Over the weekend, we reported on the controversy surrounding a story out of Oklahoma on how some emergency rooms in the state were allegedly so overrun with patients who had overdosed on ivermectin that gunshot wound victims were having a hard time getting the care they needed.

The thinly-sourced story, which was filed by Oklahoma City’s KFOR news station, ran with a headline that read “Patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals, ambulances” and quoted one ER doctor, Jason McElyea, as saying that “ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated” because of alleged ivermectin overdoses.

Naturally, the story was picked up by national news outlets like Rolling Stone and The Hill, as well as some international outlets like BBC News and The Guardian. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow tweeted the link to the story last Thursday, and her tweet is still up as of this writing. The problem with the story was that one of the hospitals McElyea had previously worked in (NHS – Sequoyah) not only posted a complete denial of his claims on their website but also pointed out that McElyea had not worked at their ER “in over two months.”

Further, at the time, I checked the websites and Facebook pages of three other hospitals Dr. McElyea is said to have worked for in the past (McAlester Regional Cancer Center, Integris Grove Hospital, and Memorial Hospital of Stilwell), and while they didn’t have anything on their pages similar to NHS – Sequoyah’s regarding Dr. McElyea, there was also no warning message about the dangers of people taking dosages of ivermectin meant for horses, which you would think you’d see if their ERs were being besieged with people who had overdosed to the point other patients were having to be turned away.

Not surprisingly, Democrat apologist/CNN “fact-checker” Daniel Dale rushed to get to the bottom of the story and eagerly proclaimed Monday afernoon that the story wasn’t totally fake because one of the hospitals McElyea is affiliated with issued a statement claiming that they had treated a “handful” of patients for ivermectin overdoses:

Here’s a statement from a hospital that Oklahoma doctor is affiliated with, supporting his comments about ivermectin use contributing to hospital congestion in the state – though not suggesting, as viral stories did, that ivermectin is a main cause of the backup. (Thread!) pic.twitter.com/1AJF719u5x

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 6, 2021

The discerning reader will note that the big issue with the original KFOR story was not that patients were overdosing on ivermectin; rather, it was the suggestion that gunshot victims and other patients were having to be turned away and in some instances due to ambulances not being available due to the sheer volume of patients supposedly ODing on the drug. Integris Grove’s statement did not support such claims, but you wouldn’t know that based on Dale’s false framing of both it and the KFOR story.

Dale went on in a lengthy thread, which you can read in full here, to engage in “bothsidesism,” saying that while the story was “poorly framed” that critics of the story on the right were also to blame for jumping to conclusions about the entire story being fake:

As far as I can tell so far, what happened is the doctor gave an interview to a local outlet in which he cited ivermectin use as one reason some hospitals are congested. The outlet then framed ivermectin use as the main cause of the congestion, which it obviously isn’t. 2/

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 6, 2021

Then national and international media outlets aggregated the initial, poorly framed local story without themselves doing due diligence to examine the extent to which ivermectin was contributing to the OK hospital congestion. And Maddow and others tweeted out the stories. 3/

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 6, 2021

So: This was not great by anyone in the sharing chain. But then, some the people criticizing others for jumping to conclusions themselves jumped to conclusions based on a release from one OK hospital system that said it hadn’t seen any patients with ivermectin problems. 4/

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 6, 2021

That hospital is only one of the ones this doctor is affiliated with, so its word was not actually definitive proof that the doctor was making the whole thing up. We now know at least one other hospital the doctor works with has indeed seen patients with ivermectin issues. 5/

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 6, 2021

Dale appeared on his network this morning to expand on his viewpoint that no side had clean hands in this story, even as he continued to falsely frame it himself:

CNN’s “fact checker” @ddale8 criticizes conservative media for “jumping to conclusions” about the fake Oklahoma/Ivermectin story. He says one hospital had a “handful of patients” and thus the story isn’t 100 percent false. pic.twitter.com/FCRlSUSrKc

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 7, 2021

How ironic is it that in a story that is shown to be fake news that Dale, a supposed “fact-checker,” spreads fake news himself? Again, for the record, the story was not just about ERs being “congested” with people who had OD’d on ivermectin, the story suggested patients with other issues were being turned away from the ERs with some not even able to get ambulance service to their homes.

Here we are some 5 or 6 days after KFOR filed the report, and not a single hospital in the state period, whether one that McElyea worked for or not, has stepped forth to state ivermectin patients are overwhelming their system. While there have been hospital-confirmed reports of ICUs being at or near capacity due to the Wuhan virus, there have been ZERO confirmations from any of them on the claims about ivermectin that came from McElyea and KFOR about turning away other patients.

Instead of clearing up the matter, Dale – in his efforts to protect the journalism industry and to of course dunk on conservatives – actually muddied the waters even more by conflating “congestion” in an ER with “turning away” patients. Until even one hospital goes on the record to confirm the KFOR report, this story will continue to reside in my “fake news” file, as it should everyone else’s.

Flashback: CNN’s Daniel Dale Sounds the Final Death Knell for Fact-Checking