NBC’s reporter, Brandy Zadrozny, has followed Tiffany Dover since Dec. 17, 2020 when the world watched 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. On international television, Tiffany fainted after getting the shot and since then, anti-vaxxer freaks claimed she died and exploited her experience to further spread misinformation about the COVID-19 shots, and justify their lunatic conspiracy theories. But guess what? She’s alive but has been off the radar because her life has turned upside down because of the events that followed after getting the COVID-19 shot.
— Manchester Chronicle 🐝 (@WithyGrove) April 5, 2023
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.
Tiffany Dover received the Covid vaccine and fainted when she stood to answer questions at an event.
That moment spawned an anti-vaccine conspiracy theory that she died and a body double replaced her.
