Cumberland Advisors Market Commentary – Rebekah Jones
A Duel Over Data (Or, Three Cheers for Rebekah Jones)
“The Florida Department of Health’s website is extraordinary, and this is what every department of health should have…. When you inform the public and give them the information that they need, then they can make decisions along with the local government and governors…. It’s by Zip Code and it’s by county. They can see cases; they can see cumulative cases; they can see new cases; they can see hospitalizations; they can see mortality; they can see age groups of mortality; and they can see where every testing piece is. This is how we have to inform the American public, and this is where the American public will develop confidence in each of their counties and local governments.”
(https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4870297/user-clip-dr-birx-comments-jacksonville-beach-opening)
On that same day, a blog post at the website of ESRI, the company behind the ArcGIS program used for many state COVID-19 dashboards and the dashboard created by Johns Hopkins, featured a story about the Florida COVID-19 Dashboard and the GIS manager for the Florida Department of Health, who had configured the dashboard and managed it in consultation with three Dept. of Health teams. Her name, one many readers may know by now, is Rebekah Jones. Blog post authors Este Geraghty (MD, MS, MPH, GISP) and Ryan Lanclos praised her qualifications for creating the Florida dashboard:
"When Rebekah Jones was subsequently fired from her job on May 18, it was the Palm Beach Post that broke the story. According to Jones, she was fired for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 data to justify the state’s reopening. (“Coronavirus: Florida scientist said she was fired for refusing to ‘manipulate’ COVID-19 data,” https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20200519/coronavirus-florida-scientist-said-she-was-fired-for-refusing-to-lsquomanipulatersquo-covid-19-data)
That story was picked up in many places, and interviews followed.
Without going deeply into the weeds, we can offer several sources for interested readers to delve into. We will leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions about what happened in connection with COVID-19 data in Florida.
The Tampa Bay Times published an in-depth report on the incident and events leading up to it:
“Florida Health Department manager told to delete coronavirus data is ousted,” https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/19/florida-health-department-officials-told-manager-to-delete-coronavirus-data-before-reassigning-her-emails-show/.
Jones offered her own account in a 7-minute NPR Interview that aired on June 29: “Florida Scientist Says She Was Fired for Not Manipulating COVID-19 Data,” https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884551391/florida-scientist-says-she-was-fired-for-not-manipulating-covid-19-data. I’ve excerpted two paragraphs from the transcript of that interview:
“I was asked by DOH leadership to manually change numbers. This was a week before the reopening plan officially kicked off into phase one. I was asked to do the analysis and present the findings about which counties met the criteria for reopening. The criteria followed more or less the White House panel’s recommendations, but our epidemiology team also contributed to that as well. As soon as I presented the results, they were essentially the opposite of what they had anticipated. The whole day while we’re having this kind of back and forth changing this, not showing that, the plan was being printed and stapled right in front of me. So it was very clear at that point that the science behind the supposedly science-driven plan didn’t matter because the plan was already made….The whole next week was a lot of manipulating things and a lot of back and forth with the epidemiologists, who were extremely uncomfortable with the way that this was being managed. And then eventually the night before the first phase of reopening, I was asked to actually delete and then hide data from the public. I said I wanted in writing that directive from my boss telling me to do that before I would do it. I said it was the wrong call, and it was a mistake to have this information that was available to the public and just take it away
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Second, we turn to Governor DeSantis’s response.
When questioned about Jones’s firing, Governor DeSantis had this to say when questioned by a Fox 13 News reporter on May 20 (“DeSantis on firing of Florida COVID-19 dashboard data scientist,” https://www.fox13news.com/video/686230):
“So, first of all, okay, so (1) she’s not, she’s not a data scientist. She’s somebody that’s got a degree in journalism, communication, and geography. She is not involved in collating any data. She does not have the expertise to do that. She is not an epidemiologist. She is not the chief architect of our web portal: that is another false statement. And what she was doing, she was putting data on the portal which the scientists didn’t believe was valid data. So she didn’t listen to the people who were her superiors. She had many people above her in the chain of command, and so then she was dismissed because of that and because of a bunch of different reasons about how she did.
