US police storm home of Florida virus whistleblower

US agents have stormed the home of a whistleblower scientist who revealed that the US government was manipulating hospitals' data to bring down the official death toll of COVID-19. 

Armed police on Monday raided the home of former Health Department analyst Rebekah D. Jones in Tallahasse, Florida.

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Police raid home of whistleblower  Fla. Health Dept. scientist 

The 31-year-old American data scientist, geographer, and whistleblower, who specializes in Geographic Information System (GIS) data science, had formerly worked as a data analyst at the Florida Department of Health (DoH) in Tallahassee.

After announcing publicly in May that state officials had asked her to manipulate COVID-19 data, she was fired as the Department’s geographic information systems manager.

The ousted data scientist had reported that the government officials wanted her to wrongly manipulate data related to COVID-19 in order to reduce the official death toll of the pandemic to make the officials look better.

Jones, who has been engaged in a media brawl with Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis over the alleged under-reporting of COVID-19 death figures, shared video footage of the police raid on her home.

Jones said she was shown a court warrant based on a complaint by the Florida Health Department.

Following the armed raid on her home, Jones accused Gov. DeSantis of trying to "intimidate scientists and get back at me, while trying to get to my sources."

Jones, who launched her own dashboard tracking cases in June, has continuously insisted that the administration of the Republican governor of Florida was falsifying data to make the Sunshine State – where the number of COVID-19 deaths had topped that of any other state – look better. 

Florida officials, however, said the police's armed raid was linked to a recent computer hack at the DoH.

The hacker had reportedly sent DoH staff an unauthorized message urging them to "speak out" against the government fraud. 

An investigator at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said the messages had been traced to Jones' IP address at her home.

Jones has been interviewed with CNN, CBS News, MSNBC and other major news channels.

In the interviews she revealed the government’s efforts to manipulate virus data to raise awareness about the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Earlier this year, a misdemeanor criminal stalking case was filed against the whistleblower who revealed Florida’s COVID-19 lies.

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The United States tops the world with the number of its coronavirus cases reaching 15,377,814.

The death toll from COVID-19 in the US is 290,880. The United States tops the globe in this regard.

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