Off the Menu

The first death from a tick-borne meat allergy is a grim milestone

If you were a government planner or “expert” and you wanted to get people to eat less meat and by doing so “save the planet,” how would you do it?

Perhaps you’d try to convince them. Make an appeal to reason with statistics about carbon emissions; arguments that industrial farming is cruel, wasteful and unsustainable; and studies that say eating animal products is bad for you and gives you heart disease and colon cancer.

That, I think, is what most decent people would do.

Others, however, would say no: The decision is too important for individuals to be allowed to make for themselves. Time of the essence—the world is about to start boiling—and in any case people are too selfish, too stupid and too short-sighted to alter their habits for the greater good. They must be made to change.

The type of people who actually end up becoming government planners or “experts” seem to favour that second approach.

There are all sorts of different ways you could compel people to give up their beloved flesh.

Of course you could ban animal products outright, but that might cause a stink, so maybe you’d try something a little less direct. You could bombard people with propaganda from every angle and shame them into going “plant-based.” You could impose punitive “carbon taxes” on “polluting” products, so meat becomes a rare treat, a luxury, or even simply unaffordable. You could encourage artificial scarcity and price inflation. To do that, you might break up family farms and allow mega corporations and asset funds to gobble up the land and convert it to solar and wind farms, or convert grazing land to arable or even “rewild” it and stop farming completely.

Or how about this: What if you found a way to give everyone a meat allergy so they couldn’t eat meat even if they wanted to?

You probably know who I’m talking about. That funny little Asian guy, the one in the video.

His name is S. Matthew Liao, and he’s a bioethicist at Princeton who genuinely believes people could be genetically engineered or given a medication to make them allergic to meat, solving the problem of agriculture and its emissions for good. Obviously that’s an idea so stupid only a tenured academic could believe it.

The video does the rounds on Twitter every now and then, and is usually presented as some kind of stunning new revelation from up on the magic mountain—from Davos, I mean, the globalists’ favourite winter resort. Actually, the video is years old. I think it’s from 2018 or maybe even 2016. I discussed it at some length in my 2022 book, The Eggs Benedict Option, which is about the plan for a global plant-based diet and why it’s such a bad thing.

In the video, Liao refers to an allergy transmitted by a tick. The allergy is called alpha-gal syndrome, and the tick in question is the lone-star tick, so named because it has a mark on its back that looks like a star. A compound in the tick’s saliva sensitizes the human host’s immune system to alpha gal, a sugar found in red meat, and as a result, whenever that poor unfortunate person eats red meat, they suffer an allergic reaction.

S. Matthew Liao comes up with these ideas for a living. Among his other proposals for reducing man’s carbon footprint include literally reducing his footprint—shrinking man, say, 15%, using embryo selection—and pumping us all full of the “love hormone” oxytocin at regular intervals to ensure we’re happy and amenable and totally on board with saving the planet, whether we like it or not.

Crazy, huh? Like I said, only an academic.

The first death in the US from alpha-gal syndrome was announced this week. An otherwise healthy 47-year-old man ate a hamburger and within four hours he was dead. It scarcely sounds possible, but it is. Although most symptoms of alpha-gal syndrome are non-fatal—rashes, nausea, cramps, vomiting and diarrhea—scientists had worried that fatal anaphylaxis could happen. Now we know it can.

The victim, whose name has yet to be released, went camping with his wife and kids over the summer. One night, the family ate steak, and the man began to experience severe digestive discomfort. He recovered, but told his family he had believed he was going to die.

Two weeks later, he went to a barbecue, ate a burger and really did die. He collapsed and was found unresponsive in a bathroom.

After an autopsy proved inconclusive, his wife contacted the University of Virginia’s medical school for help.

They tested blood samples from the victim and found that he had been sensitized to alpha gal. The blood also showed that he had suffered an extreme allergic reaction.

When researchers asked the wife about her husband’s history of tick bites, she said he had suffered 12 or 13 chigger bites around his ankles during the summer. Many suspected chigger bites are actually bites from juvenile lone-star ticks.

Alpha-gal syndrome was first identified in the early 2000s, in connection with the cancer drug cetuximab, which was causing some patients to experience severe allergic reactions. Most of these patients were in the southeast US, an area with large populations of lone-star ticks. The earliest case involving the drug was identified in 2002, but it wasn’t until towards the end of the decade that the links with red meat and with lone-star ticks were made.

Researchers then identified cases of alpha-gal syndrome stretching back into the 1990s in the US, and also suggested that reports of meat allergies from Australia dating back even earlier could also have been caused by tick bites.

Today, the CDC estimates as many as 500,000 Americans suffer from alpha-gal syndrome. About 110,000 cases were detected between 2010 and 2022, but the actual rate of diagnosis almost certainly represents only a fraction of the actual cases. Sufferers who experience only mild symptoms may never have reason to believe they have the condition, especially since awareness is still limited.

It’s tempting to believe, given what S. Matthew Liao said and who he’s connected to, as well as what we know about bioweapons research and, of course, what happened during the pandemic, that the massive spread of serious tick-borne diseases could be manmade: a nefarious plot to get us all to eat less meat, or simply the product of scientific hubris and incompetence. In either case, it would amount to the same thing.