Florida has fired the scientists who created their coronavirus dashboard that tracks most
states have something like this.
It tracks daily cases and deaths and other data.
And it is alleged that she has been fired because she was refusing to manipulate or
I would call it falsified data for political reasons to make reopening seem like a more
reasonable thing to do.
Now, this scientist's name is Rebecca Jones.
She put together these dashboards so that you could go and see in real time where are
the outbreaks, where the cases and deaths.
She wasn't paid for this additional work that she did.
She did it over a two month period.
And it is claimed that she was told to censor or manipulate some data and she refused to
do it.
She was told to manually change some data to help build the case that reopening makes
sense.
And she refused to do it, as she says, and she has now been fired.
Now, the interesting thing about this coming out of Florida is that I guess it was almost
two weeks ago, I think I was on the not the last Friday show, but the previous one or
maybe the one before that time is all blending together.
We had reports from a few weeks ago that Florida was already being accused of being dishonest
about their deaths and they were shielding cause of death from these reporting agencies.
This, if true, is North Korea style propaganda.
Too many deaths and cases to reopen just make up different numbers.
No problem whatsoever.
And again, I think it's important to underscore that a lot of the headlines say that she was
refusing to manipulate data.
She was refusing to falsify data, selectively releasing data or changes or manipulation.
This is falsification.
It would be a form of fraud or straight up lies.
They are doing what Trump and Republicans have been accusing China of doing.
They are doing what Trump and Republicans have been said.
You know, maybe the death tolls are being overstated.
Well, it looks like they are being accused of doing the exact thing, although in the
opposite direction, to make this seem less bad than it actually is.
Now, of course, there are always details that are late coming in.
What she straight up fired or forced to resign?
It's not clear.
She's not communicating very much.
Rebecca Jones is with with reporters over the last 12 to 16 hours.
What exactly was she asked to change?
We're not really sure yet.
What was observed was that over the last couple weeks, the demographic info about who is getting
infected and dying has been more difficult to access.
As one example, reporters have been having more and more trouble finding out how many
cases and deaths are coming from Long-Term Care in nursing home type facilities and prisons,
which are big hotspots for outbreaks of coronavirus.
At one point, as I told you, the Florida state government prevented stopped medical examiners
from releasing death totals and also cause of death.
And both of those things were being done there for for for many, many years.
That was standard operating practice.
We reported on that already.
And as usual, we still don't have transparency in terms of the full scope of what they're
hiding or potentially falsifying.
We do need to get more of the story from Rebecca Jones.
She hopefully will be more communicative with reporters in the upcoming period of time.
Now, in terms of the numbers that Florida has been releasing, you know, earlier in the
week I mentioned when you look at some states that have been open versus closed, you see
very similar curves.
And we speculated this could be because an open state might have a lot of people isolating
on their own, whereas a closed state might have a lot of people ignoring the protocol.
It could be that states are falsifying data.
We don't really know.
In terms of the numbers that Florida has released the case, numbers have been declining pretty
modestly, sort of a similar pattern to states that have been mostly shut down.
Maybe a question mark in light of this recent revelation in terms of the deaths.
There is a strange sort of herky jerky up and down graph for Florida deaths.
Sometimes when you see that it has to do with reporting intervals where certain days of
the week you don't get full data and numbers are pushed around potentially.
You know, often it's weekends, the numbers go down.
And it's not because fewer people are dying on the weekend.
It's because the reporting is pushed to Monday and Tuesday and tallied early in the following
week.
We're not really sure in terms of testing levels.
Florida is testing about 33000 per million.
That puts them at twenty seventh in the United States.
That's right.
About the middle.
Florida is not particularly good or bad on testing.
But again, this is what they are releasing.
And that's all we really know.
We may know more soon, as I say, but we may not.
And that's the whole point that.
This is a story about the fact that we are not being given information that is absolutely
necessary to figure out what's going on in Florida to determine are they ready to move
to a phase one or phase two reopening or whatever the case may be.
Once again, it's projection that the right has been saying that the left is falsifying
data for a while now.
No actual evidence of that, but now increasingly evidence that it is the right that may be
indeed doing that.
And the very right wing Florida state government of Governor Ron DeSantis is at the at the
center of this at this point in time.