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fresh Mandy on Tiffany Dover.

Misinformation

Conspiracy theorists made Tiffany Dover into an anti-vaccine icon. She’s finally ready to talk about it.

The Tennessee nurse stayed quiet in hopes that her silence would quiet false claims of her death. Now, she says it only hurt.

April 10, 2023, 6:00 AM EDT

By Brandy Zadrozny

HIGDON, Ala. — Tiffany Dover is alive. Sitting across from Tiffany at her kitchen table, this is obvious. She breathes in and out. She gestures with her hands. She laughs generously. Dimples carve into both cheeks when she smiles, which she does a lot. Her eyes are wide and bright and terribly blue.

“I didn’t die that day,” Tiffany tells me. “But the life I knew did.”

I’d been following Tiffany since that day, Dec. 17, 2020. Like thousands of others, I first saw her on a livestream during the national rollout of Covid vaccines to front-line workers, where Tiffany became one of the first people in the U.S. to get a shot. I was also watching when she fainted immediately after, launching a wave of misinformation and conspiracy theories that would eventually unravel her life.

The modern anti-vaccine movement was powered by unverified stories of the dead and damaged. Tiffany wasn’t the first person to be swallowed up in an anti-vaccine propaganda campaign, and she wouldn’t be the last.

The unsettling thing about it — to me and the more well-meaning conspiracy theorists who took up an interest in Tiffany’s case — was that she seemed to just disappear.

I called and sent emails, but Tiffany never got back to me. Her employer declined media interviews on her behalf, and she stopped posting on her own social media accounts. I made several visits to her Alabama home and to CHI Memorial Hospital Chattanooga. But I never spoke to her.

So all I could do was watch, as Tiffany became the worst kind of internet celebrity, as she trended on every social media platform, as fact-checkers around the world worked to dispel reports of her death, and as the theories about her evolved, spun up by a phenomenon researchers call participatory misinformation. On Instagram, users flooded posts of her children with demands that she speak. People hounded her husband on Facebook and branched out to the social media pages of extended family members, colleagues and acquaintances, urging them to come clean about what had happened to Tiffany and the cover-up afterward. They made websites. They led Facebook groups. They recorded songs. They came to her house. Everyone wanted to know what happened to Tiffany.

I reported what I could about Tiffany and how the anti-vaccine community had used her story in a podcast last year. Her silence spoke for itself. It seemed like Tiffany had made up her mind. So I was surprised when she texted me in February. Tiffany said she was ready to talk about everything that had happened to her and offered to make a video answering any questions I had. I asked her for one better: Let me come back out to Alabama.

Tiffany reluctantly accepted. Sitting across from her, Tiffany felt like the person I had seen in hundreds of her social media posts: bubbly and warm, a doting wife and mother, a dedicated nurse. But she felt delicate, too. No wonder, given what she’s been through.

> https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/tiffany-dover-conspiracy-theorists-silence-rcna69401

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“I was in a dark place and I did not have it in me to do this, because I didn’t know if I could trust you,” Tiffany tells me as I’m across from her, face to face. “I don’t know why I trust you now, but I’m choosing to.”

Tiffany Dover is alive, but she’s never addressed the rumors. She never put out a statement or made a video about what she went through, and she regrets it. She thinks she should have continued to post on social media and act as if everything was normal — because it was.

“That would’ve been a perfect moment for us to speak out,” she says. “Yes, I did pass out. This could be a side effect. You can pass out from receiving a vaccine, but that’s OK because it can also save your life. So it’s worth it.”

“The silence is what flamed this.”

Tiffany’s drawl gives away that she’s lived her whole life in the same place: the small towns dotting the borders where Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama meet. She and her husband, Dustin, fell in love when they were young teenagers and had two kids.

Tiffany went to college while she raised her babies, later graduating and taking a job at CHI Memorial Hospital Chattanooga. She’d started as a nurse caring for non-critical-care cardiac patients, but she found her calling on the intensive care unit and emergency teams.

In her personal life, Tiffany thought of herself as timid and sheltered. But to her own surprise, she thrived at work in the most chaotic situations — the moments where a wasted second or a single mistake could mean the difference between life and death. She felt calm in that chaos. And in 2020, after nearly 10 years at CHI Memorial, her boss announced that she was leaving and that Tiffany would be promoted to interim manager.

Before she could get comfortable in her new role, the pandemic hit. And Tiffany’s unit, which had previously served cardiac patients, had a new mandate. It would be the Covid ward.

The work was grueling. Along with their regular nursing duties, patients needed to be proned, or flipped, multiple times a day just to breathe. Since visitors still weren’t allowed, the nurses held up iPads so families could say goodbye. The unit was always full, and their patients were always so sick.

“There were times when it felt hopeless,” Tiffany says. “Almost like we were a palliative care unit. Death after death, after death.”

December 2020 had been the deadliest month of the pandemic, and Tiffany’s unit was exceptionally busy on the day that Covid vaccines came to CHI Memorial. Tiffany was elated to receive hers, more so because of what it meant: Soon everyone would have access to vaccines and the constant death would stop.

She hadn’t had a minute for lunch, so when it was time to get her vaccination, Tiffany grabbed a piece of sushi from a co-worker and headed down to the staging area, where news cameras were waiting to capture the occasion.

In a video that continues to circulate the internet, Tiffany sits at one of three vaccination stations. Her dark brown hair is parted to the left, her hands are folded neatly in her lap. Someone in a white coat gives her the shot in her left arm and Tiffany claps.

Minutes later, Tiffany was asked to speak in front of the assembled cameras. Tiffany didn’t know that the news stations were livestreaming the footage on Facebook, but she was happy to talk on camera. As Tiffany stood and spoke, however, a familiar wave washed over her. Her arm began to throb, she got sweaty and dizzy, and all she could do was say, “I’m sorry,” before she fainted into the arms of two nearby doctors.

“I wanted so badly to tell what this vaccine meant to me,” Tiffany says now. “I thought that I could just push through because it was important to me and I thought my body might respect that, but it didn’t care. It did what it does.”

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>>18677762

If it's the same Tiffany, I know where some of the payoff money went