Amid the real tragedy of nearly 600,000 American deaths related to COVID-19, the media crafted a political melodrama in which Democrats were forever the good guys, and Republicans the villains.
And there has been no bigger villain than Gov. Ron DeSantis. For the media, the Florida Republican has been the Darth Vader, the Lex Luthor, the Joker of COVID.
On the other hand, the heroes have been liberals such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Rebekah Jones.
In Florida, it was Jones, a former employee of the state health department, who has been DeSantis’ foil. Last year she became the media heroine as the “data scientist-turned-whistleblower,” as USA Today described her because she claimed to have been fired for exposing how COVID data was manipulated to improve Florida’s performance during the pandemic.
The legend grew when Jones was arrested in January on a charge of hacking a state computer system to send an unauthorized email and download data, including personnel records of 19,000 state workers. The media portrayed the investigation as retribution from the governor.
Yet as with so many on the left during the pandemic, Jones has been proven a fraud, as Charles Cooke of National Review has revealed in the past few days.
In a lengthy article last week, Cooke pointed out that Jones “has single-handedly managed to convince millions of Americans that Governor Ron DeSantis has been fudging the state’s COVID-19 data,” and caused those outsiders “to believe quite sincerely that the state’s many successes during the pandemic have been built atop fraud,” Cooke wrote.
Cooke’s account related Jones’ checkered background as well as the labor pain she was to many senior managers within the Florida Department of Health. But the bottom line was that, according to Cooke, she took the state’s same data, which she accused officials of manipulating, and displayed it differently, and incorrectly, on her own private, “rebel” dashboard.
Cooke also picked apart the narrative that Jones was some kind of “scientist” who had been directed to alter the state’s raw COVID data.
Although admittedly talented at her job, Cooke wrote, she essentially was responsible for uploading data that was collected, analyzed and managed by others more senior to her. In short, Cooke noted, “In her role as the manager of the (COVID) dashboard, Jones did not have the ability to edit the raw data. Only a handful of people in Florida are permitted to touch that information, and Jones was not among them.”
Thus, Cooke added, “Jones isn’t a martyr; she’s a myth-peddler. She isn’t a scientist; she’s a fabulist. She’s not a whistleblower; she’s a good old-fashioned confidence trickster. And, like any confidence trickster, she understands her marks better than they understand themselves,” referring to the gullible, anti-Republican liberals in the media, and the donors who have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to her GoFundMe account.
Recently, Jones responded to Cooke’s column and to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who also took apart Jones’ story. Cooke followed up to point out that she continues to lie.
Cooke noted that her response to him acknowledged she could not have accessed the data she claimed to have been ordered to manipulate. And attempting to refute Carlson’s claims, Jones went on Twitter to announce that she had “never” claimed that she was directed to delete death cases.
Cooke came with the receipts, specifically a Dec. 24 tweet, which has been deleted, that Jones wrote saying she had been told to delete cases and deaths.
As Cooke concluded his follow-up piece:
“Jones confirmed this week that she has been lying about the role she played in the department. And, once she’d done that, there was nothing that she could do except to back off her main claim. No direct access to the database means no ability to delete data from the database. No ability to delete data from the database means no claim that she was asked to delete data from the database. No claim that she was asked to delete data from the database means no scandal.”
“Game over.”
An honest national media would give up the fairy tale it’s been promoting for a year, and acknowledge that DeSantis has been among the best, if not the best, to manage the pandemic. But the media gave up on honesty long ago.
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Is there a way to contact those who funded her “Go Fund Me” account and send this article to them?