Why Florida Public Health Officials Won’t Blow the Whistle on Ron DeSantis https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/florida-covid-data-whistleblower-ron-desantis.html Perhaps you’ve heard in recent days of the extent to which Florida’s government has limited public health data about the COVID-19 pandemic at the expense of the health of the state’s residents. Indeed, Florida’s government, under the leadership of Gov. Ron DeSantis, has provided an object lesson during this pandemic in the how both whistleblower protection statutes and the First Amendment fail to provide adequate protection to government employees who want to blow the whistle. Over the past several months, the DeSantis administration has engaged in a variety of stratagems to suppress truthful information and disseminate falsehoods about the pandemic. Yet, save for Rebekah Jones—who says she was sacked in May as the Department of Health’s Geographic Information System manager for refusing to manipulate the Sunshine State’s COVID case numbers and is now under state investigation over messages she sent urging others to speak out—few, if any, state employees have stepped forward as whistleblowers. Perhaps most disturbing: For reasons that have not yet been explained, starting on Oct. 24 and continuing through the Nov. 3 general election, the state ceased including long-backlogged COVID-related deaths in its daily death counts. The state resumed including these numbers on a consistent basis on Nov. 17—two weeks after the national election. Thus, for over three weeks, the Sunshine State systematically underreported COVID deaths in a way that made the numbers look rosier than they actually were. The DeSantis administration’s efforts to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative were not limited to significantly underreporting the state’s COVID deaths: They extended to suppressing data regarding COVID spread in public institutions such as public schools, hospitals, and prisons. Moreover, in September, DeSantis imposed a code of silence on state health department employees in an effort to minimize the public’s appreciation of the pandemic’s risks. The department went silent on social media from September to November regarding the mortal risks associated with COVID—but continued to post about anodyne topics such as flu vaccinations, the risk of lead poisoning, and the benefits of regular hearing tests. In addition, county health department spokespeople were prohibited from speaking out about the COVID epidemic—at least until after the Nov. 3 election. So too, a state COVID task force organized by Florida’s Surgeon General Scott Rivkees met a few times this spring and then quietly disappeared into oblivion. Florida’s state government owed its residents accurate, truthful, and timely information about the risk that COVID-19 presented to the public’s health. However, the state government instead worked to minimize the danger that the virus presented to the state’s population. Yet, since May, no one within the state government has stepped forward to call foul on these efforts. In May, Jones, the state employee responsible for maintaining Florida’s COVID case website, says she refused to manipulate the numbers (despite being told to do so). After she was fired, she built her own COVID website and continued to aggregate data on COVID cases in the Sunshine State. Jones has filed a whistleblower complaint under a state statute that conveys limited protection on state employees who blow the whistle. To date, her complaint has gone nowhere. Earlier this month, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement raided her home, agents’ guns drawn, and seized her smartphone, computer, and flash drives—ostensibly because Jones had used the state’s employee communications system to send a text message to Department of Health employees urging them to “speak out before it’s too late.” It is not difficult to figure out why employees working in Florida’s Department of Health would choose a path of prudent silence. Florida state law, like federal law, does not provide robust protection to whistleblowers who share confidential state government information with the public. Like most statutes that protect whistleblowers, including the federal Whistleblower Protection Act, a Florida employee must respect a government agency’s chain of command and report concerns either internally or to a law enforcement agency in order to be protected. What’s more, such laws do not immunize government employees from potential liability for breaching laws and regulations that restrict the unauthorized release of information within the government’s possession. What about the First Amendment? After all, the U.S. prides itself on maintaining the broadest constitutional free speech guarantees in the world. Unfortunately, First Amendment protection for a whistleblowing government employee—at any level of government—is both uncertain and weak. To be protected at all, a government employee’s speech must involve a matter of public concern and must not fall within the scope of the employee’s official workplace duties. For county-level Department of Health employees, whose job duties include providing health information to the general public, any speech related to the COVID pandemic arguably would fall within the scope of their employment—which