Not every grifter is on the right
Please stop falling for dubious stories that confirm your pre-existing beliefs.
Remember Rebekah Jones? No? Anyway, she was a big deal for a while, because of her lurid allegations about Ron DeSantis fudging Florida’s COVID-19 statistics and allegedly using jackbooted armed thugs to shut her up.
The state Inspector General has now investigated her case, and oh hey guess what?
A prominent critic of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Covid response made “unsubstantiated” and "unfounded" claims that state health officials had fired her because she refused to present manipulated data online, according to an inspector general’s report obtained by NBC News on Thursday.
The 27-page report from the Florida Department of Health’s Office of Inspector General said it found "insufficient evidence" or no evidence to support Rebekah Jones' accusations that she was asked to falsify Covid positivity rates or misrepresent them on the state’s dashboard she helped design. The report also "exonerated" officials accused by Jones of wrongdoing because they removed a data section from the website to ensure that private individual health information was not released publicly.
The independent report paints a portrait of an employee who did not understand public health policy or the significance of epidemiological data, did not have high-level access to crucial information and leveled claims that made professional health officials "skeptical."
The report did not examine one of Jones’ most explosives claims: that Florida intentionally hid deaths to make the pandemic seem less deadly.
That conspiracy theory, which Jones alternately promoted and recanted on Twitter before her account was suspended for violating the platform’s terms of service, has persisted on social media for more than a year, despite the lack of evidence. The Florida Democrat who ran the state’s emergency response at the time bemoaned how Jones spread “disinformation.” Independent epidemiologists say the claim has no basis.
[…]
The report also found that Jones made an "unfounded" claim that the state changed its Covid positivity calculation with nefarious intent. But the experts inerviewed indicated she didn’t understand how it was formulated, and Jones got her facts wrong, the report said.
“DOH never calculated the rates of positivity in the manner alleged by the complainant,” the report said. "Based upon an analysis of the available evidence, the alleged conduct, as described by the complainant, did not occur."
It wasn’t the only time that Jones misrepresented data. Early on in the pandemic, she launched a Twitter attack on former University of Florida epidemiologist Natalie Dean for correctly pointing out that Jones didn’t understand the difference between antigen and antibody tests.
Jones also savaged University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi on Twitter — and temporarily drove him off the platform because of the attacks from her followers — when he, like Dean, discounted Jones claims about Florida hiding Covid death data.
“The widespread notion that the Florida Department of Health is ‘cooking the books’ on COVID data is unsupported and unhelpful," Dean wrote in a March 2021 tweet. "If we aim to have a real conversation about Florida, folks need to move past this.”
Ron DeSantis is awful, but that doesn’t mean everyone who opposes him is legit. There’s a long history of ethically challenged and/or mentally unstable people taking advantage of worthy causes to make money, raise their public profile, and gain sympathy. (I call it the Belle Gibson principle.)
Moving on to another state with a terrible Republican Governor, social media was rocked this week by a shocking story about Greg Abbott trying to bribe and threaten gun violence victims to shut up following the Uvalde school massacre:
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