Alpha-Gal: Why It Might Be the Shots, Not Just the Ticks

Why Alpha-Gal Is Exploding in My Patients, What Sasha Latypova and Unbekoming Just Proved About It, and the Tick Story Nobody Wants You to Question

By Russell Schierling, Dr. Schierling Unfiltered

Audio and Video Overviews

This is for my children and grandchildren…

Back in the spring of 2022, in my piece on Morgellons Disease, I quoted Victoria Nuland’s congressional testimony — the one where Joe Biden’s undersecretary admitted, under questioning, that the United States was “working with” Ukrainian biological research labs and was worried Russia might seize them.

I discussed the thirteen labs in Ukraine that quickly became “had” once Russia took them, and about the roughly four hundred such facilities the U.S. operates around the world, their locations once posted on government websites and then scrubbed when the “conspiracy theory” got too much traction.

It was a wild ride, and interestingly, even Hunter, sensing another Ukrainian windfall, had been cut in on a piece of the biolab action…

Not only did assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, testify in congressional hearings just three short months ago that the US has at least 13 bio labs in the Ukraine (make that “had” — Russia is said to have captured all 46 of them, which is not surprising considering they had been threatening to invade the Ukraine for a decade because of these labs), there were maps of their locations — not to mention the locations of our other 300 400 such labs around the world — listed on a number of government websites. Although taken down when this “conspiracy” surfaced, it’s still possible to find sites that have archived this data.

I’m not telling you this because I had some brilliant original insight. I didn’t — I’ve probably never had an original thought in my life. I’m telling you because I had my ear to the ground in early 2022, and was doing a lot of reading. Why does that matter? Some of the things that got people branded as “Russian disinformation agents” or “fringe QAnon extremists” back then are being confirmed by the government itself right now.

On June 12 (Friday of last week), outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released declassified documents revealing longstanding U.S. funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, Ukraine included, many of them running dangerous gain-of-function work with little oversight. She said plainly that officials “lied repeatedly to the American people” about the labs’ existence and went after those who tried to expose them — a charge mainstream outlets were finally forced to carry.

I use the word ‘finally’ because…

Jeff Childers of Coffee & Covid fame delivered the goods in his Saturday roundup on the man they called a QAnon extremist — the anonymous account (Clandestine) who in February 2022, simply laid a map of Russian airstrikes over a map of U.S. biolabs, got censored, removed, doxxed, and slandered for his trouble. And has finally been vindicated by the sitting DNI. Hold that pattern in your mind: they call it disinformation until the day they can’t, and then they admit it quietly and hope you’ve stopped paying attention.

‘Hey, isn’t that a Bigfoot running through your front yard?’

As you’ll soon see, I will have plenty of people accusing me of seeing Bigfoot. I’m sure I have more Jerry Fletcher in me than I sometimes care to admit. But in regards to today’s post, I couldn’t care less. Today’s message is that important regarding the epidemic currently crushing southern Missouri. My patients. My people.

Let me bring this home to my clinic — to the people of the rural Ozarks I’ve been treating for thirty-five years.

The Amish Don’t Get Alpha-gal

I treat a lot of Amish. A LOT of Amish, and have for years. I want to tell you something I’ve watched with my own eyes — a clinical observation — because it matters more than any study I could hit you with.

The Amish I treat do not get vaccinated — not as children, not as adults, not in any capacity I’ve ever encountered. They also live large portions of their lives outdoors. They work cattle, crops, and gardens. They tend to the horses that run their buggies and disk their fields. They walk through brush, grass, and woods every day of their lives, and they don’t use Off or other commercial repellents to do it.

If the lone star tick is roaming this part of the country — and it is — then the Amish are the single most tick-exposed population I could even imagine. By the official story, they should be alpha-gal central. If anyone on earth should be struggling with red-meat allergies from tick bites, it’s them.

They aren’t.

