Beneficial bloodsucking: Making you sick in the name of “public health”

Should scientists be allowed to edit the genes of ticks to make you allergic to eating red meat?

“Yes” is the answer of two Michigan academics, Parker Crutchfield of Western Michigan University and Blake Hereth of the School of Medicine in Kalamazoo. Their recent article “Beneficial Bloodsucking” (July 22, 2025), in the journal Bioethics, argues for just that.

A certain kind of tick transmits alpha-gal syndrome (AGS). AGS makes its victims permanently allergic to red meat. Sufferers who consume red meat endure symptoms ranging from intestinal discomfort, nausea, and vomiting to, in extreme cases, anaphylaxis. The authors declare that most victims’ suffering is toward the less extreme side of that spectrum and that what they assume are rarer cases of anaphylaxis can be handled.

Believing that extreme reactions can be mitigated, Crutchfield and Hereth want to give you AGS. They deliberately want to make you sick.

Why?

Because they assume that eating red meat is immoral. They generally glaze over rationales for why red meat consumption is (to them) immoral. But we can basically summarize their opposition as: a red meat diet causes suffering to animals (especially in industrial farming) and has baneful effects on climate change. Those bad things would not happen absent the global demand for beef. Land use and methane gas from farting cows would be reduced because the world would need fewer cows. If you cannot convince people to give up red meat, infect them and make them intolerant to it.

With absolute confidence in the technological abilities of science, they conclude that red meat consumption is (at least to them) morally wrong, so it is legitimate for scientists to gene-edit AGS-carrying ticks to be able to spread AGS-induced red meat intolerance. Their gene-editing aims at two things: eliminating those ticks as carriers of other tick-borne diseases and enhancing the ticks’ adaptability to broader environments (e.g., urban ones) where they can spread AGS to more people.

The two authors, in fact, call their bug bearers natural “vaccinations,” which represent only “infringements,” not “violations” of human beings’ rights against bodily interference. Their resort to ticks is an attempt to sanitize their role in the process. They recognize that compelling people to receive artificially supplied AGS would pose “normative obstacles.” So, instead of having a public health official compel you to get your AGS-inducing jab, Crutchfield and Hereth would release it “naturally” into the environment through genetically “enhanced” arachnids whose increased range will allow them to X more people.

Why did I write “X”? Because the verb one inserts there is indicative of the topsy-turvy moral world Crutchfield and Hereth inhabit. The proper verb would be “infect”. But “infect” is negative: it causes pathologies. It makes people sick. Admitting that AGS-infected people will have reactions to any red meat they subsequently eat, Crutchfield and Hereth write them off because the infections are, as they brand it, a “moral bioenhancer”. Because the adverse reaction will deter you from eating red meat, which Crutchfield and Hereth have decided is bad, it helps you to be a better person.

So, is “infect” the proper verb? Or is “improve”?

Most of the article is an academic exercise of logical deduction for the authors’ arguments in dialogue with the two main camps of secular bioethics: consequentialists (who think “the greatest good for the greatest number” can justify almost anything) and deontologists (who pretend they are creating universalizable general principles). As regards those principles, however, they almost always include sufficient in-built exceptions to make the principle–like Goldilocks–fit “just right” for the argument they want to advance.

The authors consider their proposal a “public health” initiative and, under that rubric, they think it is reconcilable with traditional justifications for vaccination and therefore should be rolled out on that basis.

Let’s say straight up: these authors advocate intentionally making people sick. They downplay the significance of what they promote by pretending you won’t get sick if you become a “morally virtuous” person (by their index) and, even if you do, the illness isn’t that bad. They also try to buffer their responsibility by making ticks rather than compulsorily administered shots their vector of delivery. But the result is the same: introducing a metabolic intolerance of red meat into human beings.

Dietary limitation of red meat is recommended by cardiologists, but no particular steak dinner is responsible for inducing pathology in the person eating it. Crutchfield’s and Hereth’s AGS-induced intolerance to every steak dinner is, however, a pathology. Whether they admit it or not, in good consequentialist fashion, they conclude that such widespread inducing of disease is justified by the greater good of making us be, whether we want to or not, vegetarian.

