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

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.”

Tiffany came to, and she was almost immediately interviewed by Chattanooga, Tennessee’s NBC affiliate WRCB on video. She told the reporter that she was prone to fainting, usually when she felt pain, but that she was fine. Then she went back to work. 

Back in her unit, she told a co-worker what had happened. 

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I saw it. It was live on Facebook.” 

Still, he convinced her she needn’t worry. It was just a local news station. How bad could it be? 

Turns out, very. 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. 

Meanwhile, the phone in CHI Memorial’s Covid unit rang off the hook. News outlets and conspiracy theorists alike, they all wanted to talk to Tiffany. 

“Imagine being in high-stress situations, emotions are already high, and then the phone never stops ringing?” Tiffany says. “It’s enough to make you crazy.”

Tiffany gained tens of thousands of followers on her personal Facebook and Instagram profiles, and the comments never stopped. She knew she needed to do something. So she opened up the notes app on her phone and wrote out drafts of what she might say in a video responding to the rumors. 

But she never made that video. She didn’t respond to the thousands of comments on her social media pages, either. Because, she said, her employer told her not to. 

Tiffany says that the day after she fainted she got a call from CHI Memorial’s public relations department. The person on the phone said the hospital had been overwhelmed with the attention. She told Tiffany not to answer any outside calls and under no circumstances should she post to social media. She told Tiffany that the hospital would handle things from here. 

In a series of interviews and emails with NBC News from 2020 until this March, CHI Memorial Hospital has repeatedly denied knowledge of any directive asking Tiffany not to speak or post. In reply to detailed emails of Tiffany’s account sent to the hospital and its parent company, CommonSpirit Health, CHI Memorial’s director of public relations, Karen Long, replied with a statement. It read in full, “We have no new information.”

On Monday, Dec. 21, 2020, four days after her faint, CHI Memorial unveiled its plan. The official response was formed through a “collaboration between the marketing team and hospital executives,” Long said in an 2021 interview.

CHI Memorial posted a short video to its Facebook page. In it, Tiffany stands at the foot of a staircase. She’s surrounded by co-workers who are all wearing masks and holding signs with the date and messages like “Nursing Leadership Supports Tiffany!” 

An nonexhaustive list of reasons why this video made everything worse: Neither Tiffany, nor anyone else, ever speaks. The whole crew just shifts awkwardly for 21 seconds. They’re all wearing masks. Tiffany forgot her white coat at home, so they put her in someone else’s ill-fitting vest. She had her hair curled by a colleague that morning and parted it in the middle, instead of on the side as it was in the vaccine video. The lighting in this new video was much dimmer than it had been in the room with the news cameras. So Tiffany’s electric blue eyes? You could hardly see them. 

“It wasn’t a good look for us,” Tiffany says. “It made people suspicious, because if I’m OK, why am I not just talking? Why are we standing there?”

Far from being the proof of life the hospital had expected it to be, the new video was just fodder for conspiracy theorists who took it as evidence of an expanding theory. Now they were convinced that not only was Tiffany dead, but that the hospital and pharmaceutical companies had replaced her with a body double. 

Incidentally, the video also created another victim. Conspiracy theorists looking to identify the fake Tiffany set their aim at Tiffany’s colleague, Amber Honea. Amber and Tiffany had worked together at CHI Memorial for years. They were good friends, and besides looking quite a bit alike, they had a lot in common — so much, in fact, that one doctor jokingly called them by each other’s names. 

Conspiracy theorists found Amber among Tiffany’s friends and in her photos and decided that she must be the body double. They made videos about Amber and sent her messages. 

Amber said they accused her of “participating in the biggest cover-up in history.” They called her a traitor to her country, to her profession and to her friend. They invoked her son. They harassed members of her extended family. They threatened to show up at her house. 

“It was very scary and frustrating,” Amber said. “Tiffany and I had lots of conversations about, what do we do? Where do we go from here? How do we approach this? Do we need a lawyer?” 

Amber, who left CHI Memorial in 2021, said administrators recommended that she not say anything publicly, but offered little additional help. Amber said her employer suggested she file a police report over the threats, but she never did because she felt like the threats were “just a lot of talk,” and she didn’t have evidence of a crime. 

Of the hospital’s response, Amber said, “It was not very supportive.”