On September 30, Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico told attendees of a virtual USHBC event that he'd gone to urgent care in Dallas the night before and been diagnosed with the flu. Specific. Detailed. Urgent care. Dallas. The previous night.
Then on October 11, sitting across from NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth reporter Phil Prazan, Talarico said he'd gone to his primary care physician.
Those are two different stories. An urgent care clinic in Dallas is not the same as your primary care doctor, and Talarico didn't bother explaining the shift. He just swapped one version for the other and kept talking, as if nobody would notice that the details of his own medical narrative changed between tellings. As 100 Percent Fed Up reported, the two accounts aren't necessarily impossible to reconcile — someone could visit both — but Talarico never offered that reconciliation. He just quietly edited the script.
The doctor visit discrepancy might be a footnote if the rest of the timeline weren't so strange. Talarico's last verified public appearances in Texas came on September 26. By September 29, he was reportedly at a fundraiser in New York. On September 30, he appeared virtually — not in person — claiming the flu. Then he vanished from public view for roughly 12 days, choosing to resurface at a music festival in Austin, surrounded by thousands of people of all things.
Independent reporter Nick Sortor and fellow journalist Rhein Amacher releasing a recorded phone call they say features an employee at the Lindner Center of Hope — a mental health facility in Mason, Ohio — stating that Talarico had been discharged. Sortor posted the recording with the caption: "Ohio mental hospital CONFIRMS James Talarico was discharged from the facility earlier this week. The 'flu' thing was a BIG FAT LIE."
The recording has not been verified by official sources. The caller's identity hasn't been confirmed on the record. The Lindner Center itself hasn't issued a public statement as of publishing.
But here's what's also worth stating plainly: Talarico's own campaign response didn't exactly clear things up. Spokesman JT Ennis issued a statement calling the allegation "a lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory," adding that "last week James Talarico was home in Austin, Texas recovering from the flu." Home in Austin — except his September 30 account placed him at urgent care in Dallas the night before. The campaign's denial managed to introduce yet another geographic wrinkle into a timeline that was already hard to follow.
Talarico tried offense in an interview this week, joking that he'd heard reports of Ken Paxton having "clinical levels of cowardice." A candidate under fire for a 12-day disappearance and a shifting medical story probably shouldn't be the one diagnosing his opponent.