Ticks woke?: when bioethics becomes activism

A few months ago, the academic journal Bioethics published an article titled "Beneficial Bloodsucking," signed by Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth, two professors at Western Michigan University School of Medicine. Their central proposal: genetically modify ticks to spread the alpha-gal syndrome to as many people as possible, with the goal of forcing them to stop eating red meat. Not as an abstract thought experiment, although that's how they presented it when the public backlash came, but as a moral imperative. Another example of the deranged exercise of virtue signaling woke.

The core of the article is what the authors call the "Convergence Argument," and it unfolds in two steps, always within their progressive value system. First they claim that, if eating meat is "morally wrong," then any effort to prevent the spread of a disease that forces people to stop eating it is also morally wrong. They then derive from that statement that, given that it is now technically possible to genetically edit ticks to amplify their ability to transmit the syndrome and expand their geographic range, not doing so is tantamount to tolerating a "preventable evil."

Yes, just as you read, they are proposing to make people seriously ill on the basis of an ideological plan. The conclusion is that spreading the alpha-gal syndrome is not only permissible, but "strongly obligatory." They call this mechanism a "bioethical enhancer," an intervention that enhances "moral behavior" through disease.

To understand the magnitude of what this implies, it is necessary to first understand what the alpha-gal syndrome is. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), it is a "serious, potentially life-threatening" condition that causes allergic reactions in those who consume red meat and currently affects nearly 450,000 people in the United States. The most common symptoms are gastrointestinal discomfort appearing two to three hours after eating meat, but the condition can develop into anaphylactic shock. There is no cure. And the disease is spreading: the lone star tick has now spread to 27 states, from Texas to Maine, with active health alerts in Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, Delaware, Missouri and Ohio, among others.

The incidence of anaphylaxis in patients with the syndrome is between 1 percent and 3 percent. Inducing the syndrome in the world's 8.3 billion people would give between 83 and 249 million deliberately provoked cases of anaphylactic shock. Crutchfield and Hereth never address that calculation at any point.

Instead, they frame everything as a public health intervention comparable to vaccination. Their conceptual distinction: releasing modified ticks that bite people "infringes" on bodily autonomy, but does not "violate" it. The difference, apparently, is that the transmitting agent is an insect, not a government official. This distinction omits the question of deliberate harm. The American Council on Science and Health accurately dismantled it: the authors propose to cause harm, not prevent it; they explicitly violate individual consent; and the analogy with vaccination is scientifically and ethically indefensible, given that vaccines prevent diseases while this scheme introduces them.

The article also resorts to a comparison that reveals much about their philosophical presuppositions: Crutchfield and Hereth equate eating meat with cannibalism, arguing that if it is lawful to induce an allergy to human flesh in a cannibal, by the same logic it is lawful to induce an allergy to animal flesh in anyone. The argument morally equates farm animals with humans.

Given the ethical (and psychological) derangement of the authors, it is logical that they also fail to contemplate what is the nutritional value of that which they seek to eliminate from the human diet. Red meat is an abundant source of high biological value protein, iron, vitamin B12, zinc and selenium, critical nutrients for preventing anemia, sustaining immune function and maintaining cognitive health, especially in children and pregnant women. The authors do not dispute these points at any point in their article, of course.

Furthermore, the data on the dietary habits of people who already have the syndrome show that most do not become vegetarian, but simply migrate toward meats that do not cause them to react, such as chicken, fish, seafood. Consumption would not be reduced; it would simply be redistributed to other species.

The environmental argument underlying the entire proposal, which is often based on outdated or deliberately decontextualized data, does not hold water either. The famous 14.5% of global emissions attributed to livestock, a figure that activism repeats as dogma based on a 2013 report, is a global average that mixes inefficient subsistence systems with modern livestock farming, where genetics and nutrition make the emissions intensity per animal radically lower. In fact, in its most recent report of 2023 ("Pathways towards lower emissions"), the FAO itself updated its estimates downward, placing the real impact at around 11.1%.

Even more revealing is the myth of uncontrollable territorial depredation: the data consolidated by the University of Oxford show that humanity has already surpassed the "Peak agricultural land." Thanks to the intensification of production, the global area devoted to pasture has been reduced by about 140 million hectares since 2000, making it possible to produce much more meat in much less space. As a direct consequence, emissions from land-use change for livestock have fallen by a third in the past two decades. The footprint of animal agriculture is not an expanding existential threat; in fact, it is contracting.

Even more telling is what the article deliberately omits. The authors themselves admit that, "for the sake of brevity," they do not present any of the arguments that would justify why eating meat is morally wrong. However, they devote entire paragraphs to justifying infecting all of humanity with a potentially fatal disease in the name of that unproven axiom. We are talking about unleashing modified disease vectors on entire populations. How far are you from bacteriological terrorism to defend your ideology?

It is worth noting that even within the bioethics community itself the article was repudiated. But that the rebuttal was necessary within the journal itself says as much about the original article as it does about the state of the field. The ideological context in which this type of proposal emerges cannot be ignored either. Many international organizations, NGOs, influencers and almost the entirety of environmental activism have for years been promoting veganism and reduced meat consumption, pushing insect-based diets and alternative proteins, and publishing reports that present animal agriculture as an existential threat to the planet. There is an ideological ecosystem in which dietary coercion, previously unthinkable, becomes progressively articulable as a legitimizing academic argument.

When the article generated an avalanche of criticism, Crutchfield resorted to the usual shield: it was just a "thought experiment." But many colleagues rightly responded that such a ruse as a defense does not suffice, because destructive ideas often began as theoretical experiments in academic journals before gaining political traction. What is "just a hypothesis" today may be public policy tomorrow. Today, one can observe, behind acts of vandalism or potentially terrorist acts, that the perpetrators have been influenced by radical ideas with this kind of justification: a scientific journal that almost looks like an instruction manual for committing attacks.

What kind of academic system produces, validates and publishes these kinds of ideas? A peer-reviewed scientific journal published the article. A medical university endorses it because of the track record of its authors. And when the scrutiny came, the authors did not withdraw the article or revise their arguments: they simply changed the concept from "proposal" to "thought experiment."

Maybe the problem is not that two professors have criminal ideas, but that they are produced in a system that certifies them, publishes them, and then shrugs. At some point, the distance between publishing an idea and legitimizing it becomes too short to continue to ignore it.