Rebekah Jones, the Florida COVID-19 “whistleblower who wasn’t,” conceded Thursday that her entire operation to frame health officials with manipulating pandemic data was a hoax when she admitted she was never asked to delete deaths in the database.
“Deleting deaths was never something I was asked to do,” Jones wrote in a since-deleted post captured and published by National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke. “I’ve never claimed it was.”
As outlined by Cooke, who chronicled her lucrative scam here, however, she did claim health officials told her to delete pandemic data quite a few times, a supposed bombshell revelation aimed to tank the credibility of the state’s triumphant performance under its Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Below is another deleted post, published in National Review, where Jones accused Florida Deputy Secretary of Health Dr. Shamarial Roberson of instructing Jones “to delete cases and deaths,” the entire premise of the whistleblower story.
Jones claimed in a story amplified by CNN, MSNBC, and other corporate outlets that she was fired from her job as a mid-level bureaucrat running a website because she refused to manipulate the data. As Cooke outlined in his piece last week exposing her as a deep-state con artist, however, Jones had no ability to comply with the supposed requests.
Cooke explains:
As part of the 10,000 word screed Jones wrote after my piece was published, she linked to a snippet of code that shows clearly that her dashboard did not interact directly with the state’s database, but instead utilized Excel files that other people at the Florida Department of Health had put on a network drive.
Or, put another way: 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.
Florida has remained a prime target for left-wing conspiracies related to the pandemic as the state’s Republican governor refused to embrace the draconian lockdowns pursued by statist leftists in California and the northeast to their own detriment.
While New Jersey and New York lead the nation in deaths per million, Florida ranks 27th, according to a state tracker in RealClearPolitics.
In late April, Twitter’s editorial staff joined the chorus of manufactured confusion to cast doubt about triumphant numbers in Texas and Florida after reporting from Fox News noted low case numbers in contrast to new surges in New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Twitter’s trending topics tossed cold water on the report while no evidence offered credence to claims that either state was engaged in malicious manipulation of the data, such as was uncovered in New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s envoy on climate, John Kerry, trended on the platform with no description as news broke that Kerry previously leaked covert Israeli operations in Syria to Iranian adversaries.
notice which trend receives a description. pic.twitter.com/fsmPW6i7km
— Logan Hall (@loganclarkhall) April 26, 2021
Source: The Federalist
