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News Story
Michigan medical school suggests using tickborne disease to curb meat eating
Critic calls for cutting taxpayer funds for Western Michigan’s medical school
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A recent study from a medical school affiliated with Western Michigan University promotes spreading a tickborne disease to curb meat eating, a stance that has prompted calls for an end to taxpayer funding for the school.
The WMU Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine received $600,000 in state grants in 2020 and 2025, according to a Michigan Strategic Fund report. The school also received more than $10 million in federal grants from fiscal year 2020 through 2026, according to USA Spending.
But the school is under fire over the 2025 study in the journal “Bioethics” encouraging proliferation of ticks that carry Alpha-gal syndrome, which has the potential to make people allergic to red meat.
“We aim to establish the main claim that we should promote the proliferation of AGS by promoting the ticks that transmit it,” Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth state in the abstract of their article “Beneficial Bloodsucking.”
The paper explains that people who have the potentially life-threatening allergy may show a variety of symptoms, including hives, gastrointestinal upset (e.g., vomiting and diarrhea), or anaphylaxis in severe cases.
The authors posit that promoting tickborne Alpha-Gal Syndrome may nevertheless promote virtuous action or character and could be “morally obligatory” with the stipulation that eating meat is morally wrong.
One of Crutchfield and Hereth’s arguments is presented in six steps:
Eating meat is morally wrong.
If (1), then eating meat makes people morally worse and makes the world a worse place.
So, people would be morally better and the world would be a less bad place if people didn’t eat meat.
If an act makes people morally better and makes the world a less bad place than it would otherwise be, then that act is morally obligatory. [Corollary of consequentialism]
Promoting tickborne AGS makes people morally better and makes the world a less bad place.
So, promoting tickborne AGS is morally obligatory.
Critics say a medical school tasked with healing and teaching medical ethics should not be arguing for the spread of illness among humans.
“Peak absurdity from the taxpayer-funded ivory tower,” said Corey DeAngelis, president of the Educational Freedom Institute and best-selling author, in an email to Michigan Capitol Confidential.
DeAngelis called the article junk science and said Americans should not have to subsidize what he called anti-meat activism dressed up as research. He recommended cutting public funds for this type of research.
Two bioethics authors provided an official response, “Why it is Wrong to Promote Alpha-Gal Syndrome: A response to Crutchfield and Hereth.”
Rainer Ebert and Christian Koeder, the authors of the response, challenged the empirical assumptions of the pro-tick paper.
They noted that people would not stop eating meat because of an allergy but instead would switch to poultry and fish.
Intentionally infecting humans violates fundamental moral rights as it imposes lifelong risks, Ebert and Koeder said, adding, “From a virtue-ethical perspective, the proposal fails to promote good moral character.”
A spokeswoman for the school called the paper a “thought experiment” that examined the implications of ethical commitments and scrutinized hidden assumptions rather than offering policy proposals or clinical recommendations.
“The work in question is a piece of academic philosophy published in Bioethics, a peer-reviewed journal of theoretical and normative inquiry,” Laura Eller, a representative of the Stryker School of Medicine, said in an email to CapCon.
“WMed stands firmly behind academic freedom and rigorous, civil scholarly discourse, and we are proud of the contributions our faculty make to their fields,” Eller wrote. “Peer-reviewed scholarship is written to invite discussion and argument. We also regard the safety of our faculty, staff, students, and community as paramount, and we condemn personal attacks, harassment, and threats directed at any individual. The threats of violence and attempts to intimidate scholars are repugnant and unacceptable.”
