Tick Talk: The Truth About Alpha-Gal and the Lone Star Tick

The suspicion was earned. Most of the stories weren't.

Tick season has come and gone. Last spring there was a lot of noise about the lone star tick and alpha-gal, the allergy that makes people sick when they eat red meat. Over the summer the stories kept coming. Boxes of ticks found in fields and parks. A man who drops bugs from planes for wildlife control, saying the drop zones had moved closer to where people live. Some of my friends bought all of it.

Now, at the end of the season, the story has flipped. I'm hearing it was never the tick at all. It was the COVID shot.

Nobody seems to know what's true, but everyone seems sure Bill Gates did it.

Here's what we found when we sorted through it, one claim at a time. One thing up front: the people who believed these stories weren't crazy. Some of the people blamed in them have earned a lot of distrust. That's a reason to check each claim carefully, and it doesn't make any of them true.

Start with what's real

The tick is real, and so is the allergy.

Alpha-gal is a sugar found in the meat of most mammals, like beef, pork, and lamb. Humans don't make it. The lone star tick carries it in its saliva. When one bites you, your immune system can start treating alpha-gal as a threat. After that, eating red meat can set off a reaction: hives, stomach trouble, or in bad cases, anaphylaxis, which can kill you.

What makes it strange is the delay. Most food allergies hit within minutes. With alpha-gal, the reaction usually comes hours later, so you eat supper and wake up sick in the middle of the night. That's a big part of why it took doctors so long to figure it out. And not everyone who's bitten gets it. Some people make the antibodies and never have symptoms.

It's also spreading.

The CDC counted more than 110,000 suspected cases between 2010 and 2022, and it estimates as many as 450,000 Americans may be affected. Because it isn't a nationally reportable disease, the real number isn't known, though more states now require doctors to report it. According to TickZone, a tick-tracking site that draws on CDC surveillance, the lone star tick is now established in about 1,139 counties across 33 states. Researchers point to warmer winters, more deer, and changing land use.

Up here in North Dakota, the lone star tick isn't established. The state health department has confirmed a few strays over the years, but it isn't a tick we normally deal with. For now, this is mostly a problem for the South, the Midwest, and the East Coast.

How the story got tangled

One date matters more than any other in this story. Doctors worked out the tick-to-meat link between 2008 and 2011. It started when patients in the Southeast had severe reactions to a cancer drug that contained alpha-gal. Researchers traced those reactions back to tick bites. That was about a decade before anyone had heard of COVID.

Everything else got piled on later. In 2013, PETA posted an April Fools' joke about releasing lone star ticks to give people meat allergies. It later got passed around as if it were real, and Snopes debunked it in 2017. This spring, the stories came back all at once, with a new suspect.

Bill Gates: the suspicion was earned

Let's be fair to the people who pointed at Gates. He gave them plenty to go on.

In a 2021 interview with MIT Technology Review, Gates said: "I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef." He added that regulation could be used to "totally shift the demand." He has invested in Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and lab-grown meat startups. He's also the largest private farmland owner in the country, and in late 2021 a trust linked to him paid $13.5 million for about 2,100 acres in northeast North Dakota. When that came out, Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota asked Congress to question him about it, pointing directly at his synthetic-meat views.

So anyone who distrusts Bill Gates's intentions toward beef doesn't need a conspiracy theory. His intentions are on the record.

The tick part is where it falls apart. The rumor had been fact-checked back in 2023, but it resurfaced this spring, helped along by Russell Brand and by Rep. Tim Burchett on Joe Rogan's show. It's built on something real: the Gates Foundation did fund a tick project. But that project targets the Asian blue tick, a tropical cattle tick that carries disease, not the lone star tick. And its goal is to shrink that tick's population by releasing males carrying a gene that keeps their offspring from surviving. On June 2, the foundation said it "is not involved in any work in relation to Alpha-gal syndrome."

Gates wants less beef on your plate. There's no evidence he used ticks to get it there.

Ticks from planes

Then the plane drop. The Story goes: A man who works in wildlife control said he drops insects from planes, and that this year the drop sites were closer to where people live. And sure enough, lone star ticks.

As far as we can find, this version traces back to an anonymous forum post on March 16: "I work for a private charter company in Ontario Canada. We are paid to spread ticks by plane." It gave no name, no company, no date, no place, and no photo. From there it spread through YouTube, with details added along the way.

There's another problem. Nobody releases ticks to control anything. Ticks don't eat pests. They drink blood. There's no wildlife-control job for a tick to do. And the tick increase in Canada involves blacklegged ticks, not lone star ticks.

But I understand why it sounded believable, because the pieces it borrows are real.

Planes really do drop bugs, and they did it this summer. New World screwworm, a parasite that eats living flesh, was confirmed in a Texas calf in June. USDA fights it by dropping sterile male flies from planes, which swamps the wild population until it collapses. There's a dispersal base in Edinburg, Texas, built to put out 100 million flies a week. The flies are dyed so crews can tell them apart from wild ones in their traps. That same method wiped screwworm out of the U.S. by 1966. Anyone watching the sky in South Texas this summer really was watching bugs being dropped from planes. They were flies, and the point was to help cattle.

