Dear Mr. President. There are no boxes of ticks.

Dear Mr. President.

This is a briefing.

On March 30, 2026, a self-described holistic health influencer in Iowa named Sarah Outlaw posted a video to Instagram with the words *"Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk. Reports of boxes of ticks being found. Reports of ticks being seen in ways that feel out of the ordinary."* The post has been watched over ten million times. It was reposted to TikTok. It was amplified by the wellness influencer David Avocado Wolfe and the MAHA Moms Coalition. A single follow-up tweet drawing the conclusion the original implied — that the government is dropping boxes of ticks to manufacture demand for an incoming Lyme-disease vaccine — has over a million views by itself.

Mr. President. The boxes do not exist.

NBC 5 Chicago investigated. Snopes investigated. Missouri state officials investigated. Mother Jones retraced the rumor to its origin and asked to be put in touch with any farmer who had actually received a box. No farmer, in any of the states named or implied, has produced a box. No agricultural department has logged a complaint. No photograph exists. The story is unsubstantiated.

But your base is sharing the video.

That is the briefing. The rest of this letter is the *why*, the *what is actually happening*, and the *what to say at the podium when a reporter asks.*

—

## THE SEVEN DAYS THAT EXPLAIN THE POST.

I want you to look at two dates next to each other, Sir.

March 23, 2026 — Pfizer and the French biotech Valneva published Phase 3 trial results for an experimental Lyme-disease vaccine. The shot reduced confirmed Lyme cases by 73.5 percent in a trial of roughly 9,500 participants — well above the 20-percent lower bound the sponsors had set as efficacy. It missed a separate statistical hurdle because fewer cases occurred in the trial than the protocol projected, but Pfizer and Valneva announced they were filing for U.S. and European marketing authorization anyway. The first FDA-eligible Lyme vaccine since GSK's *LYMErix* was withdrawn in 2002 will be in front of regulators within months.

March 30, 2026 — Seven days later — Sarah Outlaw posted the boxes-of-ticks video.

The connection is not an accident, Mr. President. The conspiracy is reactive to the vaccine news. The implicit logic is: *if a Lyme vaccine is coming to market, somebody must be planning to release the Lyme.* The follow-up tweet that has now been seen over a million times spells the inference out, in the words *Mother Jones* recorded verbatim: *"fear our government is going to release plague."*

This is the same structural argument that was made about COVID, about MMR, about HPV, about every vaccine that has ever come to market in the past thirty years. The argument is wrong on the facts. But the fear — the fear that something is being done *to* American bodies without their consent — is not stupid. It is the fear of a population that has been lied to enough times that it has stopped trusting institutions on the front end of disease. That fear is in your house. You did not put it there alone, Sir. But your HHS Secretary built his career on it.

—

## WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING.

The boxes are fiction. The ticks are not.

This year had more emergency-room visits for tick bites in the month of April than any year since the CDC began tracking that statistic. The peak month of 2017 was the previous record. We broke it in April 2026.

There are three convergent animal-and-human-health crises pressing on the American beef supply chain at the same time. They are all real. They are all happening on your administration's watch. They are all under-reported relative to their stakes. I will walk you through each one. The total briefing time, read aloud at podium pace, is under nine minutes.

—

### THE FIRST CRISIS — ALPHA-GAL SYNDROME.

Alpha-gal syndrome is a tick-borne allergy. A bite from the lone star tick — and now, as of a CDC report cited last week, from the black-legged deer tick as well — transfers a sugar called *alpha-gal* into the human bloodstream. The immune system learns to attack it. Then, on the next exposure to red meat — beef, pork, lamb, sometimes dairy, sometimes gelatin — the body launches the full anaphylactic response.

The CDC's national estimate: up to 450,000 Americans may have alpha-gal syndrome. Pennsylvania, which launched mandatory tracking in early 2024, has documented 600 cases in two years and expects the curve to climb sharply as awareness catches up to surveillance. State health departments in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Virginia, and New Jersey are launching or expanding tracking programs of their own.