In my years of practice, across a large Amish patient population that is maximally exposed to ticks and entirely unvaccinated, I am not aware of any cases of alpha-gal. Not one. I’m not saying there might not be a couple, but if there are, they are not making it public.

And before someone reaches for the easy dodge — well, maybe they’re just less exposed somehow — let me close that door. They are not less exposed. They are more exposed than the repellent-using, mostly indoors, general population that is developing alpha-gal in droves. Maximum tick exposure, zero vaccination, little to no alpha-gal.

The general population has the opposite of all three, and the allergy to mammalian products is exploding among them. That’s not a footnote. That is a true mind-bender, sitting right there in plain sight, in a population it seems the experts would rather not examine too closely.

And No, This Isn’t the “Old Friends” Hygiene Hypothesis

I can already hear the objection, because I’ve written about the hygiene hypothesis — the “Old Friends” mechanism for years — Dogs & Dirt. The Amish have low rates of asthma and allergy because their farm-rich, microbe-rich environment trains the immune system early, the way our ancestors’ immune systems were trained. That’s real, and it’s well documented. So some may be tempted to reach for it here.

Except that defense detonates in their hands the moment they pick it up.

Alpha-gal is not sold to you as an ordinary atopic allergy, the kind a microbe-trained immune system shrugs off. It is sold to you as a tick-bite injury — a sensitization caused by something injected into your skin by a bug. And the hygiene hypothesis has absolutely nothing to say about tick bites.

A farm-raised, endotoxin-seasoned immune system does not stop a tick from biting and dumping its saliva into you. So, to retreat to “Old Friends explains the Amish” concedes that alpha-gal tracks with general allergic predisposition rather than with tick exposure, which is the point. Either it’s the tick, in which case the oft-bitten Amish should have it, and they don’t — or it’s a sensitization of an already-primed immune system, in which case we’d better start asking what’s doing the priming.

There is exactly one variable that cleanly separates my Amish patients from the general population that has this thing. It isn’t the woods. It’s the shots — the cradle-to-grave vaccinations that most Americans are exposed to, but they aren’t. From day-one injections of Hep-B, to HPV, to the way that far too many people clamor for their annual flu shot or COVID booster du jour.

All of it potentially leading to something that should stop the average person in their tracks.

What’s Actually Going On — The Bare-Bones Version

Here’s the simple truth, and I’m going to keep it simple on purpose, because most of you reading this aren’t immunologists — you’re people who suddenly can’t eat a hamburger without ending up in the ER, and you want to understand why. For the deep technical machinery, I’m going to send you to two writers who have done extraordinary work on this, and I’ll point you to them in a moment. But here’s the bare-bones version…

When you eat meat, your gut breaks it down into microscopic pieces — harmless pieces. That’s your digestion doing its job — it’s why you can eat a steak and your body treats it as food. It’s also why the digestive component of ‘gut health’ is so important.

But when bits of mammal — cow and pig proteins like gelatin (not to mention the blood protein they grow vaccines in) — get injected into you instead of eaten, your body never gets to break them down properly. Your immune system meets them in the bloodstream, where food is never supposed to be (sort of like The Leakies), decides they’re the enemy, and remembers them.

The aluminum adjuvants in the shots (meant to intentionally create inflammatory responses) act like an alarm bell that makes your body’s reaction louder and more permanent. Then, years later, you eat a burger — and your body, which was trained by these injections to treat mammal protein as a threat, attacks it. Hives. Stomach collapse. Anaphylaxis, three to six hours after dinner, for reasons nobody can explain to you. And the doctor says: must’ve been a tick.

It wasn’t a tick. It was the shot. That’s it. That’s the mechanism in plain English. And like I said earlier, I’m not the one who connected these dots. Let me show you, however, who proved it out in detail — because they deserve the credit, and you should read their entire articles.

A Summary of Latypova and Unbekoming — Read Them, Not Me

What follows is a summary. I am not here to take credit for any of this — the heavy lifting belongs to Sasha Latypova and to the writer who publishes as Unbekoming, and you should go read both pieces start to finish. I’m pointing you to them and telling you what their work means for the people in my Ozarks clinic.

