[Discuss Thrower]

"This in no way means that Doering’s account is untrue. But it provides, at minimum, some important context that was completely absent from the CNN interview and from all the media amplification that followed. Little or no effort was made to assess the scope of the problem that Doering so memorably described. How many Covid-19 patients in South Dakota are really so blinkered by disinformation that they're enraged at their caregivers and, in their final moments on earth, still dispute what’s happening? No one bothered to find out.

...

In July we heard reports of rampant “Covid parties.” One version of this story had college students in Tuscaloosa hosting parties with infected guests, and then betting on who else would catch the virus. Another took the form of a second-hand account from a nurse in San Antonio. A 30-year-old patient was said to have admitted just before he died that he’d gotten sick by going to a Covid party. “I thought it was a hoax,” he allegedly told the nurse, “but it’s not.”

As WIRED’s Gilad Edelman reported at the time, none of these accounts held up to further scrutiny—yet each had been picked up from its original source and then amplified by larger publications that added little or no additional reporting. There’s good reason for these stories to be passed along, Edelman wrote. The hospital administrator who first went public with the story of the last-breath Covid-party confession is “trying desperately to get the American public to take the coronavirus seriously. If she hears a perfect cautionary tale, it isn’t necessarily her responsibility to investigate whether it’s too perfect before passing it along. It is, however, precisely the job of reporters.”

Doering’s account is similarly a perfect fit for a narrative that has already been written, and one that has been passed along by respected people and prestigious outlets with scarcely any diligence at all."