Last week, KFOR, a local news outlet in Oklahoma, published a story that contained some terrifying information: so many people in the state were hospitalized due to overdoses of ivermectin—a drug originally designed for horses, which some anti-vaccine sources have promoted (incorrectly) as a defense against COVID-19—that there was no room in intensive-care units for other patients, including those with gunshot wounds. The story contained quotes from an interview with Dr. Jason McElyea, a local physician, and was quickly picked up by a number of national outlets, including Rolling Stone magazine, the Guardian, Newsweek magazine, and Business Insider. A producer for MSNBC repeated the claim on Twitter (although she later deleted it), as did the Rachel Maddow show.

Not long afterward, the story started to spring some major holes. As detailed on Twitter by Drew Holden—a public-affairs consultant in Washington, DC, and former assistant to a Republican congressman—and by Scott Alexander on his popular blog, Astral Codex Ten, the first sign that all was not right came with a statement from a large Oklahoma hospital, which said that there was no bed shortage due to ivermectin overdoses, and that the doctor quoted in the KFOR report hadn’t worked there in months. Others pointed out that in his original interview with the Oklahoma news outlet, McElyea hadn’t said anything about ivermectin cases crowding out other patients, but that the initial story and subsequent coverage had linked separate comments about ivermectin overdoses and scarce beds.

The episode caught fire with right-wing Twitter trolls and conservative commentators, who represented it as yet another example of the mainstream media’s tendency to willfully publish news stories to either make citizens of rural areas look stupid, or to overstate the risk or frequency of non-mainstream COVID treatments. Many pointed to the tweet from the Maddow account as evidence that no one fact-checks their statements any more, especially when they serve the purpose of making right-wing anti-vaxxers and COVID denialists look bad. Others used the Rolling Stone story as an opportunity to revisit the magazine’s infamous 2014 investigative story on an alleged rape at the University of Virginia, which collapsed after statements made by the single source it was based on couldn’t be independently verified.