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In April, the MAHA Mom Coalition, an organization that claims it advocates for “parental rights, holistic health, clean food & water, and medical freedom,” put out an unusual call. They wanted to talk to the farmers who’d been finding mysterious boxes of ticks in their fields—farmers and boxes that, by every available indication, don’t seem to exist.
“Can anybody reading this right now validate this?” the MAHA Mom Coalition wrote on their Instagram page. “We’d love to connect with and speak to these farmers!!”
The reason for such a request, as one conspiracist on Twitter explained in a post with over a million views, is with a potential new “Lyme disease vaccine coming out next year,” they “fear our government is going to release plague like levels of ticks upon us in order to incentivize the masses into getting another vaccine.”
The roots of the tick rumors originate, according to the fact-checking website Snopes, with an Iowa woman named Sarah Outlaw. “Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk,” she wrote alongside a March 30 Instagram video post that’s been watched over 10 million times. “Reports of boxes of ticks being found. Reports of ticks being seen in ways that feel out of the ordinary. At the same time, we are seeing a very real increase in tick populations across our region…in my practice, I am seeing the impact. More Lyme. More chronic symptoms. More alpha gal,” an allergic reaction to red meat triggered by tick bites.
The suggestion that mysterious forces are distributing ticks to give us all Lyme disease keeps spreading.
Outlaw hasn’t provided documentary evidence to support these claims. She wrote on Threads that she heard them at a private seminar in late March from someone familiar with a “rural Missouri community.” But when Snopes reached out to hundreds of public health and other governmental officials in Missouri, they couldn’t find a single person who could corroborate seeing even one box of ticks. Snopes also wrote that in correspondence with Outlaw she “declined to provide us contact information for any involved parties, citing their privacy.” Outlaw didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.
All evidence—or lack thereof—aside, Outlaw’s not-so-veiled suggestion that mysterious forces are distributing boxes of ticks to try to give us all Lyme disease has kept spreading. It wasn’t long before people on social media began to connect Outlaw’s claims to a newly developed Lyme disease vaccine from the drug companies Pfizer and Valneva. While the vaccine technically failed a late-stage clinical trial—which its makers attributed to a decrease in Lyme cases during the study period, resulting in less data than expected—the companies still hope to gain regulatory approval and release it in 2027. In a March press release, the companies boasted of the vaccine’s “strong efficacy,” reporting it reduced Lyme cases by 70 percent.
One major vector for the rumors was David Avocado Wolfe, a prominent wellness and conspiracy influencer, who quickly reshared Outlaw’s video on Telegram in a flurry of posts with suggestions on fighting ticks. He also reshared a different video implying unknown powers are at work, featuring a woman who stares deadpan into camera as text under her reads, “Pfizer’s dropping a new Lyme vaccine next year… magically, this spring and summer are going to be the worst tick season ever. You’ve seen this playbook.” Throughout April, posts on X making claims about boxes of ticks or casting suspicion on the forthcoming vaccine continued to go viral, with phrasing like “SHOCKING TIMING EXPOSED” and “feds bioengineering ticks to poison us with Lyme disease.”
A previous Lyme disease vaccine, LYMErix, was pulled off the market in 2002, doomed partly by suspicions from Lyme patient groups that it caused adverse effects, and partly by a weak CDC recommendation that didn’t fully protect it from liability. After a raft of lawsuits were filed against its maker, GlaxoSmithKline, it discontinued the drug. No human Lyme vaccine has existed since.
Ever since, Lyme cases have continued to grow, spurred in part by climate change and other environmental factors that have brought people into closer contact with ticks, which can carry the bacteria which causes the disease. Tick-borne alpha-gal is also on the rise, with its first reported death in November 2025, when a New Jersey pilot who was apparently unaware that he’d been bitten by a tick and had developed the allergy died after eating a cookout hamburger.
Because Lyme is a frightening and debilitating illness, conspiracy theories about it reliably catch attention. In 2024, Tucker Carlson produced a program claiming that “government bioweapons labs” that were “injecting ticks with exotic illnesses” in the 1960s led to widespread Lyme disease today, a show that has been viewed nearly 8 million times on X alone. In response, Politifact pointed to evidence that not only has the Lyme disease bacterium existed for some 60,000 years, it would make a poor weapon considering its slow spread and low fatality rate.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said as recently as January 2024 that he believes that Lyme disease likely came from a “military bioweapon.” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary made a similar claim on a podcast in November; both men have said the disease came from federal research facilities on Plum Island, New York. That idea was advanced in a 2019 book by science writer Kris Newby; the Washington Post debunked some of the book’s claims, including by disputing that a key Newby source was in fact a bioweapons researcher, as he is described. An epidemiologist who reviewed the book faulted it for “hysteria and fear-mongering,” while doing “little to help those afflicted by the disease it preys upon.”