The government really did study ticks as weapons. James Oliver, who served in the Army's entomology branch at Fort Detrick in the 1950s, described working on how to mass-produce ticks and mosquitoes, drop them from airplanes, and "get the bugs to the enemy." In 2019 the House passed Rep. Chris Smith's amendment ordering the Pentagon's inspector general to look into whether the military experimented with weaponized ticks.

So insects really are dropped from planes, and the military really did study ticks as weapons. Neither of those is evidence that someone is doing it to you now.

The boxes in the fields

The "boxes of ticks" story went viral in late March. Snopes contacted hundreds of Missouri officials and couldn't find a single confirmed report. According to the fact-checking site Factually, the most widely shared clips came from Appalachia, and the original footage made no claim about ticks. Other people reposted it later with text blaming helicopters or unnamed actors. One version, shared by Alex Jones, showed a hunter opening a container he said held millions of ticks, with nothing to show where it came from.

None of the fact-checks found a farmer, a county agent, or a lab that had actually handled one of these boxes.

Now it's the shot

At the end of the summer the story changed again: it was never the ticks, it was the COVID vaccine. Before getting to why that doesn't hold up, it's worth saying plainly that people have good reason to distrust whoever is selling them a vaccine.

The shots were rushed, with trial phases run side by side under emergency authorization, and then pushed with mandates tied to people's jobs. The promises went further than the facts. President Biden said in July 2021, "You're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations," and it didn't turn out that way. The shots mainly protected against severe illness. The heart inflammation risk in young men was real, and the public message tended to talk past it. The CDC even reworded its definition of "vaccine" in 2021.

Then in July, Sen. Rand Paul released more than a thousand pages of Anthony Fauci's diary from 2019 through 2022. Paul says it shows Fauci privately heard doubts about a natural origin in early 2020 while publicly waving off the lab-leak theory. ABC News reported that the diary doesn't reveal new information about where the virus came from, and FactCheck.org says Paul misread at least one key entry. When the Senate called him to testify on July 29, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions. People can decide for themselves what that means. Either way, "trust the experts" was a hard sell long before this summer.

So the distrust was earned. This particular claim still doesn't hold up.

The timing is backwards. Alpha-gal was traced to ticks about ten years before the first COVID shot.

The ingredients don't fit. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have said their COVID vaccines contain no animal-derived ingredients, and Pfizer has said its vaccine contains no alpha-gal. There's no gelatin in any of them.

The real connection runs the other direction. A few vaccines, like MMR and the FluMist nasal spray, use gelatin made from cows or pigs, and that gelatin can contain alpha-gal. If you already have alpha-gal from a tick bite, those vaccines can set off a reaction, so allergists take care with them. The vaccine doesn't give you the allergy. It can trigger one you already have from a tick.

The new version of the claim comes from a preprint posted in August by Nicolas Hulscher and several well-known vaccine critics, which got wide attention this month. It's about gelatin vaccines in general, not the COVID shot, which has no gelatin. It argues gelatin might cause alpha-gal directly or prime people for a later tick bite, and the authors themselves call the direct route "plausible but unproven." It hasn't been peer reviewed.

Why this keeps happening

A real tick is spreading, and cases are really going up. That's frightening, and it's slow, and there's no villain in it. So people reach for the people they already distrust: Gates, activists, the government, the vaccine makers. Each of them has given people real reasons for suspicion.

But distrust isn't evidence. The question to ask about any of these stories isn't "would they do this?" It's "what does this actually show?" Asked that way, most of the summer's stories fall apart.

My take

I went into this expecting to throw most of it out, and mostly I did. But I don't blame my friends for believing it. When one of the richest men in the world says rich countries should give up beef and then buys up farmland, including in my state, you're going to be suspicious of him. When the people who told you the shot would stop COVID turn out to be wrong about that, you stop taking their word for things.

Here's where I land. Keep the suspicion. It's healthy, and aimed at people who deserve it. The tick is real, it's spreading, and it's slow and boring and nobody's fault. That's harder to share than a box falling out of the sky, but it's what actually matters for anybody who eats beef.

How we dug into this

This started with me listing everything I'd heard over the summer and using AI to find what held up. We searched fact-checkers (Snopes, Science Feedback, AFP, Factually), health sources (the CDC, Tufts, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and alpha-gal patient and physician resources), news coverage (NPR, The Hill, ABC, the Canadian Press, Cap Times), USDA and military releases on the screwworm fly drops, and the original Gates interview and farmland reporting. The pilot story I heard may not be the same as the anonymous forum post, but they match closely. The North Dakota observation is mine. Charts were built in Python. A separate AI pass fact-checked the claims before publishing.