CCP Spokeswoman Parrots Debunked Rebekah Jones Conspiracy Theory

A spokeswoman for the China Foreign Ministry endorsed Rebekah Jones’s false claim that she was fired from her role as dashboard manager for the Florida Department of Health after refusing to alter raw data on coronavirus infections.

“Why was Rebekah Jones, the manager instructed to take the data down, terminated and later fired after she told her supervisors the removal was the “wrong call”?” spokeswoman Hua Chunying wrote on Twitter.

Jones claimed in May 2020 that she was fired because she refused to alter data to make the pandemic response Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s administration look better. However, Jones never had access to raw data on coronavirus cases and was fired for insubordination, according to public records obtained by National Review‘s Charles Cooke.

Jones later wrote on Twitter that she was never asked to remove raw data on coronavirus cases from the dashboard. (Jones deleted the tweet soon after publication.)

“Deleting deaths was never something I was asked to do. I’ve never claimed it was,” the tweet read.

Hua also pointed to a story on potential coronavirus cases in Florida in January-February 2020.

“The website of Florida‘s Department of Health showed 171 patients had coronavirus symptoms or positive test results in January&February, before any cases were announced to the public,” Hua wrote. “Why was the data removed?”

That data was in fact reposted on the site after two days, author Matt Shapiro wrote in National Review.

Hua has used her account to insinuate that the coronavirus pandemic may have originated in the U.S. Hua called on the U.S. to allow investigations at biological laboratories at Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina in a Twitter thread on Friday.

“In order to shift its responsibility in poor [pandemic] response, the U.S. has been busy with politicization, stigmatization, and turning” the investigation into the origins of the pandemic “into its tool,” Hua wrote.