means that employees are entirely unprotected by the First Amendment if they speak out about the governor’s code of silence regarding COVID. This legal result flows directly from a very unfortunate First Amendment precedent, Garcetti v. Ceballos, which the Roberts court handed down in 2006. Garcetti creates a robust chilling effect on government employees blowing the whistle if the information relates in any conceivable way to their work—the area in which most potential whistleblowers are apt to possess important, but confidential, information. The Garcetti rule thus creates a serious “Catch-22” that encourages government employees to hold their tongues rather than warn the public about serious government misconduct. Even if speech about a matter of public concern clearly falls outside a government employee’s official responsibilities, the First Amendment provides only very modest protection. Under Pickering v. Board of Education, decided in 1968, a government employee’s speech about a matter of public concern enjoys First Amendment protection only if the public value of the speech exceeds the risk of disruption that the employee’s continued presence in the government’s workplace might cause. This approach effectively permits disgruntled co-workers to justify the discharge of a whistleblower; the more egregious and embarrassing a government employee’s public disclosures, the more likely that the person’s continued presence will be disruptive to the government workplace. In sum, First Amendment jurisprudence stacks the deck strongly in favor of silence over speech. A government employee must guess about whether her speech is sufficiently job-related to be utterly unprotected under Garcetti; even if she can clear this legal hurdle, she must still prevail under a balancing test that empowers co-workers to exercise a heckler’s veto. When the First Amendment affords inadequate or uncertain protection, would-be speakers will self-censor. The deafening silence of Florida public health officials in the face of a concerted, ongoing campaign by DeSantis to conceal the truth about the state’s COVID crisis demonstrates with crystal clarity that our current approach just isn’t working. If we want government employees to blow the whistle on serious government misconduct—including, for example, an organized government effort to deceive voters about an ongoing pandemic by disseminating incomplete or even patently false information—then we must afford them sufficient legal cover to make doing so possible. Absent such legal reform, rational government employees will follow the example of Florida’s public health employees—and reflexively choose silence over speech. Florida’s residents deserved better.
DeSantis - we are not as terrible as other states so we are good. Governor Casts Doubt on Experts as Cases in Florida Rise The virus is now infecting more Floridians over 65 than ever, but Gov. DeSantis says Florida is not as bad as other states recently pummeled by the virus. An epidemiologist advises against using "terrible as something to strive for." https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local...-on-experts-as-cases-in-florida-rise/2346401/
A page out of Trump's "we're doing better than Europe" book. A sycophantic ballwasher from beginning to end:
??? How many times have liberals used statistics from other countries to cast the US in a negative light?
"DeSantis for the win" - He's caught lying again edition. No, Ron -you are pushing disinformation once again. Pfizer has no production issues. Your buddy Trump is failing as distributing the warehoused vaccine doses to your state. Florida’s Ron DeSantis claims vaccine shipments are ‘on hold’ — but Pfizer says he’s wrong https://www.rawstory.com/2020/12/fl...pments-are-on-hold-but-pfizer-says-hes-wrong/ On Thursday, the Tampa Bay Times reported that drug maker Pfizer, one of the main manufacturers of COVID vaccines, has directly contradicted the claim from Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) that shipments of the vaccine are “on hold” to his state. “Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday that Florida could receive less than the 452,000 does of the coronavirus vaccine that the state was expecting because of a ‘production issue’ on the part of a vaccine manufacturer,” reported Kirby Wilson and Steve Contorno. “DeSantis said that two shipments of the vaccine slated to be sent to Florida in the coming weeks are ‘on hold right now.'” This is directly at odds with a statement put out by Pfizer, which states that, “Pfizer is not having any production issues with our COVID-19 vaccine, and no shipments containing the vaccine are on hold or delayed. This week, we successfully shipped all 2.9 million doses that we were asked to ship by the U.S. Government to the locations specified by them. We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses.” “DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday,” said the report. “DeSantis said Tuesday the state was expecting 205,000 doses of the vaccine to be shipped the week of Dec. 21, followed by 247,000 more the week after.” Pfizer’s vaccine, along with a competing vaccine from Moderna, are a daunting logistical challenge for federal and state officials as they try to work out which vulnerable groups have first priority to ensure the least spread of the disease.
