Updated, Sept. 1
Few characters have had a more remarkable pandemic trajectory than geographer Rebekah Jones, who rose to fame after she accused the state of Florida of trying to doctor its COVID cases and then released a video of police raiding her home that went viral in December 2020.
In an exclusive conversation with The 74, the whistleblower data scientist now running for Congress talked about how having a child with autism informed her education platform, revealed a possible plea agreement in her pending criminal case and addressed how she would confront her opponent, Rep. Matt Gaetz, about sex trafficking allegations from a surprisingly personal perspective.
Jones first entered the public eye in May 2020 when she was fired from the Florida Department of Health, where she had helped build the state’s dashboard to monitor COVID cases and deaths. State officials said her dismissal was due to insubordination. But Jones claims she was let go because she refused to manipulate data to downplay the spread of the virus.
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An outspoken critic of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Jones garnered further attention for launching an independent dashboard counting Florida COVID cases and also a national tracker of infections in schools, in partnership with FinMango.
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