COVID Whistleblower Rebekah Jones: I Knew DeSantis Would Go After Me
Jones speaks out after Florida cops raided her home while investigating an alleged hack of the emergency message system.
Illustration by The Daily Beast
COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones always thought that having a gun pointed in her face would be terrifying. 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.
Jones claims she was fired from her job at the Florida Department of Health months ago because she refused to manipulate data, and she went on to create her own dashboard of COVID statistics and file a whistleblower complaint.
In November, though, Florida authorities began investigating Jones because, they say, they traced an unauthorized message sent from the state’s emergency response system to her home internet address. Jones denies she hacked into the system and says state officials want to silence her.
“I think they’re purging everybody who’s disloyal,” she says.
Jones clearly has no plans to shut up. She said Florida is still 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 2-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 said.
She doesn’t know what will happen next, but she wants people to keep paying attention to what’s happening with the virus and keep Gov. Ron DeSantis under scrutiny.
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“DeSantis would love to just distract people from what's going on with hospitalizations right now,” she said.
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