“Come to find out, she’s also under active criminal charges in the State of Florida. She’s being charged with cyberstalking and cyber sexual harassment. So I’ve asked the Department of Health to explain to me how someone would be allowed to be charged with that and continue on because this was many months ago. I have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment, so her supervisor dismissed her because of a lot of those reasons, and it was a totally valid way, but she should have been dismissed long before that.
Kotok note to readers: this assertion by DeSantis has been greeted by disbelief and lack of proof about veracity on his part. Jones has extensively answered his assertion. So far no criminal charge against Jones has been validated.
We will continue DeSantis’ quote: “Our data is available. Our data is transparent. . ."
Jones responded to the situation by creating her own coronavirus dashboard for Florida, funded by public support, putting to rest the question of whether she was capable of such things (“Fired scientist Rebekah Jones builds coronavirus dashboard to rival Florida’s,” https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20200611/fired-scientist-rebekah-jones-builds-coronavirus-dashboard-to-rival-floridarsquos).
According to her data (which is updated daily and in some cases every 30 minutes, since she still has access to the Department of Health’s raw data), Florida has had considerably more cases than the state reports and more deaths. Jones carefully explains on the site how she arrives at her numbers. . .
Jones reports data with an eye to its accuracy and its usefulness. She is being recognized for her efforts, and not just by news outlets calling for interviews. She will be the keynote speaker at the online National Data Science Conference this year, sponsored by the American Statistical Assoc. and Journal of Data Science. For details, see https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1280194029494374403?s=20.
Governor DeSantis’s quest for reopening, however, has to be addressed. We left it to him and got a raging forest fire of COVID. Now the situation is in the hands of cities and counties and school boards. There is, frankly, no way to fully close down. Protracted lockdowns are deeply problematic. Everything stops. But rising case counts and hospitalizations teach us that there is no way to freely open up, either, no way to party and proceed as if it’s still the summer of 2019, at least not without sickening many people, perhaps for a long, long time, and killing quite a number of them. We need the attention to providing full and complete data that Rebekah Jones’s efforts represent, and we have to seek a better way to tackle the necessity of reopening. We need both better health outcomes and better economic outcomes. Leadership succeeds when it finds a path forward between extremes. Leadership fails if it doesn’t.
As we’ve learned from this pandemic what can work and what can’t, governors who now chart a path toward a disciplined, science-based, and data-driven reopening that controls viral spread will be credited both with safeguarding public health and with optimizing essential economic functions.
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Florida State Police Raid Home Of COVID Whistleblower, Point Guns At Her & Her Family, Seize All Her Computer Equipment
from the this-is-fucked-up dept
This is insane. Earlier this year, we wrote about Rebekah Jones, the data scientist working for Florida, who put together that state's COVID-19 database (that had received widespread praise), and who was fired by the state for her failure to fake the data to make it look like Florida was handling the pandemic better than it actually was. Governor Ron DeSantis had made it clear he wanted data showing good results in order to justify reopening the state...
Since then, Jones has been running Florida COVID Action, which is a dashboard of Florida COVID information, like the one she used to run for the state.
And apparently Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis couldn't allow that to stand. This afternoon Rebekah posted a short Twitter thread, with video, showing Florida state police raiding her home. As she notes, when they asked her who else was in the home, she told them that her husband and children were upstairs, and they pulled out their guns. . .
Why was her home raided? Why did they pull out guns? Why did they do it after she told them that it was her children upstairs? Why did they seize all of her electronics equipment? Why are they doing any of this?
Jones has been doing everything to better inform the public of what's happening in the middle of a pandemic, and this is the thanks she gets? Having her home raided by the police and having guns drawn on her children?
This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly.
This is what happens to people who speak truth to power.
I tell them my husband and my two children are upstairs... and THEN one of them draws his gun.
On my children.
This is Desantis' Florida.
— Rebekah Jones (@GeoRebekah) December 7, 2020
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HOLD ON > It's more than that
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