The NBC Nightly News will air an interview with Tiffany Dover, who fainted after getting the COVID-19 vaccine on live television leading to a number of anti-vaccine advocates to sound the alarm.
“I didn’t die that day,” Tiffany told NBC. “But the life I knew did.”
As a nurse, her employer wasn't about to speak out about her private medical experience. For years, she faced a flood of attacks on herself, her children and her husband.
"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," wrote Brandy Zadrozny for NBC. "On Instagram, users flooded posts of her children with demands that she speak out. 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."
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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 told Zadrozny. "I don’t know why I trust you now, but I’m choosing to."
She said that she regrets not putting out a video or a statement about what happened and informed everyone that everything was normal.
“That would’ve been a perfect moment for us to speak out,” she said. “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," she confessed.
“I wanted so badly to tell what this vaccine meant to me,” Tiffany said about her experience. “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.”
She was interviewed after coming to by Chattanooga, Tennessee's NBC affiliate WRCB on video. She explained that she is prone to fainting, usually when she feels pain, but that she was fine and went back to work. A co-worker told her it wasn't a big deal and not to worry about it. It was just a local news station, after all. And then she became the poster person for the anti-vaccine movement.
"Imagine being in high-stress situations, emotions are already high, and then the phone never stops ringing?” Tiffany explained. “It’s enough to make you crazy.”
Today, she's safe, she's happy and she wants to set the record straight. The interview with air on NBC's Nightly News Monday.
