A wide-ranging cast of characters is coming to town for a conference. There are associates of former President Trump, including his son Eric and his aide Roger Stone. And there’s the Ohio doctor who went viral for saying COVID vaccines magnetize people, which is not true.
The three day event will include some local voices, too — like pastor Greg Locke, who claims Tennessee’s hospitals are full of vaccinated COVID patients, which isn’t true, and Sen. Mark Pody, who pushed the state health department to stop promoting vaccinations for minors.
Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles was also scheduled to speak in a talk titled “Keeping Tennessee Free.” Though, he wasn’t exactly sure what he signed up for.
“I don’t even know the date of the conference,” he said. “That tells you where I’m at in the process.”
While Ogles has been fighting against mask and vaccine mandates, he says he doesn’t agree with some of what the conference is promoting.
“I don’t want to be pegged as someone who is anti-vaccine, because I’m not,” he says. “It’s a free country.”
The day after speaking with WPLN News, Ogles said he will not be part of the conference after all. He blamed a scheduling conflict.
His confusion about the event is understandable because it’s called “The Truth About Cancer,” which doesn’t paint a complete picture of some of the topics that will be discussed.
A national conference with local roots
It’s being put on by local Sumner County couple, Ty and Charlene Bollinger.
Charlene Bollinger says Tennessee has become a hub for this type of ideology, along with Florida and Texas.
“There’s just this networking of freedom fighters,” she says. “We want health freedom. Medical freedom. To make the choices that work for us, not dictated to us on what we have to do.”
What started as a brand that pushed unproven alternatives to chemotherapy has expanded into an anti-vaccine cash cow. Tickets for The Truth About Cancer are going for as much as $1,000. Bollinger says she expects 2,000 people to come, with more streaming online.
The Bollingers have a massive digital reach, with over 1 million followers on one of their Facebook pages alone. They were recently called some of the most prominent super spreaders of vaccine misinformation in the country, by the Center For Countering Digital Hate.
“If we’re super spreaders, we’re super spreaders of the truth,” Bollinger says. “We have countless testimonies of people that are alive today because of our work, and this is straight from heaven. God has put us on this earth for such a time as this.”
But the couple were flagged for promoting falsehoods about the pandemic, and kicked off YouTube.
‘They’re forming this community of belief’
The Bollingers’ conference won’t just cover health misinformation.
The couple is politically active — starting a super PAC and hosting a rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 for the Stop the Steal movement, which is based on the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
Lisa Fazio is a misinformation researcher at Vanderbilt University. She says some people may show up to this conference for one conspiracy theory and learn about another, giving misinformation the opportunity to cross-pollinate.
“In a lot of ways, they’re forming this community of belief,” Fazio says. “‘People like us, believe these things.’ And those things are being anti-vax, being anti-mandate, believing in Stop the Steal. And you can’t believe some of it, and not others.”
In a statement, the mayor of Nashville downplayed the possible impact of the conference, calling it an “echo chamber.”
But Dr. Alex Jahangir, who leads the city’s coronavirus task force, says it could still be harmful.
“What worries me is people who really want to learn about the vaccine, want to learn about this disease, who are going to an event that they think will give them factual information,” Jahangir says.
That is not what they’ll get at the conference, which is hosted at the Opryland Resort.
For their part, representatives of Opryland and the building owner, Ryman Hospitality Properties, say they don’t control the content of events.
But this conference in particular conflicts with the company’s own advocacy during the pandemic.
CEO Colin Reed has been a backer of the vaccine effort in Nashville.
“From the beginning of this crisis, our company has supported Metro Health and this administration in their efforts to protect public health in this city,” Reed said at a press conference in March.
Opryland does have COVID protocols, which ask workers to wear masks if they’re not vaccinated, and encourages attendees to do the same.
That may not work on this crowd. The conference’s website advertises the in-person event won’t require any masks or social distancing, just like it was before what they call the “plandemic.”
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