The DeSantis adminstration goes silent when called out on their fake death numbers... Echoing Trump, Florida’s leaders worked to cast doubt on the state’s death count. Now they’re not talking. https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/p...0201218-hlf2b6tdiraexbecn3cyaiac6y-story.html As the presidential campaign heated up, Florida’s leaders worked to cast doubt on their own COVID-19 death count, second guessing doctors on the front lines of the pandemic and mirroring Donald Trump’s messaging that the toll wasn’t as bad as it looked. The state tightened control over its reporting, cut off avenues for review and announced additional layers of scrutiny for COVID-19 deaths. Now, new questions are being raised about an unexplained gap in death reporting in the days leading up to Election Day on Nov. 3. The pause in reporting long-backlogged deaths resulted in fewer COVID-19 deaths being reported in daily counts as Floridians headed to the polls. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office denied Thursday it had a political motive for a pause in reporting backlogged deaths from Oct. 24 to Nov. 17, attributing it to a review by the Florida Department of Health and noting that about 3.5 million Floridians had already cast votes when the reporting pause started. “We did notice the gap, and it is a real thing,” said Fred Piccolo, a DeSantis spokesman. “The main reason is we had gone into this review process. It was instituted a few days before the election started, so it would be funny if it was an election thing because we were pretty late to the game if that was the case.” But Piccolo and officials with the Department of Health won’t explain exactly how deaths are being scrutinized, or even if that review continues.They won’t say if any cases have been omitted from the tally because of the review. They won’t identify who is assigned to the effort or what their qualifications are. The state’s silence now stands in contrast with a public effort in October to raise questions about the reliability of the death numbers reported daily to the public. That push came as Trump proclaimed on the campaign trail the numbers couldn’t be trusted. On Oct. 24, three days after Florida announced its review and the same day it stopped including backlogged deaths in its count, Trump publicly questioned the COVID-19 death toll at a rally in Wisconsin: “This country and their reporting systems are really not doing it right,” he said. Around that same time, someone at the state Capitol leaked death certificates that had been kept secret to a conservative blogger, allowing her to comb through hundreds of redacted death records. She wrote an article telling readers the death toll was inflated. Piccolo, the governor’s spokesman, tweeted the story to his followers. Dr. Stephen Nelson, chairman of Florida’s Medical Examiners Commission, said he doesn’t know why the state wanted to second guess doctors and medical examiners who were trying to keep up with a surge of COVID-19 deaths. He wondered how the state would even go about verifying information submitted on death certificates, given the resources such an endeavor would require and limitations in accessing medical records. “It is filled out by doctors — not by a politician — as to what the cause of death is,” he said. “Who better than the doctor who took care of the patient to say why they died?” Politicizing death DeSantis and Trump have been in lockstep in fueling a message that the COVID-19 death toll is inflated. That narrative is the opposite of the findings of leading health experts who say states are undercounting the death toll, noting that a limitation in testing resulted in missed deaths early in the pandemic. In July, DeSantis publicly questioned the state’s death statistics, raising concerns about a news report that a 20-something was included in the COVID-19 death toll, despite having died in a motorcycle crash while infected with COVID. “You get hit by a car and then you’re attributing it to coronavirus, and so I want them to go back and look,” he said, blaming the death’s inclusion on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But CDC guidelines didn’t require those types of deaths to be counted in the COVID-19 death toll. Deaths should be counted when COVID-19 is either the cause of the death or a “significant” contributing factor. Dr. Joshua Stephany, the chief medical examiner for Orange and Osceola counties who reviewed the case, said the motorcycle death was never included in the COVID-19 death tally, despite being used by the governor as an example of why the toll should be questioned. “I don’t speak for them, so I don’t know why that came up,” Stephany said. “It got to the governor, and he made a big deal. They never asked us about it.” DeSantis also bragged that Florida’s death count looked good when compared with other states, noting that Florida had done better than New York, which was hit hard early on in the pandemic. Florida has the 20th highest per-person death rate in the country, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health organization. An October push The state’s efforts to raise doubts about the accuracy of the COVID-19 death toll escalated in October at the same time Trump was questioning its reliability on the campaign trail. Oct. 13:Republican House Speaker Jose Oliva released a memo and analysis that concluded the state’s death toll could be inflated by 10% and suggested the data could be compromised. Oliva’s review took issue with death certificates that weren’t filled out in full detail based on state and federal guidance, but it didn’t