Truthers: Tiffany Dover Is Dead*

Who Does That?

<p>Tiffany Dover isn’t the only person who knows what it’s like to have strangers on the internet take her story, twist the facts, and turn it into a weapon. Last September Amanda Makulec’s youngest son, Zander, died unexpectedly, just shy of three months old. Someone took the tweet where Amanda told her friends and family what had happened and pasted it next to another tweet of hers from two months earlier -- where she had written about her relief at being vaccinated while pregnant. The juxtaposition turned her into an anti-vaxx meme, and her story ended up on TheCovidBlog, a website dedicated to spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation. Brandy visits Amanda and then goes to meet the site's owner, and only author: a 47-year-old Iowa man named Brian Wilkins, who’s written that Tiffany Dover is “one of the early cases that inspired the creation of this blog.” Brian's mission is to lead as many people away from vaccination as possible, relentlessly casting doubt on accepted science. But now, Brandy learns, a committed group of doctors is starting to fight back.</p>

Welcome to one of the internet’s weirdest obsessions. Back in December of 2020, a nurse named Tiffany Dover fainted on camera while she was talking to reporters after getting her first COVID shot. She got right back up and gave another interview, but it was too late. A conspiracy theory was already racing around the world: Dover had died. She’d been replaced by a body double. And an ever-expanding list of conspirators was in on the cover-up, including the drug companies, the hospital, the media, and maybe even the Pope. Tiffany Dover is alive and well, but she’s stayed silent through it all. And now her story has been hijacked by total strangers trying to make people doubt the safety of the COVID vaccine. In this first season of Truthers, a podcast project about misinformation and conspiracy theories, NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny sets out to show what’s true and what isn’t—and how one person’s life became a weapon in a global information war.