There are only two things that scare me, dear reader, and one of them is nuclear war.
The other? Carnies. Circus folk. Nomads, you know. Smell like cabbage. Small hands.
Truth be told, I’m actually not scared of nuclear war—I was born in 1987, barely two years before the Wall fell—and it’s a long time since I’ve been anywhere near a circus.
Here are some things that do scare me. I’m not one for enclosed spaces, and I have a recurring nightmare about being forced to watch people eat with their mouths open, smacking their lips and sending half-chewed fragments of food spinning through the air and into my face. I wake up in a cold sweat every time. Worst of all, though, by far, is the fear that I myself might never be able to eat meat again. I shudder just to think of it.
I first came across the terrifying prospect of a “meat allergy”—an allergic inability to consume red meat—when I was researching my 2022 book, The Eggs Benedict Option. The book was about the plan for a global plant-based diet, and naturally I discovered some rather daft suggestions about how we’d get there: how millions upon millions of meat-eaters would be persuaded to give up their beloved steak, pork chops and bacon for the good of the planet. Or not. After all, why go to all the effort of persuading people if you can just take the decision out of their hands entirely?
I found a video of a Princeton bioethicist called S. Matthew Liao speaking at some globalist shindig in 2016. He suggested we could all be given gene therapy to make us allergic to meat, just like a natural allergy transmitted by tick bites. Problem solved. Liao also suggested gene therapy might be used to shrink us by about 25%, to reduce our carbon footprint, quite literally.
The condition Liao referred to, I soon learned, is “alpha-gal syndrome,” named after a sugar molecule that’s found only in red meat—beef, pork, lamb. A bite from a lone-star tick introduces a compound into the blood that resembles alpha-gal enough to sensitize the immune system to it. The tick gets a tasty little feast of blood, and you end up being unable to eat meat ever again. When you eat meat, your body suffers an allergic reaction. It can be so severe you die.
In fact, in 2024 there was the first recorded case of a death from alpha-gal syndrome. A 47-year-old man from New Jersey collapsed and died within hours of eating a hamburger. After an autopsy proved inconclusive, his wife went to experts at the University of Virginia’s medical school, who tested blood samples. They found the victim had been sensitized to alpha-gal, and that he had died from an extreme allergic reaction. The wife then revealed her husband had suffered a dozen or so bites on his ankles from ticks that summer. Case closed.
There’s since been a second confirmed death, in Australia.
We’ve only known about alpha-gal syndrome since the early 2000s, thanks to the testing of a cancer-drug called cetuximab. Researchers were able to show a link with the lone-star tick, and also to identify cases that stretched back into the 1990s in the southeastern US, where the tick flourishes. They identified anecdotal reports dating back even earlier, to the 1980s, including in Australia.
The CDC estimates as many as 500,000 Americans could have alpha-gal syndrome. The vast majority, of course, won’t have a diagnosis. In truth, the number is likely to be much larger.
New research suggests as many as 1 in 4 adults in some states carry antibodies for alpha-gal.
Science website Medical Xpress explains the new research: “To assess the risk of alpha-gal syndrome, researchers tested 3,000 blood samples collected between November 2024 and April 2025 from residents of 10 states.
“Results showed that the percentage of people carrying alpha-gal antibodies was highest in states where lone star ticks are well established.
“Arkansas had the highest levels, with nearly 1 in 3 residents (31%) carrying alpha-gal antibodies. Missouri followed with 26% of residents ‘sensitized’ to alpha-gal.
“All told, about 1 in 4 people (24%) could be expected to test positive for alpha-gal antibodies across the five states with the highest prevalence-Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia.”
Older people (aged 55-64), men and people living in rural areas were most likely to carry the antibodies.
It’s worth noting that this is just antibodies—evidence of a previous immune response to the sugar. These results don’t mean 31% of Arkansans have alpha-gal syndrome. What they do mean, though, is that 31% of Arkansans have probably been bitten by a lone-star tick.
What we need, as the researchers behind the new study make clear, is for research into how the condition develops, including why some people have antibodies and don’t suffer the condition, and whether the condition can develop later after a “dormancy period” and what might trigger that.
We still know far too little about the condition, but what we do know, I think, is that it has all the makings of a public health disaster. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands—maybe millions of Americans unable to eat red meat. And right at the time when the Department of Health and Human Services, under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is putting meat back on the menu as an essential ingredient of a healthy life.
I won’t get in to the evidence of deliberate engineering of tick diseases by the US government stretching right back to the Second World War, nor am I going to close by talking about ongoing gain-of-function research into rare tick diseases, like Crimea-Congo haemorrhagic fever, that’s taking place on US soil, with Department of Agriculture funding. You can make up your own mind about whether the spread of meat allergies has anything to do with bioweapons research or indeed the wet dreams of Princeton bioethicists.
For me, at least, there’s more than enough evidence that the spread of these meat allergies has natural causes. In recent decades, conservation and reforestation efforts have led to an explosion in the number of white-tailed deer and wild turkeys, the main hosts for lone-star ticks. A warmer climate also favors the ticks, allowing them to spread further north. The number of deer per square mile on Martha’s Vineyard has doubled in a decade. Over 500 cases of alpha-gal syndrome were reported there in 2024 alone.
One Response
> I was born in 1987
Yet you write like a retarded boomer. This isn’t your personal diary. Pseudoscience slop 💩