A Medical Ethics Professor’s Chilling Plan to Infect the World With a Meat-Allergy Disease

In the rarefied halls of Western Michigan University’s Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, Professor Parker Crutchfield teaches medical ethics. One might expect such a role to instill reverence for human dignity, bodily autonomy, and the Hippocratic admonition to first do no harm.

Instead, Crutchfield has authored arguments for covertly drugging the population to improve its “morality” and, more recently, for actively spreading a tick-borne disease to make people allergic to red meat.

This is not satire. In the journal Bioethics, Crutchfield and co-author Blake Hereth published “Beneficial Bloodsucking,” which posits that if eating meat is morally wrong, then humanity has an obligation to promote the proliferation of lone star ticks carrying alpha-gal syndrome (AGS). The condition triggers severe allergic reactions to mammalian meat, causing hives, gastrointestinal distress, anaphylaxis, and in some cases, life-threatening complications.

The reasoning follows a familiar progressive script: identify a preferred lifestyle — in this case, veganism or strict vegetarianism — declare it morally obligatory, then justify any means necessary to enforce it. Peter Singer’s animal liberation philosophy undergirds the argument, treating human dietary freedom as subordinate to abstract ethical calculations about animal suffering.

History teaches us the danger of such utopian blueprints. When intellectuals claim the right to reshape human nature for the “greater good,” the results range from re-education camps to outright democide.

Crutchfield’s earlier work reveals the full scope of his vision. He has contended that moral enhancement drugs should be administered secretly because people might resist having their wills altered. Better, he suggests, that they never know their desires have been chemically constrained.

This is the logic of totalitarianism dressed in scholarly prose — the enlightened few manipulating the many for their own benefit, all while claiming benevolence.

Consider the practical horrors. Alpha-gal syndrome is no minor inconvenience. It can render everyday foods dangerous and has expanded alongside the range of the lone star tick. Public health officials rightly warn against it. Yet these professors frame the disease as a feature, not a bug.

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