2025 marks the 80^th anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg Trials, the prosecution of Nazis for their crimes against humanity. Among the defendants in those proceedings were the “doctors’ trial,” which found guilty those who took part in German experimentation on prisoners and promoted euthanasia under the Nazi “public health” program. One of the cardinal principles that the Trials established was informed consent: no one can be compelled to submit to a medical intervention absent their free knowledge and consent.

Crutchfield and Hereth trample that principle. Their pharisaical equivocation–that widespread inducing of AGS occurs not through mandatory shots but dumb ticks–holds no water because they deliberately intervened in the development and genetics of ticks in order to enhance their infection-spreading capacity across a wider range of environments and populations. Expanded susceptibility to AGS is not a natural phenomenon: it would be a deliberately induced one aimed at spreading a disease in the name of some other “good.”

Appealing to “public health” should not be a justification for trampling on human free choice concerning medical interventions, whether actively administered or “passively” proliferated through modification of the environment. Mandatory shots forced on the population during COVID–often at the price of continued employment, military service, and/or social participation —were gross moral violations of a basic human right to corporeal integrity that is still being litigated for liability purposes in the courts. That regime and the efforts to control the social debate surrounding it also contributed to significant public distrust in what is advocated in the name of “science” and “public health,” to the detriment of real needs in both those areas. Can one imagine the degree of breakdown in social trust that would ensue from such gain-of-function enhancement of tick-borne disease by those supposedly serving your ‘public health?’

I’ll note that Crutchfield’s quasi-eugenicist approach to making better people through science also appeals to keeping people in the dark about it. In his 2019 article titled “Compulsory moral bioenhancement should be covert” in Bioethics, Crutchfield argues that “moral bioenhancement”—interventions in persons not to generate objective health gains but in the name of their so-called moral improvement—should be both “compulsory” and “covert”.

You can neither evade it nor even know about it. Crutchfield likewise justifies his uninformed non-consent in the name of “public health ethics.” Crutchfield resolves what even God Himself does not do: make you “better” even against your will.

Crutchfield and Hereth’s moral-improvement-through-making-you-sick regime entails huge assumptions about the unproven necessity of eliminating red meat from the human diet in order to achieve theoretical environmental and climate goals. It also is willing to experiment on human beings, not just by making blithe assumptions about the consequences of their course of action (they admit anaphylactic reactions to red meat might sometimes be severe or even fatal, but they write them off as “rare”) but also being empirically unaware of the consequences of so radical a transformation of the human diet against most human beings’ wills. While climate and animal rights proponents undoubtedly consider these questions answered, let’s ask them: Where will human beings obtain needed protein? Will AGS also induce intolerance to dairy products–sources of calcium–or can we safely separate lactose from meat intolerance?

As a Catholic theologian, I would also raise the question I think bedevils much of contemporary environmentalism: the equation of human beings with the rest of the created world. Crutchfield and Hereth quote Peter Singer, the bioethicist who considers the decision to rescue a baby human over a baby puppy to be arbitrary and “specie-ist.” In the name of protecting the planet from eating red meat, human free will is to be sacrificed through a publicly supported introduction of a pathology-producing syndrome into human beings. Human health is to be deliberately injured in the name of saving the ecosystem. This is hardly the vision of the human person as a steward with “dominion” over the rest of the created world. Man is not a sacrificial lamb for the world and its “salvation.”

There is a prominent current in contemporary bioethics that endorses “moral bio-enhancement”—using the resources of modern technology, especially in the genetic, biological, and medical fields, not to combat objective disease but to “improve” people according to criteria outside their objective health. The tenure of the new eugenics thinking is conveyed in the title of a book by Julian Savalescu, one of its prime spokesmen: Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement (Oxford University Press, 2012).

I frequently invoke an image from contemporary Polish political philosopher Zbigniew Stawrowski, who states that our times is inhabited by “sleek barbarians.” If the barbarians who brought down ancient Rome wore animal skins and furs while sacking cities, today’s “sleek barbarians” wear power suits and white lab coats while sacking their communities in labs and courtrooms. Convinced of Richard Weaver’s observation that “ideas have consequences,” let us note that similar ideas have already been floated at the World Economic Forum. Finally, we should call Crutchfield’s and Hereth’s ideas what they are: bio-chem warfare against human beings and their dignity in the name of some people’s vision of “a better world”.