Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed new federal funding toward Lyme disease and a tick-borne meat allergy this week, even as a law he backs has handed Congress’s watchdog the job of determining where Lyme came from. Kennedy announced the package on May 29 in Concord, New Hampshire, during a stop on his “Take Back Your Health” tour. It includes up to $2.5 million in innovation prizes, a tick-control pilot, and new National Institutes of Health work on Alpha-gal syndrome. The same government now paying to fight the disease is, under a law signed in December, investigating whether an earlier program once turned ticks into weapons. Kennedy himself has said Lyme was “highly likely to have been a military weapon.”
The centerpiece is a multi-million-dollar pilot, led by the CDC, to kill ticks on wildlife before they reach people, starting with researchers at the New England Center of Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases. HHS reaffirmed its goal of cutting Lyme cases by a quarter by 2035. A trio of new LymeX competitions will award up to $2.5 million for public-awareness tools, drug-repurposing research, and an artificial-intelligence push to speed diagnosis. A separate diagnostics prize, recently launched at $10 million, targets faster and more accurate Lyme tests.
The plan also addresses Alpha-gal syndrome, an allergy to red meat and other mammal products that a tick bite can trigger. The NIH said it has identified candidate products aimed at protecting people from developing the allergy after a bite, and would fund the research to test them. The CDC estimates nearly 500,000 Americans now live with the condition, a sharp climb from the few dozen cases recognized a generation ago. In 2024, a New Jersey man became the first American known to have died from an Alpha-gal reaction.
The funding arrives alongside a separate, older question: where Lyme came from. Kennedy aired the theory on his 2024 podcast, and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said in November on a podcast that Lyme “came from Lab 257 on Plum Island.” The account, drawn largely from the book “Bitten,” centers on Cold War research at Plum Island and Fort Detrick and a former Nazi scientist brought to the United States after the war. In December, President Trump signed a defense law carrying Rep. Chris Smith’s directive ordering the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether federal programs weaponized ticks between 1945 and 1972.
The science complicates the theory. Genetic studies show the Lyme bacterium has lived in North America for tens of thousands of years, long before any laboratory existed, and the 5,300-year-old remains of Ötzi the Iceman carried it. Researchers did not identify the bacterium until 1981, more than a decade after the U.S. offensive bioweapons program ended. The American Lyme Disease Foundation notes that infected ticks turned up in museum specimens collected before Plum Island was built, and the lab says it never studied Lyme.
The rise in Alpha-gal has drawn scrutiny for a separate reason. A line of academic work has openly proposed inducing red-meat allergies on purpose: in a 2012 paper titled “Human Engineering and Climate Change,” NYU bioethicist S. Matthew Liao and colleagues argued for biomedical changes to curb meat consumption and fight climate change. Liao has proposed that society “artificially induce mild intolerance to meat,” and he pointed to the lone star tick — the carrier of Alpha-gal — as the model. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis condemned the proposal in October as social engineering, and a recent paper in the journal Bioethics argued that promoting such allergies offers a way to reduce animal suffering.
What remains is a government spending to fight a disease while its own investigators examine whether an earlier federal program had a hand in it. No public document establishes that Lyme or Alpha-gal was made in a lab. The GAO owes that answer to Congress, and it has not yet reported. The theory Kennedy once argued as a private citizen now sits with the department he leads.
Support Independent Local Journalism — High Country Advocate was created as a real alternative to regional media that too often silences dissenting voices while taking sides in the political struggle. Producing in-depth, unflinching reporting like this series and others is expensive: servers, editing, research time, and legal review all add up quickly. If these articles have informed you or given you new perspective, please consider supporting HCA with a paid subscription — every subscriber helps keep this reporting strong and independent. 