Update January 4, 2021: Including comments from Ancestry in paragraph 10.
Social media users are sharing reports claiming that the nurse who fainted after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine died. This claim is false: the Catholic Health Initiative (CHI) Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where nurse Tiffany Dover works, has confirmed to Reuters that she is doing well.
Most posts refer to an ‘Alabama nurse’, who probably sums up two pieces of misinformation (previously disqualified here and here by Reuters).
The posts (here, here, here, here) share videos (here, here, here) or screenshots showing that the sites Ancestry.com and SearchQuarry have a record of Tiffany Dover or Tiffany Pontes (which according to them is her real name ) of Higdon, Alabama, who passed away at the age of 30 in 2020, and also listed by her well-known family members. Captions include: “Tiffany Dover confirms (sic) death from vaccine”; “Tiffany Dover – Another Vaccine Accident”; and “Tiffany Dover … passed away.”
As Reuters explained in a previous fact check (here), Dover fainted after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, as seen in this video by local news agencies WTVC-TV NewsChannel 9 and WRCBtv 3 here
After recovering, she told WRCB Chattanooga and WTVC-TV NewsChannel 9: ‘It just hit me, I feel like it’s going on. I felt a little disoriented, but I feel good now. ‘(here, here)
Dover said she has a medical condition where she often faints when she experiences pain (here).
CHI Memorial spokeswoman Karen Long told Reuters Dec. 28 that Dover’s death was not true. The hospital posted a video of Dover with her colleagues, four days after she received the first dose of the vaccine to show that she is still doing well.
Reuters asked Dover for comment via social media, but did not immediately return.
For further ‘evidence’ presented in these claims, the information about the death of a Tiffany Dover or Tiffany Pontes comes from Ancestry.com and SearchQuarry, which is not an official public records website and neither of them does not show an official death certificate.
When Reuters conducted the search on SearchQuarry, the site repeatedly declined. Based on the amount of information Reuters could see on Dover’s publicly available Facebook and Instagram profiles, it would be pretty easy to create a profile on Ancestry.com for Dover with different family details (here). An Ancestry spokesman confirmed in an email to Reuters that the details entered for an individual do not need to be backed up or supported by official sources, and that they are not verified by Ancestry, but that they ” imported according to the approval of the tree owners “.
On Dec. 18, Reuters uncovered false claims, which began spreading before Dover received the vaccine, about a Alabama nurse who died after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine (here).
The Alabama Department of Public Health (APHD) issued a statement on December 16 (here) stating that they had investigated the claim and found it to be untrue: ‘The posts are untrue and no persons who vaccine in Alabama did not die. The Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) reached all hospitals in the state that administered the COVID-19 vaccine and confirmed that there were no deaths among vaccine recipients. ”
VERDICT
Untrue. A spokeswoman for CHI Memorial, where Tiffany Dover works, confirmed to Reuters that she was doing well.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.