Last updated on April 25th, 2023 at 01:02 pm
This article about the anti-vaxxer harassment of Tiffany Dover was written by Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco, CA), who is a frequent contributor to this and many other blogs, providing in-depth, and intellectually stimulating, articles about vaccines, medical issues, social policy, and the law.
Professor Reiss writes extensively in law journals about the social and legal policies of vaccination. Additionally, Reiss is also a member of the Parent Advisory Board of Voices for Vaccines, a parent-led organization that supports and advocates for on-time vaccination and the reduction of vaccine-preventable diseases. She is also a member of the Vaccines Working Group on Ethics and Policy.
For several weeks in late 2020 and early 2021, anti-vaccine activists from all around the world targeted a nurse from Tennessee, Tiffany Dover, stalking and harassing her, her employer, and her family. This post describes the kind of behavior Tiffany Dover was subjected to, offers some steps people in that situation can take, and points to the features of social media that make this kind of targeted harassment possible.
Ms. Dover was not the only – or even the worst – case of this kind of sustained harassment in the past years. The worst is probably the extensive, ugly, horrible targeting of the families who lost children in the Sandy Hook shooting.
This kind of behavior is highly problematic and needs a response.
What happened to Tiffany Dover?
On December 17, a hospital in Tennessee – CHI Memorial Hospital – gave its healthcare workers the first doses of the much-awaited COVID-19 vaccine. One of the people receiving the vaccine was a critical care nurse, Tiffany Dover.
Shortly after the vaccine, Ms. Dover passed out. Since the event was televised, the fainting was made public. Unsurprisingly, anti-vaccine activists, seeking to scare others about COVID-19 vaccines, deceptively edited the video, showing the fainting but not the nurse’s quick recovery, and the shortened video went viral.
As was pointed out by others, fainting after vaccination is not unusual – and not generally harmful. It’s almost certainly related more to the needle and the process than anything in the vaccine. People do faint after, for example, blood draws.
Ms. Dover herself explained, right after she revived – almost immediately – from her faint:
I have a history of having an overactive vagal response and with that, if I have pain from anything, hangnail or if I stub my toe, I can just pass out.
A TV episode of a nurse that fainted is not a great visual at the start of a vaccine rollout. And there is a good argument that if Ms. Dover – and her hospital – knew she was prone to passing out from the pain of vaccination, she probably was not the ideal candidate for this clip. But normally, this could be explained, and in fact, could be a chance to educate people about fainting after vaccination, why it is not a long-term risk, and how to reduce harm from it.
But the anti-vaccine movement took this very simple story and ran with it.
The Targeting of Tiffany Dover
Immediately after the video went viral, anti-vaccine activists started spreading rumors that Tiffany Dover was dead. This was not the first or only claim of deaths after a COVID-19 vaccination that anti-vaccine activists fabricated.
They made similar claims, for example, about a nurse in Alabama following an anonymous post. They falsely claimed that nurse Jennifer McClung, who died from COVID-19, died from a COVID-19 vaccine.
In fact, at this point, I have counted at least five fake deaths after COVID-19 claims. My friends at Voices for Vaccines created a video to address the fake reports of deaths after Covid-19 vaccines, and what you can do to fight the spread of misinformation:
And to be fair, for Ms. Dover, multiple fact-checkers very quickly responded and stated the claims are not true.
But it did not prevent the harassment.
For Ms. Dover, it started when someone used a site called SearchQuarry to search for her, and allegedly found a death certificate for her.
I ran a search for my own name and death records. I found an identical record. I do assure people that the rumors of my own death, too, have been somewhat exaggerated.
Basically, this site would give that kind of result for any person. Dead or not.
But the conspiracy theorists took this non-proof and ran with it. Further, someone also made up a fake obituary.
On Thursday, December 19, Chi Memorial put up a post and a Tweet saying:
UPDATE: Nurse Tiffany Dover appreciates the concern shown for her. She is home and doing well. She asks for privacy for her and her family.
On Facebook, they were immediately targeted with thousands of comments accusing them of lying and demanding Ms. Dover make a video. They ended up taking down their Facebook post.
The videos have been shared globally. As a result, tens of thousands of people descended on Ms. Dover’s social media. They posted comments that ranged from concern to attacking her on her Facebook timeline and targeting her on Instagram, too.
