Young Living Distributor Violates Law with COVID Claims

UPDATE 2/10/22: The blog has been taken down and the video has been made private, meaning it can still be shared privately. Our original article follows.

A top distributor of essential oils Multilevel Marketing – a way of distributing products or services in which the distributors earn income from their own retail sales and from retail sales made by their direct and indirect recruits. Young Living has published a blog and video, both of which contain unsubstantiated claims that the company’s products can prevent, treat and mitigate the symptoms of COVID-19, in violation of the law.

Amanda Cooper, who claims to be a “platinum” distributor, a rank that fewer than 0.1 percent of Young Living distributors achieve, starts the blog with a warning not to share the information, writing, “I will have to take down this link if it gets shared on social media.” Cooper then lists a number of Young Living essential oils and supplements (among other purported remedies such as colloidal silver and hydroxychloroquine) that she says her family used to recover from COVID after the entire household became infected.

The Young Living regimen included an essential oil called Peppermint Vitality, which Cooper claims “was amazing for managing fever, nausea and hydration,” and a drink called NingXia Red, to which Cooper credits her family’s quick recovery, “even though we were hit hard.” She instructs readers to “[o]rder all products through links I included.” The total cost of the Young Living products she promotes for COVID surpasses $900.

The blog directs to an unlisted YouTube video that is only accessible if you have the link. In the hour-long video, Cooper goes into greater detail about the COVID symptoms her family experienced — among them intense pain, extreme fatigue, fever and vomiting — and the Young Living products they took to deal with them. She says:

This virus is weird because every day it seems to mutate into something different. That’s why I’m telling you what we’ve done … I kept just adding things as things would change and symptoms would change.

The protocols outlined in the video included applying “50 to 100 drops of oil every hour on our bodies” and taking a supplement called MightyPro that Young Living targets at children but that Cooper says the entire family used. “Whenever somebody felt like it, they took one,” Cooper says in the video. As for ImmuPro, another Young Living supplement, she calls the product a “total lifesaver.”

Yet none of Cooper’s COVID claims are supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence as required by law. TINA.org has reported the blog and video to a regulatory authority in an effort to get the materials taken down immediately. Check back for updates.

Young Living isn’t the only essential oils MLM whose top distributors have taken to making illegal claims related to the coronavirus. Since the beginning of the year, high-ranking distributors of doTerra, who are also employed or retired health care providers, have been participating in Zoom calls in which they also deceptively promote the company’s products for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19.

Find more of our coverage on Young Living here.