Start with the history, because none of this is new. The mechanism behind alpha-gal won a Nobel Prize in 1913. The Frenchman Charles Richet won it for anaphylaxis — he coined the word — after showing that injecting an animal with a foreign protein primes the immune system so hard that a second dose, even a tiny one, can kill it.

Injection was the maker of the reaction: a prior injection, not prior eating, is what turned a protein into a lethal trigger. Modern immunology spells out why he was right. The route decides the outcome — protein that arrives by mouth gets broken down and tolerated, while the same protein delivered by needle skips that step and can sensitize instead. Tolerance by mouth, sensitization by shot. That gap is the whole ballgame.

A hundred and seven years before ticks were blamed for meat allergy in humans, the highest medical honor on earth was handed to a man who had manufactured meat allergy with an injection. Unbekoming lays this out in “What Is Alpha-Gal Syndrome?” — the same mechanism, in the same direction, against the same proteins. Only the cover story changed.

Then came the modern rediscovery, and the establishment did it to itself. In 2008, a cancer drug called cetuximab — grown in mouse cells, which carry the alpha-gal sugar — started causing violent reactions on the first dose, but only in patients who already carried the antibodies before they ever got the drug. Something had sensitized them in advance. What has been injecting mammal protein into Americans for decades? The vaccine schedule.

But instead, we were told it was due to ticks.

And here’s why the tick story stuck so fast: it filled a hole the system was desperate to fill. As Latypova documents in “Weaponized Ticks!!!, a mini review,” a huge share of severe anaphylaxis in this country — by some surveys, roughly four in ten cases — was classified as “idiopathic,” meaning cause unknown.

A tick-borne allergy with a convenient delayed-reaction pattern was perfectly shaped to soak up cases the system couldn’t otherwise explain. In a country where the average child receives dozens of doses of vaccine ingredients — including gelatin and bovine serum albumin (BSA), both of which carry alpha-gal, alongside aluminum — the obvious suspect should have been the injection schedule from the beginning.

The cleanest proof comes from Japan, and it’s in the mainstream literature.

When Japanese authorities put gelatin into a childhood vaccine and moved it earlier in the schedule, anaphylactic reactions in children climbed. Japanese researchers concluded the aluminum-adjuvanted shot had sensitized those kids to gelatin — and that subsequent exposure, by needle or by food, triggered the reaction. Gelatin carries alpha-gal, so this proves the mechanism and, at the very least, makes vaccines a plausible route for alpha-gal.

They pulled the gelatin, and the cases dropped dramatically. The medical establishment of an entire country quietly admitted, in peer review, that vaccines cause food allergy by Richet’s mechanism — and few contested it. In the United States, the gelatin was never removed. The schedule only grew. And the food-allergy explosion that allergists date to around 1990 lines up almost exactly with that expansion.

This is the part the establishment cannot allow itself to see, and it’s worth saying that Latypova and Unbekoming are standing on real shoulders here…

The framework goes back to Heather Fraser’s The Peanut Allergy Epidemic — injection plus aluminum equals sensitization — and it was applied to alpha-gal specifically six years ago in the Weston A. Price Foundation’s “Alpha-Gal Syndrome and Ticks: A False Trail?” Latypova herself had laid out the Richet mechanism back in 2024 in “The Second Shot.” The two new pieces are the sharpest synthesis yet.

And there’s another tell — the insurance codes.

The only code, Z91.014, files it as a plain ‘meat allergy’ — cause-neutral on paper, but clinically read as a tick bite. So a vaccine-driven case gets absorbed into the tick bucket. The vaccine side has the same blind spot from the other direction as well: the adverse-effect codes that do exist (T50.Z95 and the like) only capture the reaction in the room that day — there’s nothing built to log an allergy that surfaces months or years after the shots, which is exactly how alpha-gal shows up. Delayed causation has no box to check, so it never gets counted, and what never gets counted remains largely unstudied.

