Florida police have raided the home of data scientist Rebekah Jones, who built the state’s official Covid-19 database. Ms Jones has accused the US Department of Health of manipulating virus data in order to relax pandemic restrictions. She posted a series of videos of the raid on Twitter, in which armed officers seized her phone and laptop. The force said it was responding to a hack of the state’s emergency health alert system, which Ms Jones denies. Ms Jones was fired from her job at the Department of Health in May after making her accusations, and has since maintained her own database, independently tracking the spread of the virus.

At the time, a spokesperson for the department described her as “disruptive”. In the hack, which is said to have taken place in early November, an unauthorised message was sent to members of the emergency response team urging them to “speak up” before thousands more people died from Covid-19. The message was obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.(BBC)…[+]