Ty Bollinger (born 1968) is an American misinformation marketer and conspiracy theorist who promotes alternative medicine treatments for cancer and vaccine-preventable diseases. Bollinger has no medical training and has a history of disseminating misinformation about cancer treatments, anti-vaccine conspiracies, promoting ineffective or unproven cures, and other conspiracy theories on social media platforms. With his wife Charlene, he runs the website The Truth About Cancer and its associated social media accounts, where they sell books, videos, and nutritional supplements based on these ideas.
Biography
Bollinger is a former bodybuilder, and has no medical training. He lives in Tennessee with his wife and their children.
He attributes his interest in alternative cancer treatments to losing several relatives to cancer, starting with his father in 1996. Not unlike anti-vaccination activists, he presents himself as a right-to-choose advocate rather than being anti-medicine.
The Truth About Cancer
The couple's main website is The Truth About Cancer, established in 2014. It promotes misinformation about cancer, notably that chemotherapy doesn't cure the disease, and functions as a merchandising platform for their numerous instructional videos, as well as food supplements, alternative health books, and treatments. The reach of the videos can be considerable, some having been viewed millions of times.
The Truth about Cancer videos present a variety of pseudoscientific treatments to supposedly remove toxins from the body, an approach long discredited as being incompatible with what is known about human physiology. The videos include interviews with alternative medicine advocates selling ineffective supplements and treatments, such as Matthias Rath, Mike Adams, Joseph Mercola, Jonathan Wright, Rashid Buttar, Russell Blaylock, Stanislaw Burzynski, and Tullio Simoncini. There are no interviews with oncologists or cancer researchers. Misusing medical information, they propagate myths about the efficacy of alternative treatments and conspiracy theories involving pharmaceutical companies and health professionals. Promoted treatments include detoxification, fad diets, as well as ineffective and potentially dangerous medication such as laetrile.
The website has strong commercial ties to other companies that use false or misleading information to sell products and to anti-vaccination groups. The Bollingers have said they paid $12 million to partner groups such as Children's Health Defense for website customer referrals, a practice known as affiliate marketing. This type of commercial alliance between companies and groups spreading conspiracy theories to sell products and information packages has been dubbed a "disinformation industry" by Professor Dorit Reiss. Top sellers for Bollinger's The Truth About Vaccines include prominent anti-vaccination promoters, including Sayer Ji, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rashid Buttar, Michael Adams and Sherri Tenpenny.
Bollinger has a history of promoting unproven or disproven cancer treatments. One of his highly circulated 2017 videos features the viral treatment known under the name of Rigvir, which originated in a Latvian laboratory. The treatment was subsequently taken off the market by the Latvian health authority, as the company could not present results of human studies to prove efficacy after it was found the doses sold contained a number of viruses that was greatly inferior to what was indicated on the packaging. Ty Bollinger promoted lycopene as a medication reducing the risk of developing several types of cancer in 2018, when extensive studies concluded as early as 2007 that it does not prevent cancer.
Bollinger associated himself with osteopathic physician and conspiracy theorist Rashid Buttar to sell subscriptions to an organization (the International Association for a Disease-Free World) that appears to exist solely as a marketing device for doubtful cures sold by Buttar. Bollinger explains most of the website is accessible to paying members only, to discourage law enforcement officials and public health authorities from looking into the medical claims made about the products.