Rebekah Jones was a former COVID dashboard manager and claimed she was instructed to manipulate data, though she has not provided evidence for her shifting story. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office said in May 2020 that Jones ``exhibited a repeated course of insubordination."
The state-run Global Times published a piece on Saturday focusing on Jones's accusations and subsequent layoff, warning Florida “is causing public concern due to its serious epidemic situation and the lack of transparency on its early cases — especially in the case of 171 early patients' data that was deleted and hidden.” It also claimed Florida cases emerged "even earlier than the virus outbreak in China's Wuhan.”
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Christina Pushaw, DeSantis's press secretary, told the Washington Examiner: “I don’t believe Rebekah Jones is an agent of China or anything like that. I do believe that China has used and exploited her conspiracy theories to push their own agenda, to push their own narrative, and to undermine and discredit DeSantis because his policies have obviously been in direct opposition to what the Chinese Communist Party wants in America."
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Jones’s data claims have been widely disputed by health department staffers.
National Review explained the data controversy in June, writing, “When, last year, the Miami Herald brought its false ‘scoop’ to the attention of the Florida Department of Health, the DOH did what any serious data operation would do: It ordered an audit. Aware that a single data field, ‘Event Date,’ was pushing reporters to erroneous conclusions, the department temporarily stopped reporting it while it made sure its information was correct. The entire process took 48 hours.”
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In December, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement executed a search warrant at Jones’s home and announced she was arrested in January, charging her with a felony. Investigators reported she "illegally accessed the system sending a message to approximately 1,750 people and downloaded confidential FDOH data and saved it to her devices.”
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Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian took aim at DeSantis on Thursday, sharing a CCP-run China Daily video criticizing Florida’s COVID-19 response with the caption, “While people around the world are doing everything they can to contain the spread of the #DeltaVariant…”
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Zhao has repeatedly retweeted efforts by the Global Times to push the U.S. Army conspiracy theory, also tweeting about Fort Detrick.
The GOP report pointed to a “sustained disinformation campaign” led by Zhao and other Chinese officials and outlets that have pushed baseless claims about the U.S. military since March 2020.
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Pushaw warned: “Because people believe that Rebekah Jones nonsense, they might also believe that CCP nonsense that COVID started earlier in Florida than in Wuhan.
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“Believing Rebekah Jones’s conspiracy theory means you believe that thousands of public health employees from all 67 counties, many of whom are Democrats, conspired to manipulate COVID numbers to help DeSantis politically. This is outlandish and nonsensical, but countless Americans believe it, and the CCP benefits.”
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