Scientist’s home raided after she questioned data
MIAMI >> The complicated story of how a Florida data scientist responsible for managing the state’s coronavirus numbers wound up with state police agents brandishing guns in her house this week began seven long months ago, when the scientist, Rebekah D. Jones, was removed from her post at the Florida Department of Health.
Jones had helped build the statistics dashboard showing how the virus was rapidly spreading in a state that had been hesitant to mandate broad restrictions.
Two months in, Jones was sidelined and then fired for insubordination, a conflict that she said came to a head when she refused to manipulate data to show that rural counties were ready to reopen from coronavirus lockdowns. The specter of possible censorship by the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican allied with President Donald Trump, exploded into the frenetic pandemic news cycle, and Jones’ defiance came to symbolize the growing questions over Florida’s handling of the pandemic.
T he arrival of state agents at her home in Tallahassee on Monday to execute a search warrant in a criminal investigation marked a new, dramatic chapter in Jones’ saga, which at its core has always returned to the same basic question: Can Floridians, who are now in the midst of another alarming rise in coronavirus infections and deaths, trust the state’s data?
“This isn’t really unexpected,” she said of this week’s raid. “You take down a governor, he’s going to come for you. Six months ago, I was just a scientist trying to do my job.”
Jones’ firing in May became a national flash point as DeSantis touted Florida’s early success in battling the virus — a victory lap that turned out to be premature, given that infections and deaths later surged over the summer, and are rising again. DeSantis cast Jones as a disgruntled ex- employee who is not an epidemiologist and whose claims about a lack of data transparency were unfounded.
The tiff with the governor turned Jones, 31, into a cause célèbre. By June, she had built her own dashboard to rival the state’s, funded in part by donations from hundreds of thousands of newfound followers on social media.
Jones has spent months publicly urging health department employees to denounce what she says has been the manipulation and obfuscation of virus data to make Florida look better off than it really is. In July, she filed a formal whistleblower complaint. The new dashboard Jones set up surfaces some data about virus cases that had been buried deep in PDF files on the state website and generally shows a higher number of cases than the number reported by the state. It also includes information from other agencies, such as hospitalization rates from the Agency for Health Care Administration that are not on the state dashboard.