By Elizabeth Royappa
Since last Thursday, Florida papers have been reporting on the controversy surrounding fired Department of Health data scientist Rebekah Jones and the recently released Inspector General report addressing her COVID-19 whistleblowing claims. One thing missing from all of these articles, though, has been a response from Jones herself. We spoke with her this morning.
Jones told Inweekly she wasn’t surprised by the IG findings, saying the state leaked the report to the media before sending it to her. She asserted that the investigators never spoke with her about the allegations in her complaint.
“For all the hoopla about it, it’s really just the state’s own internal review and position statement,†Jones said. “This isn’t my whistleblower complaint. We never filed my whistleblower complaint with the Department of Health because, frankly, we never expected to get a fair shake.â€
She added, “They did their own separate, internal process that I wasn’t interviewed for. I think it was something like 12 of the other witnesses that were never contacted.â€
Note: After the interview, Inweekly reviewed the IG report and found that the agency had asked Jones’ attorney to schedule an intake interview but was told Jones would not participate in an IG interview. However, she did respond in writing to written intake questionnaires.
When asked to clarify her statement about the interview, Jones texted, “Yes, we filled out a questionnaire, but this wasn’t our investigation. They weren’t interviewing the entire witness list so there was no advantage to participating in something that we didn’t expect to be done fairly.”
Jones was fired in May 2020 after publicly voicing concerns about the misrepresentation of COVID-19 data on the Florida dashboard website, a project she managed. In July 2020, she filed a retaliatory termination complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations that was passed to the governor’s office and the Office of Inspector General for a response six months later.
The IG report addressing Jones’ complaint identified four allegations. Two of these described directives from her supervisors to Jones and other staff pressuring them to falsify COVID-19 positivity rates. The IG report labeled both “unsubstantiated,†saying there was “insufficient evidence to clearly prove or disprove the alleged conduct.â€
“It actually says that they could not prove or disprove it, so they just throw their arms up and say, ‘You know what? We don’t know,’†Jones said. “When you’re suing somebody, that’s not all that terrible of an answer. It’s not the same thing as, ‘No, we definitely didn’t do it, and we have all this proof that we didn’t do it.’ It’s we don’t know. That’s actually, from a legal standpoint, a good thing.â€
Since July 2020, Jones and her attorney have been waiting for the Florida Commission on Human Relations, not FDOH, to issue its findings on her complaint. She expects to file a lawsuit once this administrative process is completed.
The third claim focused on her supervisors allegedly directing her to misrepresent the calculation of new case positivity on the FDOH COVID-19 dashboard. The IG report labeled the claim “unfounded†and plainly stated that the conduct “did not occur.â€
“That was one of the wildest things because it was one of the things that was most heavily covered and substantiated in the press,†said Jones. “The Sun-Sentinel actually developed this really brilliant infographic on how the way that the state calculated positivity in Florida was so different from everywhere else. We’re actually the only state in the country that used this way of calculating it.â€
The Sun-Sentinel reported several times during the height of the pandemic that experts felt Florida reported its positivity rates to make the state’s situation look significantly better than it was. The newspaper reported that a person who tested positive was counted only once, but negative tests would be counted repeatedly if the same person got more than one test.
The IG report did find that FDOH added a new calculation, “new case positivity,†on April 30, 2020. Still, investigators stated it didn’t misrepresent or mislead the public regarding how positivity rates were calculated.
Finally, the report addressed Jones’ fourth allegation that upper-level FDOH employees ordered a restriction on public access to the data behind the COVID-19 dashboard. The IG report found it did occur but was not deemed “a violation of any governing directive,†so the employees involved were officially exonerated.
“To me, the most awful part was that on the fourth charge for hiding, removing and deleting data, they said, ‘Yeah, it happened,’†Jones said. “It happened exactly as I said it happened, but they don’t think it’s against the rules. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re really looking forward to our day in court with them because one of the things that we’re going to push for in this lawsuit is sweeping policy changes that would make it against the rules to hide and delete data during a public health crisis.â€
She added, “I think a lot of people are finding that that’s just shocking that you can order scientists to hide and delete data during a pandemic for the specific purpose of not letting people see how bad it is and that there’s
This afternoon, Jones shared that she and her attorney received a draft of the IG report in March and were given 10 days to submit corrections.
“So we submitted a 74-page correction with hundreds of thousands of lines of data, expert opinions, references, etc.,” Jones texted Inweekly. “The investigator indicated he would be changing the determination based on our corrections. Then, a few weeks ago, we got an email saying the investigator was no longer at DOH and a new person would be continuing the investigation.”
We’ve requested the 74-page correction. Stay tuned.