00:00:00.000Across the heartland of America, farmers are stumbling upon mysterious boxes of ticks scattered in their fields.
00:00:11.840There are ticks everywhere. In 30 years, 20-some years of having horses, I've never had to deal with these many ticks.
00:00:19.660All reports flood in of unnatural surges in tick populations, dropping like a biblical plague from the skies.
00:00:30.000there it is right there the tick box i'm not going to touch it because there's ticks
00:00:40.920all over that thing i know there is look at them crawling out of it millions of them
00:00:47.880you can see the ticks and even boa constrictors in florida that are invasive they're now suddenly
00:00:54.860getting eaten and dying off because there's so many ticks all over them i mean this is just out
00:00:59.540As tick-borne illnesses explode nationwide, Lyme disease cases have skyrocketed, with ER visits for bites hitting multi-year highs this spring.
00:01:11.260Look at my face and my neck. I can't eat red meat anymore. I can't have any animal byproducts in anything. And it's in everything. This is alpha-gal syndrome.
00:01:25.480A 47-year-old New Jersey man ate a burger in 2024 and died four hours later.
00:01:32.380Two weeks earlier, he got sick after eating a steak.
00:01:38.340It usually starts with a bite from a lone star tick that sensitizes a person's immune system to a sugar molecule found in the meat of mammals called alpha-gal.
00:01:48.340Reactions can include hives, nausea, and life-threatening anaphylaxis.
00:01:52.480Phylaxis. Yet just as the panic builds, pharmaceutical giants are fast tracking a
00:01:58.400new Lyme disease vaccine poised for rollout amid the chaos. Stephen Rich, a professor of
00:02:04.560microbiology at UMass Amherst, he has studied ticks for decades. He is watching as Pfizer is
00:02:10.120now seeking approval on a Lyme disease vaccine. What they found was that it was about 73 percent
00:02:15.280efficacious, meaning that it worked about 73 percent of the time. Vaccine went to market in
00:02:20.640the late 90s, but failed. For one reason or another, the company, arguably they said because
00:02:25.900of sales, took it off the markets. The demand now is high, but Rich and his researchers fear
00:02:30.860the public may see a vaccine as a tick cure-all. If you got rid of Lyme disease, you won't get
00:02:35.800rid of ticks. If approved, the vaccine could be a four-dose vaccination series, three injections
00:02:42.080in one year, and a booster at year two. So, I mean, if this vaccine is approved, it would be
00:02:47.800a game changer in the fight against Lyme disease. And it's nothing new. From Cold War
00:02:53.240tick experiments to Plum Island labs, bioweapons research has turned insects into silent vectors
00:03:00.040for years. Did we actually use ticks as bioweapons? Yes, it's actually in CIA documents
00:03:08.500that have been declassified. For instance, infected ticks were deployed from C-130s flying
00:03:15.780low over sugarcane fields in Cuba back in the day under President Kennedy, there is
00:03:23.360abundant evidence of the testing, field testing, of infected ticks and other insects in a variety
00:03:33.460of settings in the United States and elsewhere.
00:03:38.680Clearly, USAMRID was involved, and in particular, the Plum Island facility that had been a
00:03:45.820biowarfare investigative facility up in Long Island region, and then was transferred over
00:03:54.880to USDA, was involved in a lot of this research.
00:03:58.860Possibly, we can use human engineering to make it the case that we're intolerant to
00:04:03.440certain kinds of meat, to certain kinds of bovine proteins.
00:04:07.060And there's actually analogs of this in life.
00:04:09.440There's this thing called the long star tick, where if it bites you, you will become allergic to meat.