Worse yet, they looked up her family members and posted in the thousands on their profiles. They saved all the personal photos Ms. Dover had up. Most people who do not expect to be targeted do not actually secure their social media profiles, and many of us have photos that are not properly hidden or videos that are easy to find. Because regular people do not anticipate the length to which a conspiracy theorist who convinced themselves they’re on a fact-finding mission is willing to go to.
The attackers invented claims about the video, among other things claiming that the person in the video was not Ms. Dover, and targeting other co-workers that they decided were playing her in the video.
In response, Ms. Dover went off social media. She did not lock it down well – I suspect looking at it right now is too distressing. But she went off, and it is not surprising, given the level of harassment. All over that weekend, anti-vaccine activists targeted any of her family members that did not have their profiles locked down.
At best, they asked where Tiffany is. And family members answered several times that she is fine. It did not help. The harassers kept coming, and many of them accused the family of conspiring to hide Tiffany’s death. They did not stop.
On Monday, CHI Memorial Hospital released a video of Ms. Dover standing with her co-workers, accompanied by this message:
We’re pleased to share Tiffany Dover is doing well. Here’s a video of her today surrounded by her colleagues who all support her.
The harassment did not stop. Two groups were created to target the nurse – one was taken down by Facebook, and the other was not.
By December 29, over 16,000 comments were posted on Ms. Dover’s timeline.
Some were extremely unpleasant. Here are some examples:
Note that the anti-vaccine activists are calling this a psyop, are arguing that someone should go film her, and repeatedly claiming that she is dead – in spite of repeated statements that she is not.
Anti-vaccine activists also continued to post on her family’s timeline, sometimes telling family members that their relative is dead, sometimes attacking the family as collaborating to hide the truth, and sometimes directly attacking Ms. Dover:
Attackers made several groups that targeted Tiffany Dover, which have since, apparently, either been removed or gone private.
Some points
The targeting of Ms. Dover was intense, global, relentless, and based on false information. While I am sure some of the people posting were not intending to harass her, when thousands of people descend on a private individual like that, it is harassment. When people make up death claims in the face of repeated denials from family and employers, it is harassment. And way out of line.
It does not matter if a specific individual was intending to attack Ms. Dover. If they came in as part of the attack, they were participating in harassment.
Several of the harassers engaged in stalkerish behaviors, targeting family members, and seeking to violate Ms. Dover’s privacy.
It was fair and appropriate to ask how Ms. Dover was, given that she fainted on TV – but once an answer was given and a video released, continuing to push was harassment.
What can you do?
- Remember that social media gives you control of settings. Not everyone would have their profile locked down before the attack, and that is okay; people are not doing anything wrong by not expecting to be harassed. It is prudent to lock down your social media in advance, but it’s not your fault if it did not occur to you.
- If you are attacked, lock down your social media. Take full advantage of privacy settings. Make posts private, make your friends list private, and take pictures and videos private. On Facebook, if you want to leave some posts private, you can still limit who can comment. Feel free to block people who harass you. You don’t owe anyone access to your private social media channels.
- Reach out for support. Voices for Vaccines and Vaccinate Your Family has several resources to help deal with anti-vaccine attacks. For healthcare providers, Shots Heard Around the World has useful materials. Reach out to us. I am also happy to respond to messages from people who need help. Don’t be alone, like a page or person; there are things you can do.
- Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can do better. One easy and simple fix for pages – though not individuals – would be to allow pages to turn off comments. This would really help pages under targeted attack. At present, that’s not an option; we do have some other fixes that can help, and I’m happy to discuss them with anyone who needs them. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram should offer tools to individuals targeted for mass harassment – for example, a one-button ultimate privacy option to prevent them from having to figure out the controls while under attack.
In today’s environment, with a global anti-vaccine movement seeking to scare people off vaccines, partly by promoting misinformation and partly by targeting and harassing those who counter them, we can expect more mass harassment campaigns. We need to be ready.
Update 03 February 2021
Update 19 December 2021
NBC Podcast — Tiffany Dover is not dead
NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny details her journey to prove Dover’s continued existence in a new investigative podcast called “Tiffany Dover Is Dead*.” Zadrozny, who is exploring conspiracy theories, and those who believe them, has detailed all the information that proves that Tiffany Dover is absolutely alive.
