Is Bill Gates Ticking You Off?
will tick-linked meat allergies drive you to eat his fungus-based meat?
Thanks to recent headlines, millions of people will have gastrointestinal symptoms after a summer barbecue and wonder if they might now have Alpha-gal syndrome, a condition caused by an immune reaction to the sugar alpha-gal, which is found in red meat, dairy, gelatin and some medications. The condition is being linked to lone star ticks, which are said to trigger this immune response.
It’s another ready-made, connect-the-dots narrative that includes, you guessed it, climate change.
But before we embrace GalSafe pork, lab-grown meat and whatever other FDA-approved biomedical and pharmaceutical solutions are coming down the pike, let’s play our own game of connect-the-dots to see whose fingerprints are on this narrative.
I always like to start with a little Bill Gates search.
Technology that has been used to control mosquitoes and fall armyworm will now be applied to solving the world’s cattle tick problem under a new $1.283 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
While Gates/Oxitec is not targeting the lone star tick, tick bites from other ticks have also been linked to Alpha-gal syndrome.
Oxitec has created a Friendly™ Cattle tick, aka Asian blue tick, aka Rhipicephalus microplus tick.
Oxitec’s Friendly™ arthropods offer a new approach to managing ticks that parasitize livestock. The simple self-limiting gene introduced to the Oxitec tick allows for the production of male-only cohorts of ticks, which – after release into the field – find and mate with invasive pest females. The self-limiting gene is passed to their offspring, preventing offspring from surviving and reproducing. With sustained releases of Friendly™ ticks on a given farm, the number of disease-spreading females will therefore decline, causing a reduction in the number of resident ticks of that species.
This is the same approach Oxitec used to produce its genetically-engineered mosquitoes that (Oops!) some how resulted in hybrid mosquitos.
A biotech company released tens of millions of male mosquitoes over the course of two years. They were genetically modified to produce sterile offspring. The company wanted to prevent the spread of diseases like malaria and Zika by culling the mosquito population.
“The idea would be that when these males mated with females, the offspring would die. And therefore the overall population size of the mosquitos would decline.”
Yale professor Jeffrey Powell studied some mosquitos in Brazil to find out how the experiment went.
“What we found was unexpected. Unpredicted.”
Scientists found hybrids of the genetically modified mosquitos and the native mosquitos – meaning some offspring weren’t sterile.
“We don’t know what the effect of having this hybrid population is. These could be stronger mosquitos, harder to control.”
Not sure why scientists were so surprised. Even Oxitec knew that exposure to the antibiotic tetracycline, which is commonly used in cattle, resulted in increased survival rates among genetically-modified mosquitos.
Maybe we should first ask ourselves if the guy who wants us to stop eating meat - the largest private owner of farmland in the United States who blames climate change on cow farts and is investing millions in fake meat - should be trusted with the health of our cattle?
Then decide if you believe that someone who prefers technology to nature and humanity should be entrusted with the fate of nature and humanity?
And then consider what this “bioethicist” has to say…
People eat too much meat. And if they would cut down on their consumption of meat… it would actually really help the planet. But people are not willing to give up meat…they have a weakness of will…So here’s a thought… So possibly we can use human engineering to make it the case that we’re intolerant to certain kinds of meat, to certain kinds of bovine proteins. And there’s actually analogues of this in life. There’s this thing called the lone star tick, where if it bites you, you will become allergic to meat… So that’s something we can do through human engineering. We can possibly address really big world problems through human engineering.
Chew on that…
Here's yet one more horrifying thought: It seems fire ants have reduced the tick population in Texas considerably, so I decided to look into this and discovered that even the fire ants won't touch these genetically engineered ticks!!
> "Although predatory ants, including the red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta), can eat lone star ticks (Amblyomma americanum), new research shows that the ants leave them alone."
-- https://entomologytoday.org/2019/10/02/how-ticks-hide-plain-sight-predatory-fire-ants/
Seems even the fire ants are smarter than Bill Gates, himself!
Find and support your local ranchers. I for one am willing to spend a extra for livestock that isn’t tainted