uncover a significant number of deaths that shouldn’t have been counted based on the CDC’s guidelines. Oliva, a COVID skeptic, issued the report in his final weeks as speaker. He didn’t push to investigate other issues related to the pandemic, including the state’s faltering unemployment website and accusations of data manipulation by Rebekah Jones, a data analyst turned whistleblower who was fired by the Department of Health in May. Democrats have slammed Florida’s Republican leadership for questioning COVID deaths while ignoring other pressing issues related to the pandemic response. “It’s hard for Floridians who are watching the governor play hide the ball with the data around COVID infections and COVID deaths to have faith in the numbers,” said U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a Democrat from the Orlando area. Oct. 21:The Florida Department of Health raised further questions about the accuracy of the death count it maintains in response to Oliva’s memo, issuing a news release that it was adding another layer of review for COVID-19 deaths. “Fatality data reported to the state consistently presents confusion and warrants a more rigorous review,” the news release read. Jason Mahon, a spokesman for the Department of Health, hasn’t explained what exactly this probe entailed or how it changed how deaths are reviewed. Instead, he issued a statement that read, “Following the Florida House of Representative’s investigation into COVID-19 deaths, the Florida State Surgeon General and the Florida Department of Health initiated a re-examination and review process to give COVID-19 death reporting a thorough vetting and ensure we were getting the most accurate data regarding the health impacts of the virus. The accuracy of data is critical as Florida continues to provide unprecedented transparency on all aspects of the pandemic. Oct. 22: A conservative blogger who writes for the Alachua Chronicle was given exclusive access to review death certificates that weren’t available to the public. She wrote a story with her husband that was published on Oct. 30 and called into question the accuracy of Florida’s death toll. Jennifer Cabrera and Len Cabrera concluded in their article, “[W]e can tell you definitively that Florida is counting deaths that were not directly caused by COVID-19.” The article appeared in the Alachua Chronicle, a local news site. It’s unclear exactly who provided the records to the Cabreras, but they wrote they were granted a few hours to examine a stack of about 700 “heavily redacted” death certificates. Jennifer Cabrera is also a contributor to Rational Ground, a blog that has questioned the severity of the pandemic. Another writer at Rational Ground, Kyle Lamb, joined the governor’s staff on Dec. 1 as an analyst and is earning an annual salary of $45,000, records show. Lamb, a former Ohio sports blogger, has boosted his Twitter following through posts downplaying the pandemic and questioning the effectiveness of masks. “I have no qualms about being a ‘sports guy’ moonlighting as a Covid-19 analyst,” he wrote on the Patreon website in a fundraising page for a podcast examining COVID-19 data. “Fact is, I’m not an ‘expert.’ I’m not a doctor, epidemiologist, virologist or scientist. I also don’t need to be.” The state has declined to share death certificates with the South Florida Sun Sentinel and others seeking to gain insight into the pandemic. Oct. 24:Trump questioned the COVID death toll at a campaign rally in Wisconsin. “This country and their reporting systems are really not doing it right,” he told the crowd. “If somebody has a really bad heart, and they’re close to death, even if they’re not, but they have a very bad heart and they get COVID, they put it down to COVID. Other countries put it down to a heart. So we have to be — we’re gonna to start looking at things because, you know, they have things a little bit backwards.” Oct. 24:With minor exceptions, Florida stopped including long-backlogged deaths in its daily counts and resumes consistently including them on Nov. 17, two weeks after the election. Oct. 30:Trump suggested, without citingevidence or specifics, that doctors were inflating the numbers for financial reasons during a rally in Michigan. “You know, our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID,” he said. “You know that right? I mean, our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say, ‘I’m sorry, but, you know, everybody dies of COVID.’” That claim drew a strong response from the American Medical Association, which issued a statement that doctors have not inflated COVID numbers. Lack of transparency Other states have provided detailed information on how COVID-19 death counts are tallied. Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services has a detailed webpage explaining the process. But Florida’s methods are shrouded in secrecy. In the early days of the pandemic in Florida, county medical examiners declared that someone died from COVID-19. In August, Florida moved that responsibility from public medical examiners to the doctors who treated the patients. The change was meant to relieve medical examiners who were swamped with COVID deaths. That policy change had another consequence: It cut off the public’s access to death summaries that had been provided by medical examiners, which helped to provide insight into how the pandemic was unfolding in Florida. Stephany, the chief medical examiner, said the public deserves more answers. “Who is reviewing?” he asked. “A medical professional or politicians? Are they getting medical records? Do they have the legal right to get them?”