Tennessee nurse who fainted after COVID vaccine healthy and alive

Tiffany Dover, a nurse manager from Catholic Health Initiatives Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, fainted shortly after receiving the inoculations, sparking rumors that the vaccine wasn't safe and even that she had died. 

Despite the rumors, Dover fainted due to an underlying condition that causes her to faint when she experiences pain, according to USA TODAY.

Shortly after the incident, Dover confirmed that she was feeling fine.

"I feel fine now, and the pain in my arm is very minimal, actually," said Dover to WRCN Chattanooga.

CHI Memorial Hospital has released multiple statements in recent weeks confirming that Dover is alive and doing well and had returned to work.

"We appreciate the ongoing concern by the community and media," wrote Karen Long, a spokeswoman for the hospital, in a statement to USA TODAY. "Our efforts must now turn to caring for an ever growing number of people in our community hospitalized with COVID-19 and vaccinating our caregivers and support staff."

Conspiracy theories surrounding side effects and dangers of the newly released coronavirus vaccines have spread rapidly throughout social media.

The main side effects reported in the trials of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were pain, swelling and redness at the site of injection, as well as chills, tiredness and headache in general, but these effects usually only lasted a few days at most.

With the Pfizer vaccine, only three volunteers out of the nearly 20,000 volunteers who received the actual vaccine as part of the trial experienced "serious" side effects: shoulder injury, arrhythmia or lymph node enlargement. Six of the participants died during the trial, but four of them received the placebo and a committee that examined the deaths found that the two deaths of people who were vaccinated were not related to the vaccine.

Any long-term side effects are still unknown since the vaccine is still too new to know about them.

In November, Tal Brosh, head of the Infectious Disease Unit at Samson Assuta Ashdod Hospital, told The Jerusalem Post that there are unique and unknown risks to messenger RNA vaccines, including local and systemic inflammatory responses that could lead to autoimmune conditions.

An article published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Institutes of Health, said other risks include the bio-distribution and persistence of the induced immunogen expression; possible development of auto-reactive antibodies; and toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components.

But Michal Linial, a professor of biological chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told the Post that she believes there is no cause for concern.

She said that while Moderna and Pfizer are based on new vaccine technologies, they are asking our bodies to do something they do every day: protein synthesis, the process where cells make proteins.

She said her concerns have less to do with the use of mRNA and more to do with the long-term efficacy of the vaccine, as well as other challenges that could cause something to go wrong and lead people to believe they are vaccinated when they are not.

But when asked if she would take the vaccine right away, she responded: “I won’t be taking it immediately – probably not for at least the coming year,” she told the Post. “We have to wait and see whether it really works.”