The legacy of these bioweapons claims lives on. After at least two previous attempts, this year Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the co-chair of the Congressional Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Caucus, succeeded in including a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act directing the Government Accountability Office to, as his office put it, “investigate whether the U.S. military weaponized ticks with Lyme disease.”
With suspicion pressing on Lyme from all sides—from the president’s cabinet and the halls of Congress, to natural health influencers and back again—it is possible that Pfizer and Valneva’s vaccine will be doomed to death by distrust before it even hits the market.
Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was a member of the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practice from 1998 to 2003, when the LYMErix vaccine was considered.
We “live in a time where conspiracy sells.”
While LYMErix was, Offitt says, “about 75% effective…it was damned by a soft recommendation from the ACIP” which held only that it “should be considered” for people who live in tick-endemic areas or spend lots of time outdoors. Offit had favored a broader recommendation, one which would have seen the shot covered by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. While patient reports of autoimmune issues were never conclusively proven, after only three years, LYMErix was pulled from the market.
“It was subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous litigation” Offit says, as its manufacturer “tried to defend the vaccine until it was too expensive” to continue, he adds.
In the intervening years, Offit says, both “vigorous patient advocacy” and a “whole paramedical community” has grown up around Lyme disease and so-called chronic Lyme disease, in which people believe they have a long-term active infection. While persistent effects from Lyme disease, called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, exist, chronic Lyme is not recognized as a medical diagnosis.
Offit thinks more research is needed to demonstrate the new Lyme vaccine’s promise, but is worried about the environment in which it could be released.
The suspicion bubbling up around the unreleased vaccine, Offit says, precisely calls to mind what has happened to vaccines targeting the coronavirus. “MRNA Covid vaccines have suffered from these conspiracies” about both the virus’ origins and alleged safety issues, he says. “It was very easy to get that bad information out there. So we suffer.”
Outlaw, who works as a herbalist, holistic doctor, and nutritionist, closed her viral video spreading her claims about tick boxes with a call to reach out to her for help: “Comment TICKS and I will send you what we do in our practice to support and protect naturally.”
To those who responded, Outlaw provided a “tick exposure and prevention guide” via DM, centered around a supplement brand called Cellcore, according to a video from by Mallory de Mille, a correspondent for the Conspirituality podcast who often covers wellness scams, misinformation, and purported health trends on social media.
Outlaw describes herself as a “Board-Certified Doctor of Holistic Health,” and boasts of other credentials, including a master’s degree in applied clinical nutrition from the New York Chiropractic College and a certification in health coaching from the Biblical Health Institute. But she is not a physician. What she calls her “doctor’s degree” on LinkedIn came from Quantum University, a holistic medicine school whose two-year doctorate program is not accredited by the U.S. Department of Education. Quantum’s website has a disclaimer stating that its degrees “are NOT equivalent or comparable to” neither a MD or “a Doctor in Naturopathy Degree (ND),” nor do they “entitle graduates to any state, provincial, or federal licensure.”
“Lyme disease takes a huge toll on people in this country and their wellbeing,” infectious disease researcher Laurel Bristow says, with health influencers hawking baseless products adding to the problem. “There’s no evidence that anything they’re selling will reduce your risk of acquiring Lyme disease from a tick bite.”
Like Offit, Bristow—who hosts Health Wanted, a podcast produced by Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health—wants to see more research before passing judgment on the new vaccine. But she is also worried about the “pernicious” conspiracy theories it has already engendered: “We don’t want to cast aspersions on a vaccine before we really know what’s happening.”
Even if the new Lyme vaccine is eventually approved by the FDA, Bristow points out another issue: there is no working “mechanism to review who should be recommended for it.” That step, which helps determine whether a vaccine is covered by insurance and by the federal injury compensation program, is conducted by ACIP. But the panel is caught in an ongoing legal battle as RFK Jr. tries to unilaterally overhaul it and stock it with anti-vaccine fellow travelers.
Bristow hopes that time and more information about the new vaccine could raise public trust before it might hit the market. “It won’t be available to work for this tick season,” she says. “So hopefully in the intervening time we can have a little more data and feel a little more confident, and by the next tick season we’ll have a good option.”
Dr. Paul Offit is less optimistic about what might happen in the intervening months, because, as he puts it, we “live in a time where conspiracy sells.”
“I’m not sure what gets us through this,” he adds, with a note of exhaustion. “We’re at a time now—and RFK Jr. is a ringleader of this as a major conspiracy theorist—where people create their own truths, including scientific truths.”