Florida Health Department's Actions Investigated as Fired Data Manager Now Granted 'Whistleblower' Status

In March of 2020, Florida's governor was assuring the state that there was no evidence of Covid-19 in Florida, remembers the Washington Post. But there was — as far back as January. The Miami Herald reports that when questioned Florida's Department of Health told its data manager to hide that data from public view, "emails from within the agency reviewed by the Miami Herald and others show." Eventually that data manager was fired, and within months her home had been raided by gun-toting police officers. But that's not the end of the story. The latest development? That data manager is now instead "officially a whistleblower under Florida law, the Office of the Inspector General told her attorneys Friday," the Tampa Bay Times reports. The Inspector General now says the data manager has indeed shown "reasonable cause to suspect that an employee or agent of an agency or independent contractor has violated [a] federal, state or local law, rule or regulation." Slashdot reader whoever57 notes the move "will grant her certain protections." The Miami Herald reports: Rebekah Jones, who was responsible for building the COVID-19 data dashboard for the Florida Department of Health, was fired last year after raising concerns about "misleading data" being presented to the public, according to the complaint, which was reviewed by the Miami Herald. In the complaint, filed July 17, 2020, Jones alleged she was fired for "opposition and resistance to instructions to falsify data in a government website." She described being asked to bend data analysis to fit pre-determined policy and delete data from public view after questions from the press — actions she claimed "represent an immediate injury to the public health, safety, and welfare, including the possibility of death to members of the public." On Friday, the Office of the Inspector General informed Jones that "the information disclosed does meet the criteria for whistleblower status as described by ... Florida statutes," according to the email obtained by the Herald... "It's pretty huge," Jones told the Herald in response to the news. "This isn't vindication but this is a start. It's a big push forward...." A department spokesperson said at the time that Jones was fired for "insubordination." There's now an ongoing investigation into Jones' allegations. And in December Florida's Sun-Sentinel newspaper cited other issues with the state government's transparency: The Florida Department of Health's county-level spokespeople were ordered in September to stop issuing public statements about COVID-19 until after the Nov. 3 election. State officials withheld information about infections in schools, prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, relenting only under pressure or legal action from family members, advocacy groups and journalists. The governor highlighted statistics that would paint the rosiest picture possible and attempted to cast doubt on the validity of Florida's rising death toll. "Unfortunately, the possibility of the Department of Health manipulating information is not a stretch," writes the editorial board of the Miami Herald. For that reason, they write that Jones' whistleblower victory "stands to be a win over state secrecy for the rest of us."

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