Rebekah Jones

Rebekah Jones (born July 25, 1989) is an American geographer, data scientist, and activist.

She is known for her COVID-19 activism in Florida, allegations against the Florida Department of Health and Ron DeSantis, an unsubstantiated whistleblower complaint after being fired, and several legal issues.

Jones graduated from Stone High School in 2007, after missing months of school during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

She says her experiences in Katrina made her interested in natural disasters.

In her junior year, Jones was removed from class for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and led other students to do the same after learning from civil liberties groups she was acting within her rights.

Jones graduated cum laude from the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University with dual degrees in geography and journalism in 2012.

In 2014, she received a master's degree in geography and a minor in mass communication from Louisiana State University.

In 2015, her research titled Quantifying Extreme Weather Event Impacts on the Northern Gulf Coast Using Landsat Imagery was published in the Journal of Coastal Research.

The execution of the warrant with armed police, widely referred to as a raid, was due to a 2016 battery charge against Jones by the Louisiana State University police.

In 2023, Jones pled no-contest to a 2017 cyberstalking charge against a former Florida State University student.

She was fired from both institutions.

Jones was the Democratic candidate for Florida's 1st congressional district in the 2022 U.S. House of Representatives elections in Florida.

She was defeated by Matt Gaetz.

Jones was born in Windber, Pennsylvania, to blue-collar parents.

At the age of nine, her family moved to Wiggins, Mississippi, where she spent most of her childhood.

She grew up poor, often housing and food insecure.

Jones was a graduate student in the Department of Geography at Florida State University from 2016 through 2018, where she worked on a doctoral dissertation entitled Using Native American Sitescapes to Extend the North American Paleotempestological Record Through Coupled Remote Sensing and Climatological Analysis.

In September 2018, she became a geographic information system (GIS) analyst at Florida Department of Health (DOH) in Tallahassee and worked on the agency's emergency response team during Hurricane Michael and Hurricane Dorian.

Jones performed analysis and modeling of mapping and surveillance data to provide information to the public and state officials used to coordinate disaster response, like the organization of patient movement to open beds between interstate hospitals.

She was dismissed from the PhD program in 2019.

In November 2019, she was appointed to a manager role within GIS handling analysis and tracking of environmental health data and health services.

She managed the team of data scientists and public health officers that used Esri's ArcGIS software to create the widely praised Florida Department of Health's COVID-19 dashboard.

Jones managed the dashboard for two months.

In May 2020, Jones was terminated from her position managing the team that created Florida's ArcGIS COVID-19 dashboard, which she alleged was for refusing to manipulate the state's COVID-19 data.

In May 2022, Florida's Office of Inspector General exonerated the state health officials, finding her claims against the DOH to be unsubstantiated or unfounded.

State records showed a pattern of sharing the department's work without authorization.

Jones later posted a forgery of the Florida Commission on Human Relations' letter dismissing her whistleblower complaint on social media and stated that the agency had validated her claims.

In December 2022, she signed a deferred prosecution agreement admitting guilt to unauthorized use of the state's emergency alert system on November 10, 2020, which resulted in her home being searched under warrant by state police in December 2020.

On May 4, 2020, a Miami Herald reporter made an inquiry to DOH about evidence they said could indicate an earlier community spread from the published data, which was handled by Jones's team.

The Tampa Bay Times and The Palm Beach Post reported a data field was removed for less than 24 hours; Shamarial Roberson, Deputy Secretary of Health, said the field was unimportant and indicated when a patient believed their symptoms began.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health responded that the dates Jones referred to corresponded to dates when individuals may have come into contact with the virus, rather than dates when they tested positive.

Carina Blackmore, the director for the division, instructed Jones to disable exporting data files to ensure the data matched what was in their PDF counterpart.

Jones was adamant that broad access to complete raw data was crucial for the academic community.

When instructed by her superiors to restrict access to any of the data, she objected, claiming it was unethical.

In emails she said, "This is the wrong call," and "I'm not pulling our primary resource for coronavirus data because he (Pritchard) wants to stick it to journalists."

Blackmore said the temporary removal was due to concerns about privacy and potential misunderstanding and misuse of the field.

The following day, Jones was removed from the COVID-19 dashboard team.

She threatened to quit and went on leave.

On May 15, 2020, Jones sent an email to a public listserv suggesting her removal was punishment for a commitment to accessibility and transparency and should cast doubt on the data's integrity.

On May 18, Jones was fired for insubordination, after refusing an offer to resign.