Internal emails indicate Jones resisted when her bosses told her to remove the raw data from the website, meaning that users could no longer download it for analysis.
The data had just been downloaded and used by newspapers to report that sickness in Florida emerged as early as January, a fact that led some to second-guess whether DeSantis acted quickly enough to shut down the state.
In a May 4 email from Jones to Department of Health IT Director Craig Curry, she wrote: “I’m not pulling our primary resource for coronavirus data because he wants to stick it to journalists and make them copy and paste from the tables in the pdfs. If it’s in the dashboard, it’s public. Period. There is no way around that.
"We have gained national — no, international — notoriety for being the best state in the country with data transparency. I’m not trashing all of that work and progress because he got asked a few questions by reporters — which I read and were completely fair and legitimate questions that should have been asked.”
It’s not clear who Jones was referring to when she said “he.”
Florida’s coronavirus dashboard has been the state’s main hub for illustrating the pandemic’s impact on Florida.
About two hours later, Curry emailed, telling her that "per Dr. [Carina] Blackmore, disable the ability to export the data to files from the dashboard immediately.”
“This is the wrong call,” Jones responded.
The next morning, Blackmore emailed Jones and Curry to “get the web populated in a way that doesn’t expose the raw data to those who don’t need access.”
Jones, who was GIS manager in the Division of Disease Control and Health Protection, publicized her plight Friday in a mass email to users of the data. She notified everyone that she’d been removed from involvement in the dashboard and that it had been assigned to employees she didn’t think would give it around-the-clock attention.
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