She says she refused to change the numbers, then got fired - but that's not why she lost in court
A Florida appeals court has upheld the 2020 firing of a state COVID-19 data manager, rejecting her whistleblower and free-speech claims.
The First District Court of Appeal affirmed summary judgment for the department and the individual officials on July 29, 2026, ending a closely watched fight over the state's early pandemic data.
The employee joined the Florida Department of Health in 2018 and, by November 2019, was an environmental health program consultant. In March 2020 she was assigned to build the agency's public COVID-19 Dashboard.
Trouble began when her supervisor learned she had publicly identified herself as the dashboard's manager - on Facebook, in a vendor interview, and on a personal blog - without clearance from the department's communications office.
Things worsened from there. The employee testified that a then-deputy secretary told her to reconfigure county reopening figures by lowering infection rates and dropping smaller counties from a "scorecard." She said she saw that as a directive to falsify data and refused. The court pointedly declined to decide whether her account was accurate, calling the veracity of her allegations "immaterial" to the result.
In the following weeks, she kept posting data the department had not approved. On May 5, 2020, she was told to take a data hub offline for vetting but, the court said, was "openly defiant." She admitted that...
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