Tag: ticks

EXPOSED: US Labs Breeding Deadly Foreign Ticks in Bid for mRNA Vaccines

U.S. government-funded labs are actively breeding colonies of exotic Hyalomma ticks imported from Africa to study Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), a brutal tick-borne virus with a 30% mortality rate that’s never been detected in America.

This high-stakes research, aimed at developing mRNA vaccines and analyzing transmission in livestock, is raising red flags among experts who warn of catastrophic lab leaks that could unleash the disease on U.S. soil, devastating agriculture and public health.

The program involves multiple facilities, including the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Manhattan, Kansas (tied to the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, formerly on Plum Island), UC Davis in California, and Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas, according to research from the White Coat Waste project, first reported by The Highwire.

These sites are establishing tick colonies to experiment on CCHF transmission in cattle, sheep, and goats, assessing risks for the virus establishing itself here based on climate and ecology.

“The White Coat Waste Project uncovered 10 existing USDA contracts to work on mRNA vaccines, including one that is studying Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), a highly pathogenic tick-borne disease with a 10-40% case fatality rate,” The Highwire reports. “The research grant is given to the Agricultural Research Service in Manhattan, Kansas, in combination with researchers at the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), which was formerly on Plum Island, where researchers were studying Lyme disease near Lyme, Connecticut, where the first outbreak occurred.”

CCHF, first identified in Crimea in 1944, causes severe symptoms and can spread from ticks to animals or humans, and even person-to-person.

There’s no widely licensed vaccine, only a dubious Soviet-era one from 1970.

Funding flows from USDA contracts for mRNA vaccine development, including 10 ongoing deals specifically targeting CCHF.

EcoHealth Alliance, infamous for its role in COVID origins research, snagged a $3.7 million Department of Defense grant from 2020-2024 to study CCHF as part of “combating weapons of mass destruction.”

The Highwire notes, “WCWP was the organization that first uncovered that EcoHealth Alliance was involved in gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, approved by NIAID head Dr. Anthony Fauci, which the FBI and CIA both state is the most likely source of the COVID-19 virus that sparked a worldwide pandemic. WCWP celebrated the announcement that the CDC will be closing all monkey studies by the end of the year.”

Another USDA contract, running through March 2026, supports the core research.

Critics are blasting this as reckless madness.

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Red Meat Allergies from Tick Bites Are on the Rise. It Fits Conveniently into an Agenda

Dairy and red meat allergies may now be the 10th most common food allergies in the U.S., according to CDC estimates.  In case you haven’t heard, alpha-Gal syndrome is on the rise, and it’s still largely unrecognized.

What is this new syndrome?  Who needs to avoid red meat and dairy?  Might something else be going on here? Let’s look a little deeper at how a simple tick bite can have lifelong, devastating effects – and not just from Lyme disease.

What is alpha-Gal syndrome?

Alpha-Gal syndrome begins with a bite from an infected tick or chigger.  The tick or chigger bites some kind of mammal and ingests its blood, which contains alpha-Gal, a type of sugar molecule.  If that tick or chigger goes on to bite a human, it can transmit some of the alpha-Gal-tainted blood to the human, which may then trigger an allergic reaction to red meat or dairy products.

One of the stranger things about alpha-Gal syndrome is the time in which it takes for symptoms to present themselves.  It typically takes a few months after the tick bite for the person’s antibodies to alpha-Gal to build up, and then it is often several hours after a person eats meat that they have their allergic reaction. (source)  The time delay makes diagnosis really difficult because victims often feel like their allergic reactions appear out of nowhere.  Before people knew what to look for, an alpha-Gal syndrome diagnosis took some sleuthing.

Alpha-Gal is something to be aware of, particularly since it can be triggered not only by meat and dairy but also drugs containing mammal products, and even carrageenan, an Irish moss used as a food thickener.  If you’ve got allergic reactions you can’t explain, you could ask your doctor about getting a blood test to rule this out.

However, for those of us familiar with all our allergies, this is not something to lose sleep over.

In fact, overdiagnosis of alpha-Gal syndrome may be a bigger concern.  Detailed studies have shown that about a third of the American population has antibodies to alpha-Gal, which means they’ve already encountered it somewhere.  And yet the overwhelming majority of us can eat red meat without ill effects.

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