Weary from a long hike, you eat a hearty steak and climb into bed. Three hours later, you bolt up, gasping for breath. Stomach in knots, chest tight, you look down and discover you’re covered in rashes.
At least 15,000 people are diagnosed with a tick-borne allergy to red meat called alpha-gal syndrome each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rise in diagnoses in just a decade has fueled online theories about Bill Gates, boxes of suspiciously placed ticks, and a quest for meat-free, bug-eating subjugation.
Gates does support gene drives, efforts to divert insect species onto different branches of the evolutionary tree through the release of genetically modified insects. But alpha-gal is spread primarily by lone star ticks, while the Gates Foundation has supported research in Africa with engineered Southern cattle ticks, a species that has never been shown to bite people and has been largely eradicated in the U.S. since 1943.
However, theories about the nefarious tick bombs have a grip on thousands of Americans, and for good reason. Some underlying suspicions, about academics who support the spread of alpha-gal and about manmade tick-borne diseases, have some merit.
First, a recent academic paper indeed made the case for intentionally spreading alpha-gal in order to curb red meat consumption.
Second, the spread of the lone star tick beyond its native ecosystem and difficult to detect and treat tick-borne diseases may indeed have something to do with human experimentation, according to a journalist who has spent two decades investigating them.
Congressional watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office told the Daily Caller News Foundation that they will begin work in the coming months on a review of the U.S. bug bioweapon program for publication in December 2027.
‘Beneficial Bloodsuckers’
An academic paper explores the idea of deliberately releasing ticks that could spread an allergy to meat, but amid fierce backlash, including some violent threats, the authors now stress the paper is merely a thought experiment.
Two medical ethicists with the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine explored the idea in a 2025 paper titled “Beneficial Bloodsuckers,” saying alpha-gal could serve as a “moral bioenhancer.”
“Our main conclusion is that we should promote a particular tickborne syndrome: alpha‐gal syndrome (AGS),” the paper reads. “Today we have the obligation to research and develop the capacity to proliferate tickborne AGS and, tomorrow, carry out that proliferation.”
The authors did not respond to requests for interviews. But the school sent a statement defending the article as a hypothetical thought experiment rather than a public health recommendation, stating that no practical research activity is being conducted on this subject, and reaffirming its commitment to academic freedom.
“The article stipulates, for the sake of argument, that eating mammalian meat is morally wrong. It does not defend that premise. It asks only what would follow if the premise were granted,” the statement reads. “Thought experiments are a long-established and legitimate philosophical method.”
“Because the reasoning is conditional on a premise taken as given, it cannot fairly be read as a public health nor policy recommendation,” the statement continues.
The idea appeared in Bioethics, a journal affiliated with the longstanding International Association of Bioethics and published by Wiley-Blackwell, the third most prolific academic publisher in the world.
Still, the idea of spreading alpha-gal syndrome to reduce meat consumption is “absolutely outside the mainstream” of medical ethics, New York University Center for Bioethics President Michael Liao told the DCNF in an interview.
“For anything that is involuntary and irreversible, the threshold becomes really, really high, and I don’t think we’re justified in doing something like that,” he said.
The idea has sometimes been attributed to Liao, but a closer inspection of his writing reveals that he has called for less drastic and voluntary measures: for example, a patch to induce changes that make meat taste more unpleasant if one feels so ethically inclined.
Though his writing embraces the idea of “human engineering” — even genetically creating smaller, less resource-intensive children — Liao writes that each of these would be a “voluntary activity – possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored health care – rather than a coerced, mandatory activity.”
Liao said comments he made in a viral video have been misinterpreted to mean he endorses the involuntary spread of alpha-gal through tick bites.
“I understand why people are outraged,” he said. “If those comments represented the entirety of my true views, that would indeed be outrageous.”
Cold War Tick Bombs
A tick bomb may sound plausible to many Americans because the U.S. government conducted thousands of experiments using ticks and other critters to transmit biological agents from the 1950s through the early 1960s, according to investigative journalist Kris Newby.
Newby has explored the possibility that some tick-borne illnesses that persist today could be connected to this work.
The U.S. entomological bioweapons project, nearly as large as the Manhattan Project, centered at the U.S. Army lab at Fort Detrick and involved research labs across the country: at Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana; at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah; and at Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York, a few miles from Old Lyme, Connecticut, for which Lyme disease is named.
It is possible that these experiments helped to widen the geographic reach of the aggressive lone star tick that spreads alpha-gal from their native habitat in Texas to across the northeast, Newby has reported.
“The tick problem is so big, you don’t need to release boxes of them to sell a Pfizer vaccine,” Newby said in an interview with the DCNF in reference to online theories about manufactured demand for a vaccine in development for Lyme.
Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s effort to overthrow the Castro regime, involved a botched mission to disperse infected ticks over Cuban sugar fields, Newby found.
But did the U.S. bioweapons project also inadvertently release infected ticks in the U.S.?
“It’s hubris to think we can weaponize living things and not have them come back to bite us,” Newby wrote in her 2019 book “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons.”
Army scientist Willy Burgdorfer cryptically acknowledged in an interview with Newby that the tick bioweapons program had unintended consequences, possibly an accidental release, but did not provide many details. Newby spent five years digging into Burgdorfer’s files but did not fully resolve the matter. Her research did unearth papers in which Burgdorfer said the blood of Lyme disease patients reacted strongly to a bacteria he called the Swiss Agent before it disappeared from the medical literature.
Newby said in an interview with the DCNF that she would not dismiss the idea that alpha-gal could be an unpredicted downstream impact of the U.S. biological weapons program such as the open air release of irradiated ticks. However the origins of alpha-gal remain uncertain.
More answers about the bug bioweapons of the 1950s and 1960s may be coming through the new GAO report.
Inspired by Newby’s book, and after pressing the issue for six years, New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith finally secured the requirement that the congressional watchdog investigate in the 2026 defense spending bill. The provision requires the GAO to complete the research within about two years.
Newby told the DCNF that classified Fort Detrick files may shed light on the matter, but accessing them requires a high-ranking military officer “with a lot of stars on their shoulders.” Other records can be found at Dugway.
Tufts Prof. Sam Telford III, the director of a National Institutes of Health high security lab and prominent critic of Newby’s work, dismissed “insane conspiracy theories” in an email to the DCNF.
He dismisses the idea that alpha-gal could be an unpredicted externality of the U.S. bioweapons program. Scientists still do not understand how alpha-gal syndrome occurs, so it would be difficult for one to manufacture the effect, Telford argued.
“We do not know what it is that the Lone star tick does to make alpha gal appear to be foreign to us and stimulate an IgE [immune system] response. So if we don’t understand this, how on earth can we modify a tick to induce it?” he wrote in the email.
Greater transparency may help resolve the dispute over whether the government’s bioweapons program contributed to the proliferation of Lyme, alpha-gal, or other tick-borne diseases.
“We have the data, it’s just locked in a library in Detrick,” Newby said.
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