And if you want the proof that people in high places know exactly how the mechanism works, read what Unbekoming dug up on the NYU bioethicist who stood on a TED stage in 2013 and proposed deliberately giving the population meat allergies — “meat patches,” he called them — as a way to fight climate change. You cannot propose engineering a thing on purpose and simultaneously claim the thing is just a mysterious act of nature.

What’s on the Other Side of the Fence?

Everything above this line is solid. The mechanism is Nobel-grade and a century old (go back and read Sasha’s The Second Shot); the cohort data, the Amish, the Japanese admission, the timing of the codes — that’s the part nobody can knock down, and it’s the part that matters for your dinner plate. It was the shot, not the tick. If that’s all you take from this, you have what you need.

What follows is a different kind of claim, and I’m fencing it off on purpose. I’m not going to feed you anything that isn’t on the record — and I’m going to tell you exactly where the record stops, and my own suspicion begins. The connective tissue here isn’t a theory. It’s a timeline. Lay the dates end to end, and the pattern stops looking like coincidence and starts looking like a program.

Before I walk you down that timeline, a word about Sasha Latypova — because I’m about to build on her work, and I won’t have anyone mistaking that for arguing with her. Sasha did the hardest part of this, and she did it cleanly. She took the loudest claim in the room — that someone is CRISPR-ing ticks into little alpha-gal factories to explain the explosion — and she took it apart.

She’s right.

But it’s also here that Sasha and I don’t land in the same place. She doesn’t just doubt the gene-edited tick — she reads the whole weaponized-tick story, classical and modern alike, as misdirection: a fear narrative that keeps you staring at the woods while the biodefense industry bills the taxpayer to protect you from it. And she’s got a point I won’t wave off — that exact narrative has been used that way, over and over. So take what follows as my detour, not hers.

“Great article, but it just seems like there has to be something going on with the ticks.” -A comment from Sasha’s article that I ‘liked,’ loosely (emphasis on loosely) quoted from memory…

I find the declassified record harder to set down than she does, but I concede that I could be giving old paper more weight than it deserves. And if I am, Sasha, who is admittedly much more at home in this particular ocean (she and Katherine Watt are nothing short of brilliant), will probably let me have it (I’ll decline the blindfold and cigarette). At the end of the day, however, none of it touches the part we agree on completely, the part that matters for your dinner plate: this is injected mammal protein, not a bug in the grass.

So hear me carefully, because what I’m about to lay out is not the claim she demolished, and it does not cost her a single point. You do not need to gene-edit a tick to weaponize one. You never did. You stuff it with pathogens and simply turn it loose — the crude, classical, no-engineering-required method the United States spent decades perfecting and, by its own declassified record, actually used.

Is it all just a head-fake? I have a tough time wrapping my head around that idea. But then again, if I were a Current River bass, that Jitterbug might look too darn good to pass up.

Start with the people and the places…

After World War II, the United States brought over Erich Traub under Operation Paperclip — the virologist who had run the Nazis’ animal-bioweapons lab on Insel Riems under Himmler, weaponizing foot-and-mouth virus to spray on Soviet livestock — and debriefed him at Fort Detrick. His expertise helped seed Plum Island, which in 1952 was taken over by the Army Chemical Corps for anti-animal biological warfare research, and handed to the USDA only in 1954.

A year earlier, in 1951, the Army had recruited a young Swiss scientist named Willy Burgdorfer to Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana for one job: stuffing ticks with pathogens. His documented specialty was loading two and three diseases into a single tick so the resulting illness would have no fingerprints — an unsolvable medical mystery. Thirty years later, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease would be named after him (Borrelia Burgdorferi).

By the mid-1950s, the concept was proven. Operation Big Itch (1954) dropped over half a million fleas from cluster munitions to confirm that insects could carry a payload across a battlefield. The vector worked. The only question left was deployment — and that came with Operation Mongoose.

