TEASER: COVID Whistleblower Rebekah Jones: I Knew DeSantis Would Go After Me
The New Abnormal with Molly Jong-Fast & Rick Wilson- 953 views
- 14 Dec 2020
COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones always thought that having a gun pointed in her face would be terrifying. That’s what the movies and TV shows have us all believe anyway. But she says when the Florida state police raided her home and held a gun inches from her face after she told them her two children were present, she felt “nothing.” She even let them enter peacefully, she says. “I was prepared to be arrested,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast on this special members-only episode of The New Abnormal. She was actually prepared to be arrested months ago by the Gov. DeSantis administration, when the virus numbers got bad last spring and she created her infamous COVID tracker contradicting the state’s numbers in addition to filing a whistleblower complaint “against the state for manipulating data and breaking the law.” So why are they going after her now? “I think they're purging everybody who's disloyal,” she says. Also, DeSantis doesn’t like her, or anyone who is making him look bad. Could other states be doing the same? Maybe, she says. (“Nobody wants to look like it's, they've lost control.”) As far as Florida is concerned, though, Jones isn’t shutting up. She restated her assertion that her state is absolutely underreporting hospitalizations and deaths and the DOH has even changed people’s cause of death. (“They've deleted people, [from the tracker], including children. When I drew attention to the fact that a two-year-old died in Escambia County, in Florida, less than two weeks after he was diagnosed and hospitalized for it, they reported him as a death. And as soon as I tweeted about it, and there was a big press reaction, they deleted it. They actually changed his dead status from yes to no.”) She doesn’t know what will happen next, but she wants people to keep paying attention to what’s happening with the virus. (“DeSantis would love to just distract people from what's going on with hospitalizations right now.”) Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now.
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Well, you're about to hear is a teaser for our new bonus episodes we're doing for Subscriber's The Beast Inside The Daily Beast membership program. Today, we have a very special guest with Rebecca Jones, who's an American data scientist and geographer, as well as a whistleblower who's known for going head to head with Governor Santos of Florida over her covid trucking project.
Today, she's going to talk to us about that battle with him, among other things. Again, this is for beast inside members only to hear this, along with the rest of our upcoming bonus episodes, had the new abnormal DOT, The Daily Beast dot com. That's new abnormal doctor Daily Beast dot com. OK, Rebecca, what the hell is going on?
That's a good question. Tell me. So I talk to you guys a while ago. Right. And we we kind of got into the nitty gritty of the science and all of that. And so I've spent really the last six months or so just trying to provide public information about what's going on in the state and then later what's going on in schools across the country. And I've been really kind of plugging away at that day in and day out. And I kind of thought back in May or June, when I first launched the new dashboard, that the scientists would send people to come get me.
Why? Because I am I mean, I filed a whistleblower complaint against the state for manipulating data and breaking the law. Right. And for asking me to break the law because of his giant rant in front of the vice president before I ever said anything to anybody, he kind of created this fracture where I had spent months working in his administration to build the state's dashboard and all their data systems and create a reputation around it, that it could be trusted.
Right. And when he publicly attacked me and defamed me, he created dealt with a lot of people that that information could be trusted anymore. And to me, that was awful because I had been asking the state since January to provide information about the virus or what was going on in our state. And I did that. And I pushed so hard for it because I knew that people had a right to know what was going on and that a lot of people would be afraid if they did not have information or they had information that they didn't think was trustworthy.
And so when all of that happened in May, there was a large share of the population of Florida that had nowhere to go for information.
Right. And that's when you started the dashboard.
Yeah. So I basically, you know, he went out and said I wasn't the architect of it. So I completely rebuilt it from scratch and added in all of the things that I wanted to always include and was told no. So stuff about hospital occupancy, Department of Corrections data, data from the Department of Emergency Management and a testing application where you could just, you know, hit the low key button and find all of the testing sites that are within five or ten miles and what their hours are and make it really easy for people to get help or get tested.
Yeah, no, it's an awesome site and everyone should go to it. So tell us exactly they broke into your house like what happened there?
Well, they didn't break in. I opened the door. I let them in. Right. They did have a sledgehammer.