Firing causes Fla data stir

The governor of Florida has defended the firing of a scientist who said she was let go because she refused to present COVID-19 data favorable to the state's economic reopening.

Rebekah Jones, a scientist in the state Health Department who said she led the team that designed the state's coronavirus dashboard, said she was dismissed because she wouldn't change data to support the reopening.

The Tampa Bay Times reported Tuesday that Jones said she had been asked to remove fields from publicly available COVID-19 data showing when patients had begun experiencing symptoms, after media requests about the data.

Jones told CBS12 News in West Palm Beach that she was fired on Monday after having been reassigned on May 5, because she refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen".

Helen Aguirre Ferré, the communications director for Governor Ron DeSantis, in a statement to The Miami Herald on Tuesday, said: "Rebekah Jones exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the department, including her unilateral decisions to modify the Department's COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors."

DeSantis, in an appearance with Vice-President Mike Pence in Orlando on Wednesday, contested Jones' claims that she created the COVID-19 portal.

"She is not the chief architect of our web portal, that is another false statement, and what she was doing was she was putting data on the portal which the scientists didn't believe was valid data," De Santis said.

"Our data is available, our data is transparent, in fact Dr (Deborah) Birx (of the White House Coronavirus Task Force) has talked multiple times about how Florida has the best data," the Republican governor said. "So any insinuation otherwise is just typical partisan narrative trying to be spun."

Jones notified public health researchers in an email last week that she had been removed from the project. "As a word of caution, 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."

In an email to USA Today, Jones, whose job title was geographic information systems manager, wrote: "I worked on it (the portal) alone, sixteen hours a day for two months, most of which I was never paid for, and now that this has happened I'll probably never get paid for."

US Representative Kathy Castor, a Democrat who represents the Tampa area, questioned Jones' dismissal in a press release on Tuesday: "Amidst pressure to 'reopen' the state regardless of data and science, transparency is vital to keeping our neighbors safe and ensuring that they have confidence that our government is reporting honestly," said Castor. "I am requesting immediate answers as to why Ms. Jones was fired and how the State intends to fully report all COVID-19 public health data without censorship by the Department of Health or anyone else."

Castor said "the state's lack of transparency around COVID-19 public health data is troubling and unwise".

DeSantis has regularly touted Florida's handling of the pandemic, comparing it favorably with northeastern US states such as New York.

As of Wednesday, Florida was approaching 48,000 cases of the novel coronavirus, with 2,058 deaths, according to data compiled by Reuters.

New York, the US state with the most cases, nearly 358,000, had suffered 28,437 deaths from COVID-19 as of Wednesday.