Tick Bites Surge Amid Climate Change and Viral Conspiracy Theories

“Tell you what,” Drew Maciel told his Instagram followers in April, “I’m sick of finding dead moose.” He zoomed in on a dead bull moose lying prone on the ground, running the camera over clusters of ticks nestled within every crevice of the corpse.

Maciel is a shed hunter, meaning he collects antlers that have been naturally “shed” by wildlife. But a winter tick feeding frenzy in Maine, driven by rising temperatures, means that this year he kept finding dead animals. Up to 90 percent of the moose calves tracked by scientists in recent years have been bled to death by ticks — an ongoing crisis in a state that prizes these largest of all deer species.

Climate Change Fuels Tick Infestations

Where scientists see the hand of climate change at work — average temperatures in Maine have risen 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1985 — others see the designs of a global cabal.

“Human engineered biological warfare,” read a comment on Maciel’s video posted by Dries Van Langenhove, a far-right former member of the Belgian government who was recently convicted of violating the country’s Holocaust denial laws. The comment got 32,000 likes.

“It’s Bill Gates,” someone else posted.

Chuck Lubelczyk, a vector-borne ecologist with Maine Medical Center, collects ticks at a site in Cape Elizabeth.

Viral Conspiracy Theories Spread Online

These posts are part of a wave of tick-related conspiracy theories garnering millions of views online.

In April, a self-proclaimed holistic doctor on Instagram claimed to have spoken with multiple farmers in the Midwest who told her that they were finding boxes of ticks dumped on their properties.

“Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk,” she posted alongside a video that got 10 million views across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

The MAHA Moms Coalition, a nationwide group inspired by the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, reposted the claim asking affected farmers to come forward.

Theories Linking Ticks to Pharmaceutical Companies

The theory dates back to 2023, with viral claims that Pfizer and Valneva, pharmaceutical companies developing a vaccine for Lyme disease, were planting boxes of ticks on farms to drum up demand for their product.

False Claims About Genetically Modified Ticks

A separate theory that gained traction around the same time linked a British research program to genetically modify cattle ticks, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to rising cases of red meat allergies in the U.S.

The biggest problem with that theory is that the allergy, Alpha-gal syndrome, is caused by the bite of a Lone Star tick — a completely different species from the cattle ticks in the research program.

Ticks Are Getting Worse, But Not for the Reasons Theorists Claim

While all these conspiracies involve different ticks, different diseases, and different alleged culprits, they are often treated as interchangeable evidence of the same broader claim: that rising tick encounters are a part of a nefarious human plot.

The theories are right about one thing: Ticks are getting worse. Some of the same ecological changes fueling Maine’s winter tick boom are also making tick encounters more common in broad