Florida loses legal battle to keep covid data secret

The state government of Ron DeSantis in Florida, which manipulated covid data to show deaths falling during a surge, has agreed to release old data and to publish new covid data, abandoning a two year legal battle to keep the data secret.Although the state continues to deny wrongdoing, Florida’s Department of Health agreed in an out-of-court settlement to pay the $152 000 legal fees of its opponents, which include a former Democratic congressman, the Florida Center for Government Accountability, the First Amendment Foundation, and several media outlets including the Associated Press, Miami Herald, and Washington Post.Florida initially maintained a daily pandemic dashboard giving vital daily data on infections, hospital admissions, and deaths, but in June 2021, during a lull in cases, it was one of several Republican governed states to scale back its reporting, moving from daily to weekly reports.Like all states, Florida continued to report data to the Centers…
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