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.
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...
