Tiffany Dover is ready to exit the shadows
The conspiracy caucus’ legacy may linger long enough to bite us the next time a nasty virus appears. Brandy Zadrozny interviews Tiffany Dover, a Tennessee nurse unwillingly placed by anti-vaxxers at the center of their conspiracy theories (NBC News):
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.
Imaginations ran wild. Rumors of her death shambled along like zombies. Pursuers made her life and her childrens’ hell. She never posted a video otherwise addressed the rumors. She’s refused to talk until now and only to Zadrozny.
Soon after receiving her vaccine at CHI Memorial Hospital Chattanooga, reporters eagerly questioned her about getting the shot. “I’m sorry,” she said, and fainted.
Dover recovered quickly and went back to work. But she’d been caught on a Facebook livestream. Things went downhill from there.
Within 24 hours, Tiffany, or as she was being referred to at the time, “Tennessee nurse,” was trending on every social media platform. That night, she was featured on the conspiracy theory internet show Infowars. New videos about Tiffany were being posted to YouTube every 19 minutes, according to Paola Pascual-Ferrá, an associate professor of communication at Baltimore’s Loyola University Maryland, who was tracking the spread in real time. And Tiffany was going global: Most of the videos and posts about her were coming from outside the U.S., Pascual-Ferrá said.
The posts weren’t just replays of Tiffany’s fall. The conspiracy theories were evolving quickly with what seemed like the whole world contributing to an investigation where the conclusion had already been determined. For the thousands of people posting about Tiffany, she didn’t just faint. She was dead. And a fake death certificate started making the rounds.
She’d wanted to respond to the rumors and thousands of social media comments, but the CHI Memorial’s public relations department advised against it, Dover says. Overwhelmed with calls, the hospital would handle it. A short “Nursing Leadership Supports Tiffany!” video with everyone in masks simply spawned coverup rumors. Conspiracists decided Dover’s colleague, Amber Honea, had been substituted as a body double. Honea drew harrassment and hate mail. Dover’s disappearance did not help.
“Any aberration from the normal is just evidence for these conspiracy theorists,” said Rachel Moran, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public.
Likewise, in media and crisis communications, a related tactic known as “strategic silence” suggests that often the best response to rumors or conspiracy theories is to do nothing or risk amplifying the very things you hope to deflate. That, too, may be outdated.
When Dover finally posted vaction photos to her Instagram account months later, she drew a reprimand from the hospital questioning the “appropriateness and representation of self and hospital via social media.”
Her mother and grandmother contracted Covid. Her grandmother died in Dover’s unit.
The rumors continued to circulate. QAnon added Dover’s story to their portfolio of lunacy. The fallout for others concerns her.
“People have said I’m responsible for people not getting the vaccine,” Tiffany says. “That was hard to process. If people are using my name and my story to say, ‘Don’t get the vaccine,’ how many people didn’t receive it because of me? That’s hard.”
After over two years of silence, Dover is ready to respond with videos Zadrozny promises to post throughout the day.
Some days, I’m not sure what irritates me most. Farthest left activists see a dark cloud in every silver lining; every accomplishment is a betrayal, every compromise a sellout. Or the lunatics who (with foreign help) inhabit a non-Earth reality (and our state houses). There, pizza slices mean child sexual abuse and government-approved vaccines implant microchips so, presumably, the Deep State can keep track of our dead bodies.
Where have you gone, Walter Cronkite? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.