A nurse who became an unwilling icon for conspiracy theorists when she fainted after receiving one of the first COVID vaccines has stepped forward to tell her story.
Tiffany Dover became the symbol of the anti-vaccine movement ever since she passed out on Dec. 17, 2020, after receiving one of the very first vaccines due to her first-responder status. Tiffany’s fainting spell was captured on livestream for the national vaccine rollout, and soon rumors swirled that she had died from the injection.
NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny asked Dover what life has been like since “anti-vaxxers and the movement are using you as their poster girl.”
“It’s hard to think that you are being used to deter somebody from getting the vaccine and that was really hard for me to cope with,” Dover said. “I would have people say, ‘how many people did not receive the vaccine because of you?’ It’s crazy when you go in to save lives and something like that happens.”
Dover said anti-vaxxers harassed her on social media, showed up at the family home, and even claimed she was part of a pedophile ring. The harassment got so bad that Dover “disappeared” off social media and became virtually unreachable.
The Tennessee nurse recently reappeared on her TikTok channel, and began her recording with, “I guess I’ll start with, I’m alive.”
Zadrozny cleared up exactly what happened to Dover on that day: “She got a vaccine and she fainted. It happens all the time, literally all the time. It’s funny because Tiffany said to me, ‘What a teachable moment that would have been if I had been able to speak out and said, hey, you might faint after you get a vaccine but it’s worth it because it could save your life.’”
Dover suggested she did not speak out earlier because hospital’s public relations department handled inquiries about the incident.
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