When John Pierce, the anti-vaxxer and criminal defense attorney representing some 17 defendants charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, didn’t show up for a court date last week, a stand-in offered a suspiciously equivocal explanation.

“Mr. Pierce is in the hospital, we believe, with COVID-19, on a ventilator, non-responsive,” Pierce’s 30-year-old law partner Ryan Joseph-Gene Marshall told the judge.

A slew of credulous headlines followed about Pierce’s apparent intubation. No one by that name had been admitted to Cedars-Sinai or the UCLA Medical Center, the two major hospitals near where Pierce lives, and details about his condition were scant.