.
“I’m leaving DOH effective next Monday,” she said. “I wasn’t given a choice.”
The website, announced by Gov. Ron DeSantis as the public conduit for Florida’s virus response, reports how many people have the virus, are in hospitals because of it, or have died, among other things. Users can
narrow down results by the county they live in.
Internal emails indicate Jones resisted when her bosses told her to remove the raw data from the website, meaning that users could no longer download it for analysis.
The data had just been downloaded and used by newspapers to report that sickness in Florida emerged as early as January, a fact that led some to second-guess whether DeSantis acted quickly enough to shut down the state.
In a May 4 email from Jones to Department of Health IT Director Craig Curry, she wrote: “I’m not pulling our primary resource for coronavirus data because he wants to stick it to journalists and make them copy and paste from the tables in the pdfs. If it’s in the dashboard, it’s public. Period. There is no way around that.
“We have gained national — no, international — notoriety for being the best state in the country with data transparency. I’m not trashing all of that work and progress because he got asked a few questions by reporters — which I read and were completely fair and legitimate questions that should have been asked.”
It’s not clear who Jones was referring to when she said “he.”
About two hours later, Curry emailed, telling her that “per Dr. [Carina] Blackmore, disable the ability to export the data to files from the dashboard immediately.”
“This is the wrong call,” Jones responded.
The next morning, Blackmore emailed Jones and Curry to “get the web populated in a way that doesn’t expose the raw data to those who don’t need access.”
Jones, who was GIS manager in the Division of Disease Control and Health Protection, publicized her plight Friday in a mass email to users of the data. She notified everyone that she’d been removed from involvement in the dashboard and that it had been assigned to employees she didn’t think would give it around-theclock attention.
“As a word of caution,” she warned in her email, “I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it,” she wrote.
Jones said in her email Friday that she’d fielded a flood of phone calls in the prior eight days “ever since the dashboard went down, the data was hidden, and the functionality essentially crashed.”
Jones regularly communicated technical information to data gatherers who used the site. In one recent email, she noted that she had “worked 60 days straight” but that the dashboard “hit 100 million views last Sunday! That’s neat!”
Reached Friday by phone, Jones seemed surprised that her email was controversial. She said she was tired after working nonstop and said the job really should be done by more than one person.
In an email the next morning to the IT director, with the subject line “uhm … uh oh?,” Jones explained her mass email and told the director that a reporter had called.
“What I meant when I said don’t expect the same level of accessibility is that they are busy and can’t answer every single email they get right away, and that it was ridiculous that I managed to do it in the first place, and that I was tired and needed a break from working two months straight and am finally taking a vacation,” she wrote. “Is this one of those stupid things I shouldn’t have said?”
Gov. DeSantis read from her email at a news conference Tuesday when asked about Jones. He called it “a non-issue.”
“You know, our dashboard has been recognized nationally,” he said. Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, “has praised it multiple times.”
While some of the data has been riddled with inconsistencies, Florida’s coronavirus dashboard has been the state’s main hub for illustrating the pandemic’s impact on Florida. The state so far has provided public access to the data, which is managed by the health department, enabling epidemiologists to study the virus’ impact and analyze the outbreak.
The data feeds also give Floridians a look into the situation in their own back yards — charts give insights about current virus cases, testing rates and deaths in Florida, their county and their ZIP codes. More recently, the health department added tallies of emergency department visits for people who had flu-like or COVID-like symptoms.
The governor and his administration have been criticized for not revealing more information about COVID-19 and those who have it. DeSantis and the state Department of Health initially refused to identify the facilities where hundreds of seniors were infected statewide.
His administration also minimized the number of deaths in the official count by not including those who died in Florida but were not official permanent residents.
Deputy Secretary for Health Dr. Shamarial Roberson, Jones’s ultimate boss, as well as Curry and Blackmore, did not respond to an emailed request for comment Tuesday about her firing.
Helen Aguirre Ferré, communications director for Gov. DeSantis, said Jones “exhibited a repeated course of insubordination,” including making changes to the dashboard without input or approval from her bosses or from the rest of the epidemiological team whose work goes into it.
“The blatant disrespect for the professionals who were working around the clock to provide the important information for the COVID-19 website was harmful to the team,” Ferré said. “Accuracy and transparency are always indispensable, especially during an unprecedented public health emergency such as COVID-19. Having someone disruptive cannot be tolerated during this public pandemic, which led the Department to determine that it was best to terminate her employment.”
The dashboard itself is still being updated and is accurate, Ferré said, disputing the notion that any information had been squelched.
Data that showed early illnesses — before March — was abruptly removed from the site in early May after news coverage. Ferré said the criteria for symptoms and the overall understanding of COVID-19 had changed over time, rendering the data unreliable for analysis. But she said it was restored to the site “because everyone wanted it. It was restored in the abundance of transparency.”
Late Tuesday afternoon, Department of Health spokesman Alberto Moscoso said he would look into Jones’ allegations and respond. He had not responded by Tuesday evening.
Members of Congress, the state Cabinet and state Legislature pounced on the news as potential evidence the state’s virus stats are incomplete or even manipulated. Asking for answers or investigations were U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton; U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach; state Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, D-Miami; and state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried. Fried, a Democrat, asked that Jones’ termination be discussed at a state Cabinet meeting May 28 .
Jones was hired by the state Department of Health in September 2018 as a GIS analyst, according to a Syracuse University feature story about her work creating the dashboard. Jones is a 2012 graduate of the university. She has a dual master’s degree in geography and mass communication from Louisiana State University, the article said. Her resume shows she was a PhD candidate in geography at Florida State University.