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The Daily Beast Podcast

COVID Whistleblower Rebekah Jones: I Knew DeSantis Would Go After Me

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News

4.68.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones always thought that having a gun pointed in her face would be terrifying. That’s what the movies and TV shows have us all believe anyway. 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. She was actually prepared to be arrested months ago by the Gov. DeSantis administration, when the virus numbers got bad last spring and she created her infamous COVID tracker contradicting the state’s numbers in addition to filing a whistleblower complaint “against the state for manipulating data and breaking the law.” So why are they going after her now? “I think they're purging everybody who's disloyal,” she says. Also, DeSantis doesn’t like her, or anyone who is making him look bad. Could other states be doing the same? Maybe, she says. (“Nobody wants to look like it's, they've lost control.”) As far as Florida is concerned, though, Jones isn’t shutting up. She restated her assertion that her state is absolutely 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 two-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 doesn’t know what will happen next, but she wants people to keep paying attention to what’s happening with the virus. (“DeSantis would love to just distract people from what's going on with hospitalizations right now.”) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to the new abnormal special bonus episode. We're so excited to have you today

0:04.8

We have a very special guest with Rebecca Jones who is an American data scientist

0:09.4

Engeographer as well as a whistleblower who's known for going head-to-head with Governor DeSantis in Florida over her

0:14.8

COVID tracking project and today she's gonna talk to us about that among other things

0:19.0

Okay, Rebecca, what the hell is going on?

0:24.6

That's a good question tell me so I

0:28.2

Talk to you guys a while ago, right? And we kind of got into like the nitty gritty of the science and and all of that

0:35.6

And so I've spent really the last

0:38.2

Six months or so just trying to provide public information about what's going on in the state and then later

0:44.7

What's going on in schools across the country and I've been really kind of plugging away at that day in and day out and?

0:51.8

I kind of thought back in May or June

0:54.4

When I first launched the new dashboard that DeSantis would send people to come get me why because I

1:03.8

I mean, I filed a whistleblower complaint against the state for manipulating data and breaking the law

1:09.2

Right and for asking me to break the law because of his giant rant in front of the vice president before I ever said anything

1:16.8

Anybody he kind of created this fracture where I had spent months working in his administration to build the state

1:26.8

stash board and all their data systems and

1:30.4

Create a reputation around it that it could be trusted right and when he publicly attacked me and defamed me

1:37.0

he

1:38.4

Created dealt with a lot of people that that information could be trusted anymore and to me that was awful because I had been asking

1:46.6

the state since January to provide information about the virus and what was going on in our state and I did that and I pushed

1:54.4

So hard for it because I knew that people had a right to know what was going on and that a lot of people would be afraid

2:01.8

If they did not have information or they had information that they didn't think was trustworthy and so when all of that happened in May

...

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