In 1962, the Kennedy administration’s program to break Castro authorized economic sabotage of Cuban agriculture, and the planning minutes are explicit about wanting biological methods that could be passed off as natural outbreaks. It was not theoretical.

A CIA operative later told investigator Kris Newby that the strangest thing he ever did was drop infected ticks on Cuban sugarcane workers from a transport plane skimming the Caribbean to dodge radar — after which his own son fell gravely ill, and his commander ordered him to burn every piece of clothing he’d worn. Newby hosts the operational paperwork, and the title of one memo alone — a plan for dropping weaponized, incapacitating insects — tells you these were not nature studies. They were attack plans.

Then they ran a similar playbook at home.

Between 1966 and 1969, the Army released 282,800 American Dog Ticks tagged with radioactive carbon-14 — not only along the Atlantic bird flyway in Virginia, but in Montana as well (think RML here), a fact buried in the declassified record and brought to light in a 2021 United Nations filing on the U.S. entomological warfare program. They tracked the spread with Geiger counters as migrating birds carried the ticks up the coastline.

Three novel tick-borne diseases erupted in the same geographic region in the same period of time. Rocky Mountain spotted fever surfaced in the Northeast around 1970. Babesiosis was discovered in the late 1960’s. And Lyme arthritis was identified in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the mid 70’s — the coast of which is exactly 8.6 miles from Plum Island (and 120 miles from Martha’s Vineyard).

Here is the hinge — the moment the tick story was born.

By Newby’s account (she is no fringe blogger. She’s an award-winning science writer at Stanford, who has her own Substack…), when those outbreaks hit, there were said to be panicked calls between Burgdorfer and bioweapons HQ, and that is when the cover-up started. The public-health agencies decided they needed a story that would keep people from looking at the weapons program, and the story they chose was “It’s just a tick bite” — a concealment strategy, manufactured to bury the story of a weapon that did not work out as planned.

Burgdorfer carried it nearly to his grave. Nearly…

He admitted, on camera in 2013, to the bioweapons work, said he believed the Lyme outbreak was an accident of that program, allowed that he’d been asked to suppress what he’d found, and told his interviewer flatly that he had not told them everything. Because both the establishment and anti-establishment are already swinging this week, they’ll tell you Burgdorfer’s 2013 confession doesn’t count because he had Parkinson’s. Fine. Just realize that none of this depends on a dying man’s interview.

The truth is that the cover-up went deeper than ‘the narrative’ — it was wired into the disease itself…

Burgdorfer’s assignment was never just the tick; it was the payload. His own laboratory notebooks, catalogued in Newby’s reporting, record him force-feeding ticks through glass capillary tubes with a rotating arsenal — Q fever, tularemia, relapsing fever, typhus, leptospirosis, equine encephalitis, rabies — while the program separately raced to weaponize Rickettsia by freeze-drying it, milling it, and turning it into an aerosol to spray across wide areas.

The most quietly monstrous part, though, is the design philosophy: load two and three pathogens into a single tick so that whatever the victim came down with would carry no fingerprints — no clean diagnosis, no single agent, an unsolvable case. In other words, they didn’t just build a weapon; they built an undiagnosable one, on purpose. And it is the most honest explanation anyone has offered for why chronic Lyme — waved off for forty years as all in the patient’s head — behaves exactly like a disease engineered never to resolve into a diagnosis.

The morass isn’t a failure of medicine; it’s the specification. The same instinct buried Burgdorfer’s own finding of a second organism — the Swiss Agent, a Rickettsia he detected in nearly every sample from the outbreak zone — and he was made to leave it out of his published work. The payload was being engineered, and its proof was being suppressed in the same motion.

Let me be precise about what I am and am not claiming, because precision is what makes this stick. I am not saying they invented Lyme. They didn’t. The bacterium is ancient — it sits in the remains of a 5,300-year-old iceman (not to be confused with the “Frozen Man” JT was singing about back in the late 80’s). The claim is tinkering: mixing pathogens into single vectors — exactly the multi-disease tick work Burgdorfer was hired to do — then breeding those vectors by the hundreds of thousands and turning them loose to see how far they’d travel.

