An inspector general’s report concluded that the accusations against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his response to the COVID-19 pandemic were completely baseless.
Rebekah Jones was a frequent guest on MSNBC and CNN because of her claims that she was fired for whistleblowing against the DeSantis administration about allegedly faked pandemic statistics.
Those claims were found to be unsubstantiated and without evidence by a 27-page report from the Florida Department of Health’s Office of the Inspector General.
Jones claimed that she refused to publish false pandemic numbers on the state’s COVID-19 dashboard in order to make Florida’s lockdown policies appear to be working. Her home was later raided by law enforcement officials, an incident she compared to acts committed by the Nazis in Germany.
The report said that her colleagues accused her of not knowing what she was talking about.
“Complainant was not an epidemiologist and did not have system access to underlying COVID-19 data in Merlin and ESSENCE,” the report read, referring to the state pandemic dashboard.
The report also said that her accusations made little sense, because even if officials sought to falsify statistics in the dashboard, they would be quickly and easily discovered through standard processes meant to confirm the numbers.
Jones faces a felony charge for downloading confidential health department data after she was fired. She also faces an unrelated charge of misdemeanor stalking over an affair she had with a former student when she was a Florida State University teacher. She was also fired from that job.
She is now running to unseat Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz from his office in the U.S. House representing Florida.
A spokesperson for DeSantis called Jones a “discredited conspiracy theorist.”
Here’s a news report on Jones’ congressional campaign:
Fired Florida data official Rebekah Jones yo-yoes on congressional bid
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