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A public health employee predicted Florida’s coronavirus catastrophe — then she was fired: ‘This is everything I was trying to warn people about’ and…
“More people are gonna die,” Rebekah Jones wrote to her mother and sisters on Facebook. It was April 26, a warm spring Sunday in Tallahassee, Fla., and she was just finishing work at the Florida Department of Health, where she was managing the state’s much-praised coronavirus dashboard, which she had also created.
“I feel sick,” the 30-year-old doctoral student continued.
The exchange marked the beginning of an exceptionally turbulent period for Jones, who was demonized by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a rogue employee while also being celebrated by his detractors as a brave truth teller willing to stand up to political power.
In a whistleblower complaint Jones filed last Thursday with the Florida Commission on Human Relations, her attorneys alleged that she was fired by the state’s Department of Health for “refusing to publish misleading health data.”
DeSantis’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
“We wanted to be wrong,” Jones told Yahoo News. “What we’re seeing right now is actually far worse than what we anticipated.” Back in May, DeSantis’s combative press secretary dismissed as “alarmist” new projections showing the state suffering 4,000 mortalities from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Florida now has more than 5,000 coronavirus fatalities.
Of the many supposed errors DeSantis has allegedly committed in the course of the pandemic, his administration’s firing of Jones may prove the most symbolic to those who see it as a Trumpian rejection of numbers that don’t look good.
Six months since the coronavirus is believed to have entered the U.S., Florida is recording some 10,000 daily coronavirus cases, more than most countries, and Jones’s dire predictions appear to have been…