That isn’t a theory. That’s the job description. And once the timeline is in front of you, you see the animal running through all of it. Plum Island is not a generic germ lab — it is, by charter, an Animal Disease Center, founded on a man who weaponized a cattle disease. Now set that beside what this piece already showed you: alpha-gal is an allergy to a bovine sugar, injected through bovine gelatin and serum.

And the disease they call imaginary — Morgellons — was shown, in a direct comparison with bovine digital dermatitis, to be the human mirror of an accepted cattle illness: same keratin fibers, both from spirochetes. Watch the double standard work its magic — a lame cow shedding colored fibers gets a diagnosis, while the human growing identical fibers gets a diagnosis (“Delusional Parasitosis”) that requires a psychiatrist. These are different diseases and mechanisms, but they share a denominator that is impossible to un-see… Cattle, and a laboratory built to do things to cattle.

And speaking of “doing things to cattle,” that laboratory has a current address — one that turned up last week on a government map. For my Kansas homeys…

When Gabbard dropped her declassified biolab network diagram on Friday, my own alma mater was sitting smack dab in the middle of it: Kansas State University, charted alongside the USDA, USAMRIID, and the WHO. The diagram doesn’t spell out K-State’s role — I won’t claim more than the document says — but it doesn’t have to, because the rest is a matter of public record.

When Plum Island was decommissioned, its mission moved to the mainland, into the heart of the beef belt, onto the K-State campus, as the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility: a BSL-4 hot zone dropped in the heartland, the first maximum-containment lab in the country built to hold live cattle alongside the most dangerous pathogens we have. Plum Island didn’t close; it simply moved to Manhattan (the Little Apple).

Chosen in 2008, ground broken in 2010, doors opened in 2023. A fifteen-year, billion-dollar decision to drag the nation’s deadliest livestock-pathogen work off an island and into the middle of cattle country, over loud local objection. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Now, the part that should put a chill in you, because the apparatus did not die in 1969…

Nixon “ended” the offensive program on paper, but the labs, the scientists, and above all the methods survived — and you can watch the same playbook run a second time with a different delivery system. The food-allergy explosion, allergists date to around 1990, tracks the expansion of the injection schedule (studies / synthesis).

The dedicated alpha-gal billing code appeared in 2021, right behind the mRNA rollout. Was there “mammalian” product in the COVID vaccine? Maybe. However, LNPs are well-documented immune activators capable of driving hypersensitivity through complement pathways, raising the unresolved question of whether they amplify sensitization to any co-delivered mammalian antigen, including alpha-gal

And the same institutions have spent those sixty years admitting the truth one forced inch at a time. Project 112, a sprawling Cold War bioweapons program, was denied for fifty years until it was dragged into the light in 2000. It took Congressman Chris Smith five years to force the 2019 amendment ordering the Pentagon to say whether it weaponized ticks at all. Robert Malone published the “Declassified Documents Link U.S. Bioweapons Program to Lyme Disease Outbreak” account just three months ago. Then, on Friday, came Gabbard.

Each time, the thing called a conspiracy theory becomes — after a significant delay — the thing the government quietly confirms. Which is exactly the pattern we opened today’s post with.

Hey; isn’t that a Bigfoot running through your front yard?

Whatever your opinion of my rabbit-hole rant, don’t lose the main idea. For my patients — for the people watching this thing tear through their families while ex-spurts shrug and point at the treeline — the headline is simple, and it’s solid. Alpha-gal is anaphylaxis to injected mammal protein.

It was documented by a Nobel laureate. The Amish, covered in ticks and free of needles, don’t have it. They told you to watch the woods. The danger was in the vial.

---

Interested in this brand new Jackery Explorer 1500 + SolarSaga 100W Panel — never used, $750? Contact (865)-292-8657 or lonnee@protonmail.com