Numbers Game

Early in the pandemic, Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones made national news with her claim that she had been fired for refusing to manipulate the state’s COVID-19 numbers in a way that would justify reopening sooner.

Now she’s suing for reinstatement, back wages and compensation for emotional distress in a whistleblower civil suit filed last year in Leon County Circuit Court. Rick Johnson, a Tallahassee-based employment law attorney, is representing her.

“It’s a clear-cut case,” he says. “We have evidence they were investigating her, looking for ways to fire her.”

During discovery, Johnson says, he found a series of emails from a state Department of Health supervisor to the state human resources department, asking how to fire her and revealing that they looked at her personal website, which expressed views that differed from state policy, but which, says Johnson, is protected speech.

Jones is also being represented by constitutional law attorney Lawrence Walters with the Walters Law Group of Longwood, and employment litigator Lisa Lambert of Atlanta. 

“Her termination was shortly after she spoke out against the [alleged] manipulation of the state’s COVID data,” says Walters. “The temporal proximity and other record evidence strongly suggests a First Amendment violation.”

The current complaint alleges that “misrepresentations and falsifications Jones was ordered to implement, or tolerate and ignore, included COVID positivity data of rural counties, use of weekly rather than daily data to create misleading impressions, exclusion of out-of-state COVID-19 patients, and exclusion of in-state patients who did not provide an address.”

When she was fired, the health department said Jones “exhibited a repeated course of insubordination,” making “unilateral decisions to modify the department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.”

Discovery is ongoing. “We have requested various emails within the Department of Health,” says Johnson, “and we’re having trouble getting them.”

The trial is set for September.

Her termination was shortly after she spoke out against the [alleged] manipulation of the state’s COVID data.

It was May 2020 when Jones, who was the health department’s geographic information systems manager, told the press she had been asked to manipulate the numbers on Florida’s COVID dashboard. She met with her boss, Craig Curry, on a Friday to inquire about filing for whistleblower status—a required step before filing such a lawsuit. The next Monday, she was fired. She was granted whistleblower status by the state Office of Inspector General in May 2021, but a year later that office deemed her claims unsubstantiated.

In a criminal case handled by a different attorney, Jones was charged in January 2021 with illegally accessing a state computer system and sending an anonymous message on an internal Department of Health multiuser messaging account. “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late,” the message read. Jones denied sending it.

In 2022, the criminal case was deferred for two years after Jones agreed to admit guilt and pay $20,000.

The current civil suit, handled by Johnson, names as defendants the Florida Department of Health, Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, and Dr. Shamarial Roberson, the department’s former deputy secretary.

“We’ve seen estimates that as many as 40,000 Floridians died needlessly because of the DeSantis administration’s mishandling of COVID,” Johnson says. “Jones was fired for speaking out. This lawsuit addresses the harm done.”