N. Korea also claims low COVID numbers
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politi...s-florida-covid-19-data-whistleblower-arrest/
But now, a top state official was telling her to change the test positivity rate of certain counties to align with the state’s maximum threshold for reopening, according to Jones. (Requests for comment from Shamarial Roberson, Florida’s deputy secretary for health, went unanswered, but
she previously told the Tampa Bay Times, “It is patently false to say that the Department of Health has manipulated any data.”) “There were counties that had, like, 18 or 20 percent positivity,” Jones recalls. “And she was like, ‘Well, just change it to 10.’”
Up until that moment, Jones had had plenty of concerns with how Florida was handling the pandemic, but she considered them outside of her purview—matters of policy, not data (for example, the decision to exempt rural counties from more stringent reopening criteria).This was the first time she’d been asked to outright lie. At first, she says, she laughed out loud: “I thought it was a joke.”
But the official didn’t back down, she says. “She just stared, dead-eyed,” recalls Jones. “She said, ‘I once had a data person who told me,
You tell me what you want the numbers to show and I’ll make it happen.’” After that, says Jones, “I made it very clear I was not comfortable.”
On May 18, Jones was
fired from her job. An official statement from the Florida DOH said it was for “insubordination” and that Jones had modified the dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors. But she tells a different story: “I was fired for refusing to manipulate data to drum up support for the governor’s plan to reopen.” The Friday before, she’d asked her boss how to submit an anonymous whistleblower complaint raising alarm about the state’s lies, she says. Her termination took place Monday morning before she got the chance.
Instead, she fought back privately, letting an email list of people who received her updates
know that she was no longer maintaining the state’s dashboard and suggesting they be “diligent” in how they used the data from now on, according to Jones. When state lawmakers called for an investigation into her firing, she refused media requests, preferring to stay out of the public eye.
It was DeSantis who brought the fight to her doorstep—figuratively, then literally. Thus began a long, strange saga that would end with her sweating and shivering in the mental isolation room of a Tallahassee jail, delirious with COVID-19, the very disease she’d become famous for trying to inform the public about.
It all started during a May press conference, when DeSantis
was asked about Jones being removed from the Florida DOH. He called her termination a “
nonissue.” Then, on May 20, DeSantis went further, denying that Jones had built the prized dashboard in the first place during an
appearance with former Vice President Pence. He called her credentials into question, suggesting she wasn’t really a scientist.
As Jones
recently put it on Twitter, he “decided to launch me into the news cycle, defame me, and attempt to strip all of my hard work and experience from me.” (When reached for comment, the governor’s office referred
Cosmo to
a tweet by Florida’s Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez calling Jones “a failed state employee” and a link to
an article about Jones on a self-described “MAGAzine” that also published stories about election conspiracy theories.)
Finally, and most explosively, he alleged she was under “active criminal charges in the state of Florida” for something entirely unrelated to data or the pandemic—for “cyberstalking and cyber sexual harassment.” (Partly accurate, but we’ll get to that.)
This time, Jones did not fight back privately. On May 22, she
appeared on Chris Cuomo’s show on CNN from her bedroom, incisively and confidently laying out how she’d been asked to manipulate data for the state. It was a devastating (for DeSantis, at least) performance. After defending herself, “I naively believed I could just go back to being a private person,” she says.
“They’re not listening to the scientists,” Jones told
The Guardian in August. “They’re just going to let everybody fend for themselves.” On Twitter, she also began pointing out issues she saw with Florida’s data since she had no longer been managing it,
including what she claims were 76 mysteriously deleted deaths in August (one was a 9-year-old boy who died in June 2020).
The official reason for the raid was that someone had “illegally hacked into [the Florida DOH’s] emergency alert messaging system,”
said a state law enforcement officer. But Jones wasn’t having it. “This was DeSantis,” she tweeted. “He sent the gestapo.”
She sued the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) for various reasons, including for violating her right to free speech and due process. (FDLE denied the lawsuit allegations and called its protocols that day “normal” in a
statement, while DeSantis
insisted it wasn’t a raid—it was a “valid process” conducted with “integrity.”) Jones denied—and still denies—that she was behind the mystery hacker’s unauthorized message, sent to nearly
1,800 government agency employees in November. “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead,” the
message read. “You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.”
Jones insists that if
she’d sent the message, the data would have at least been right (the number of deaths was rounded down by 460). And the technology site
Ars Technica reported that the health department’s emergency alert system—the one Jones is accused of hacking—used a password and username that had been widely shared on Reddit channels and was even publicly available on the Florida DOH site.
The state claims it
traced the message to Jones’s IP address. Jones claims they knew her IP address from when she worked from home. As usual, she is refusing to back down. “This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly,” she wrote on Twitter after the raid. “If DeSantis thought pointing a gun at my face was a good way to get me to shut up, he’s about to learn just how wrong he was.”
The raid splashed her all over the news again. “The police released my home address and my cell phone number,” she says, “and the school my son went to. I got death threats to my home mailing address. I had a couple asshole reporters who would not leave my house no matter how much I politely asked them to.” She hired a bodyguard. There were rape threats, threats against her children. None of it made her want to back down, but at the same time, she admits, “I was actually terrified."
In January, she was charged with a felony for allegedly accessing the state emergency message system. If convicted, she could face five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. By then, she had moved her family to the D.C. area, in hopes of putting this chapter behind them all and starting over. She had to return to Florida to turn herself in or else risk extradition.
She drove the nearly 1,000 mile, two-day journey alone, determined to keep her kids from reexperiencing the trauma of policemen pounding down their door. It was days before Joe Biden’s inauguration. “Insurrectionists [are] planning attacks across the country this week and Florida is jailing scientists for the crimes of knowing and speaking,” she tweeted. “Censored by the state of Florida until further notice.”
