A Daily Caller News Foundation report examined alpha-gal syndrome, an academic proposal to spread the allergy, and renewed scrutiny of Cold War-era U.S. tick research.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A growing tick-borne allergy to red meat is drawing new attention from researchers, lawmakers and critics who say public concern over alpha-gal syndrome has been fueled by both rising diagnoses and unresolved questions about past U.S. biological weapons research.
Alpha-gal syndrome, commonly associated with bites from the lone star tick, can trigger delayed allergic reactions to red meat and other mammalian products. Symptoms may appear hours after exposure and can include rashes, stomach distress, chest tightness and difficulty breathing.
At least 15,000 people are diagnosed with alpha-gal syndrome each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The increase in diagnoses over the past decade has contributed to online speculation involving Bill Gates, suspiciously placed ticks and theories that meat avoidance could be used as a tool of social control through bug-eating agendas.
Some claims involving Gates appear to conflate separate issues. Gates has supported gene-drive research involving genetically modified insects, but alpha-gal is spread primarily by lone star ticks. The Gates Foundation has supported research in Africa involving engineered Southern cattle ticks, a species that has not been shown to bite people and has been largely eradicated in the United States since 1943.
Still, a Daily Caller News Foundation report found that some underlying concerns driving public suspicion have a basis in real debates. One recent academic paper argued for intentionally spreading alpha-gal syndrome to discourage red meat consumption. Separately, investigative journalist Kris Newby has argued that the spread of lone star ticks beyond their native ecosystem and the persistence of difficult tick-borne diseases warrant deeper investigation into past human experimentation and military research.
The Government Accountability Office told the DCNF it expects to begin work in the coming months on a review of the U.S. insect bioweapons program, with publication expected in December 2027.
One source of recent controversy was a 2025 paper titled “Beneficial Bloodsuckers”, written by two medical ethicists at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. The paper considered whether alpha-gal syndrome could be promoted as a “moral bioenhancer” to reduce meat consumption.
“Our main conclusion is that we should promote a particular tickborne syndrome: alpha‐gal syndrome (AGS),” the paper states. “Today we have the obligation to research and develop the capacity to proliferate tickborne AGS and, tomorrow, carry out that proliferation.”
After backlash, including violent threats, the authors and school emphasized that the article was a philosophical thought experiment rather than a practical policy proposal. The authors did not respond to interview requests, but the school defended the paper as part of academic inquiry.
“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 school said. “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 continued.
The paper appeared in Bioethics, a journal affiliated with the International Association of Bioethics and published by Wiley-Blackwell, one of the world’s most prolific academic publishers.
Michael Liao, president of the New York University Center for Bioethics, told the DCNF that intentionally spreading alpha-gal would be “absolutely outside the mainstream” of medical ethics.
“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,” Liao said.
Liao said his own work has sometimes been mischaracterized. He has written about voluntary “human engineering” proposals, including a hypothetical patch that could make meat taste unpleasant to people who want to avoid eating it for ethical reasons. He has also written about more controversial possibilities, such as genetically creating smaller, less resource-intensive children, but said such measures would be “voluntary activity – possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored health care – rather than a coerced, mandatory activity.”
Liao said a viral video of his comments has been interpreted as an endorsement of involuntarily spreading alpha-gal through tick bites.
“I understand why people are outraged,” Liao said. “If those comments represented the entirety of my true views, that would indeed be outrageous.”
Public concern over a possible “tick bomb” is sharpened by the history of U.S. entomological weapons research. Newby, who has spent years investigating tick-borne illness and biological weapons programs, said the U.S. government conducted thousands of experiments involving ticks and other insects as delivery systems for biological agents from the 1950s through the early 1960s.
That work involved Fort Detrick in Maryland, Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana, Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York, located near Old Lyme, Connecticut, the town for which Lyme disease is named.
Newby has reported that past experiments may have contributed to the lone star tick’s movement from its native Texas habitat into the Northeast. She told the DCNF that the current tick problem is large enough that dramatic claims about deliberate recent releases are unnecessary to explain vaccine interest.
“The tick problem is so big, you don’t need to release boxes of them to sell a Pfizer vaccine,” Newby said, referring to online speculation and conspiracy theories about manufactured demand for a Lyme disease vaccine.
Newby has also examined Operation Mongoose, the CIA campaign to overthrow Fidel Castro, and said she found references to a failed mission to disperse infected ticks over Cuban sugar fields in newly released records she discussed on LinkedIn.
Whether U.S. research ever accidentally released infected ticks domestically remains unresolved. In her 2019 book, “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons,” Newby wrote, “It’s hubris to think we can weaponize living things and not have them come back to bite us.”
Newby said Army scientist Willy Burgdorfer, who identified the bacterium associated with Lyme disease, cryptically acknowledged in an interview that the tick bioweapons program had unintended consequences, possibly including an accidental release. She later spent five years examining Burgdorfer’s files but did not fully resolve the issue. Her work did uncover papers in which Burgdorfer wrote that blood from Lyme disease patients reacted strongly to a bacterium he called the Swiss Agent before it disappeared from medical literature.
Newby told the DCNF she would not dismiss the possibility that alpha-gal could be an unforeseen downstream effect of U.S. biological weapons research, including open-air releases of irradiated ticks, though she said the origins of the syndrome remain uncertain.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., secured a provision in the 2026 defense spending bill requiring the GAO to review whether Cold War-era Defense Department bioweapons work contributed to the spread of Lyme disease or other tick-borne illnesses. Smith had pressed for such a review for six years after reading Newby’s book.
“A comprehensive, nonpartisan report on whether the Cold War-era Department of Defense’s bioweapons program contributed to the proliferation of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases will only assist in our search for answers—and hopefully, a cure—for these mysterious and debilitating illnesses,” Smith said in a statement to the DCNF. “If the GAO report shows that the U.S. government did not play a role in the explosion of this tick-borne epidemic, we turn the page.”
Newby said some answers may remain in classified Fort Detrick records and other material stored at Dugway. Accessing those files, she said, may require a senior military official “with a lot of stars on their shoulders.”
Not all researchers agree with Newby’s conclusions. Tufts professor Sam Telford III, director of a National Institutes of Health high-security lab and a critic of her work, dismissed what he called “insane conspiracy theories” in an email to the DCNF.
Telford said he rejects the idea that alpha-gal could be an unexpected result of the U.S. bioweapons program. He argued that scientists still do not understand how lone star ticks trigger alpha-gal syndrome, making deliberate engineering unlikely.
“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?” Telford wrote.
The coming GAO review could help determine what role, if any, past U.S. military research played in the spread of tick-borne disease. For now, alpha-gal’s rise remains a subject of medical concern, bioethics debate and public distrust over government secrecy.
“We have the data, it’s just locked in a library in Detrick,” Newby said.
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