From Jones v. Florida Dep't of Health, decided by Florida Court of Appeal Judges Joseph Lewis, Ross Bilbrey, and Thomas Winokur:
Jones was … the Environmental Health Program Consultant in the [Florida Department of Health] Division of Disease Control and Health Protection. In March 2020, as part of DOH's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Jones was assigned to work on the Department's "COVID-19 Dashboard" to provide an interactive illustration of COVID-19 testing data to the public. The parties agreed that Jones' chain of command began with her immediate supervisor, IT Director Craig Curry. Their Division Director was Dr. Carina Blackmore. Authority proceeded to then-Deputy Secretary Dr. Shamarial Roberson ….
[O]n or about April 9, 2020, Curry learned that Jones had posted Facebook messages identifying herself as the person who maintained DOH's COVID-19 Dashboard and explaining the information displayed on the Dashboard. About twelve days later, Curry discovered that Jones had given an interview to DOH's outside geographic information system (GIS) vendor describing her work as the Dashboard manager.
Curry also found out about a blog Jones published, representing herself as the author of DOH's COVID-19 Dashboard and posting charts of DOH data she had created stemming from her job duties. Curry was concerned that Jones had not obtained permission from DOH's Office of Communications before making these public statements as a DOH representative about the Dashboard information.
In late April 2020, to facilitate the State's plan to reopen counties with lower rates of new COVID-19 infections, Jones was tasked with creating and presenting reopening criteria to include on the Dashboard. Jones presented her work on this "county scorecard project," including positivity rates for each county, to Deputy Secretary Roberson on April 26, 2020.
According to Jones, Roberson disapproved of Jones' presentation because her COVID-19 figures exceeded the target percentage rates for reopening many counties. {The veracity of Jones' allegations is immaterial to our disposition.} Jones testified that Roberson instructed her to reconfigure the data by lowering the infection rates and exempt counties with smaller populations from the "scorecard" materials.
Jones alleged that she considered this a directive to falsify the data, and she refused to do so. Jones added that ultimately, the county scorecard data was not published. Although she disagreed with instructions given by Roberson, Jones did amend the COVID-19 Dashboard to reflect new case positivity rates and other data provided by DOH epidemiologists.
Jones continued to publish data to the public through DOH's open data hub, including data not approved for publication by DOH. On May 5, 2020, Jones was instructed to take the data hub offline temporarily so the information could be vetted, but she was openly defiant…. Jones was removed from her assignment on the COVID-19 Dashboard on May 6, 2020.
Jones admitted that on May 7, 2020, she altered the Dashboard files and removed several team members' administrative software rights, preventing their access and hindering their ability to do their jobs. Curry instructed Jones to restore the administrative privileges for her colleagues and directed her not to impede their work with the Dashboard. But Jones never complied. Instead, Curry had to contact the software vendor directly to get the access privileges reinstated.
The following week, on May 14, 2020, Jones texted Curry that she was considering filing a whistleblower complaint about "how I'm being treated, the Dashboard mess, gross mismanagement." … The next day, Jones emailed an outside GIS COVID data listserve group informing the recipients that she was no longer the manager of the COVID-19 Dashboard and that the new team running the Dashboard was not expected to "continue the same level of accessibility and transparency" as she had….