Here is a transcript of the evidence that Zadrozny has accumulated over the past few months that proves that Ms. Dover is still among the living:
On January 14, 2021, I man named Johnny Scearce got discharged from the COVID unit at CHI Memorial in Chattanooga. He’d spent 94 days in CCU. Scearce is a police chief in a small town of Blue Ridge in Northern Georgia and when he was finally strong enough to transfer to rehab, the hospital made a video.
In the video, you see Chief Scearce being wheeled out of his room and there are about 50 doctors and nurses lining the hallway to celebrate. Standing the third from the end of the line is Tiffany Dover. She waves as he goes by but she doesn’t say anything. She’s wearing a white sweater and her name tag.
You see her wearing the same thing in a photograph taken minutes earlier than run the Blue Ridge paper on January 19th. In that photo, members of Scearce’s care team are pose around his bedside. Tiffany is second from the right. That’s a full month after truthers say Tiffany died.
I have that photo and the still from the video penned to a bulletin board in my bedroom. It’s where I organized all the evidence I found that Tiffany is in fact alive. Every few weeks, I’ll come across a new datapoint and on the board it goes.
Here what I have so far. December 2020, three days after she faints, Tiffany’s brother-in-law posts a photo of Tiffany at a family Christmas gathering. She’s smiling in pajamas cradling a Grinch stuffy. February 2021, two months later, Tiffany posts to her own Instagram. These are those photos from the Colorado trip and the video of the family tubing down Vail Mountain. She’s got her helmet visor at one of the photos. It’s clearly her. Then she goes dark again. Probably because truthers were all over those new posts.
There’s no more evidence until the summer. But then in August 2021, she and her husband Dustin Dover signed mortgage paperwork to build a new house. That’s a public record. I found the filing in a local probate court. In October of 2021, an Alabama state trooper, Adam Reye, posts to Facebook a photo he took with Tiffany at a basketball practice, both have daughters on a local high school team. He captions it, quote, “Glad I got to see Tiffany Pontes Dover tonight.” The picture is again unmistakably Tiffany.
November, her sister-in-law Rebecca posts a photo reel to her Facebook of the family Thanksgiving. Tiffany is in one picture wearing grey sweats and hugging her son. December, the same sister-in-law posts Christmas photos. Tiffany is pictured in two candid shots. She’s wearing scrubs.
Update 11 April 2023
Brandy Zadrozny just published a new article on the NBC News website reiterating that Tiffany Dover is still alive. But this time, Ms. Zadrozny got to speak directly to Tiffany, in person. No Zoom calls, no missed appointments, and no chasing hints from social media. This time, it’s an actual one-on-one interview.
Ms. Zadrozny writes:
So I was surprised when she texted me in February. Tiffany said she was ready to talk about everything that had happened to her and offered to make a video answering any questions I had. I asked her for one better: Let me come back out to Alabama.
Tiffany reluctantly accepted. Sitting across from her, Tiffany felt like the person I had seen in hundreds of her social media posts: bubbly and warm, a doting wife and mother, a dedicated nurse. But she felt delicate, too. No wonder, given what she’s been through.
Tiffany Dover is alive, but she’s never addressed the rumors. She never put out a statement or made a video about what she went through, and she regrets it. She thinks she should have continued to post on social media and act as if everything was normal — because it was.
Now it all seems clear — Tiffany Dover didn’t contradict what was being said about her online because everything was normal. Nothing at all happened after she received the COVID-19 vaccine. We all wish she had, but her reasons are valid.
Ms. Dover was working as a nurse during one (of many) heights of the pandemic, where she had to hold up an iPad for patients to say their last goodbyes to loved ones because no one was allowed in the hospital. She thought and still does think that the COVID-19 vaccines saved thousands of lives.
We have been chasing this story for over two years, and now I think that all the conspiracies and rumors about Tiffany Dover can finally be buried in the garbage dumpster of the anti-vaccine rhetoric.
And thank you Brandy Zadrozny for chasing all of the clues.
Professor Reiss writes extensively in law journals about the social and legal policies of vaccination. Additionally, Reiss is also member of the Parent Advisory Board of Voices for Vaccines, a parent-led organization that supports and advocates for on-time vaccination and the reduction of vaccine-preventable disease.
