Why are there no repurcussions for what essentially amounts to fraud? Why is it acceptable for politicians to commit fraud, but not for anyone else?
(In fact, I think Florida was actually the state where people took a all-time high spike in newly-reported coronavirus deaths due to the state reporting a bunch of old deaths at once as proof reopening was killing people. And that spike happened on the same day - May the 5th - as this woman complained that she was supposedly removed for "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.")
We'll take your word for it. I assume you have ascertained that what your sources are claiming is correct and that the data displayed previously was also correct?
I can think of many other possibilities and prefer to wait for an official investigation before yelling for someone's head.
Communication is always political, and how information is represented is important, and public opinion matters.
For example in Quebec, there are 'big numbers' of cases, but almost 80% of the deaths are in long-term-care homes.
So you could have one person who doesn't want that data to be highlighted, while some other person does because frankly, that information might frame Covid as ultimately being less risky and yet, it's more transparent.
Hydroxychloroquine is another kind of example - in reality, there may be some benefit for this, but it's really not helpful to have the general public tweeting about it, because it's not generally useful, and the impact will be overwhelming on health officials and cause shortages for those non-covid people who really need it. So the information is either suppressed or 'led' in the direction that public health and safety officials want.
So if the state official was literally trying to get someone to literally just change the data and make it look better, this is obviously going to be a whistleblower case. But this may not be the situation.
Public communication is hard. Trump is probably the anti-example.
Everything is marketing, and I would certainly say it's plausible that a developer that was this much in the spotlight would be steering the conversation to at least frame him or herself in a positive light if not outright promote their politics (even if that is just one of transparency/government accountability).
I think the HNer thing to do is 'believe whistleblowers no matter what' but I'm of the inclination everyone is tricky and that we are deluded by our own egos quite a lot.
We need more context.
That's a far-fetched hypothesis, bordering on conspiratorial thinking.
A more mundane, realistic -and more common- scenario: due to mistakes made (as noted in OP: downtime, misplaced data files, APIs needlessly changed, etc.,) the responsibility was transferred to another team.