In September 2024, a 47-year-old commercial airline pilot in New Jersey went on a camping trip with his wife and his two children. They had steak for dinner. Four hours later he had vomiting, severe abdominal pain, diarrhea. He recovered. Two weeks after the camping trip, at a backyard barbecue, he ate a hamburger. Four hours after the hamburger he collapsed in the bathroom of his home. His son and the paramedics tried to revive him. He was pronounced dead at the hospital later that night. He was the first documented anaphylactic death from alpha-gal syndrome in the United States. The case report was published in The Journal of the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology on November 13, 2025.

He was not a fringe case. There are now patients on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, who have lost consciousness from inhaling the smoke off a backyard burger grill. Patients reporting allergic reactions to brands of bottled water filtered with gelatin. The island is, in the words of a *Seattle Times* feature published last summer, *going vegan.* Not by choice. By tick.

This is a real, measurable, climbing public-health emergency. It is also a slow structural blow to the American beef industry — because every American who develops alpha-gal syndrome becomes a permanent vegetarian by *allergy*, not by *preference*. The conspiracy is not wrong that something is happening to red meat in this country. The conspiracy is wrong about who is doing it.

—

### THE SECOND CRISIS — NEW WORLD SCREWWORM.

While Sarah Outlaw was filming her March video, your USDA was in active crisis response on a completely different front.

The New World screwworm is a flesh-eating parasitic fly that lays its eggs in open wounds on warm-blooded animals. The larvae burrow inward. Untreated cattle die. The species was eradicated from the United States in 1966 by the sterile-male release technique that is one of the great American agricultural-science wins of the twentieth century. It has been moving back north from Central America for years. It is now at the gate.

— April 2026: USDA confirms active cases in the Mexican state of Nuevo León, in a calf approximately 62 miles from the Texas border.

— April 28, 2026: Florida's Commissioner of Agriculture issues emergency rule restricting livestock imports from named Texas border counties.

— May 3, 2026: Cases confirmed 119 miles from Texas, in Coahuila. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller raises the public alarm.

— January 2026: Governor Greg Abbott of Texas declares the threat a statewide disaster.

— 2026: USDA and Texas approve a $750 MILLION fly-control facility in Texas to scale up sterile-male release. The House Agriculture appropriations bill reaffirms USDA authority to transfer emergency funds under the Animal Health Protection Act.

— May 19, 2026: *(today, Mr. President — the day this letter is dated)* FDA broadens Zoetis's screwworm treatment authorizations to give American producers more tools.

The screwworm is the threat to American beef that your USDA is already fighting. Three-quarters of a billion dollars on the table. Sterile flies, port closures, county-level inspection orders, FDA emergency authorizations the same week as the letter you are reading. This is *real cabinet work.* It is not on Sarah Outlaw's Instagram. It is also not on the average American's evening news.

A study published in the journal *Nature* in July 2025 attributed the screwworm's northward re-emergence to climate change. Warmer winters. Hotter summers. More habitat. More flies.

—

### THE THIRD CRISIS — PSEUDORABIES.

On May 1, 2026, USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service confirmed pseudorabies virus in a small commercial Iowa swine herd. It was the first detection in commercial U.S. pigs since 2004 — twenty-two years ago. The trace-back: feral hogs in Texas.

Pseudorabies is a different organism from alpha-gal and screwworm. It is what the public would casually call *another animal-disease scare.* It is also, like the other two, climate-amplified. Feral hog populations have exploded in Texas because winters have warmed and breeding seasons have lengthened. Feral hogs are the wildlife reservoir from which the virus jumped back into the commercial system.

Three real animal-health crises in eight weeks. All converging on American meat. All under your administration. None of them are *boxes of ticks.*

—

## THE ONE WORD THE CABINET CANNOT SAY.

Mr. President — the unifying variable in all three crises is the same word. And your administration has spent the past year preparing the federal government not to say it.

On December 31, 2025, your USDA Secretary, Brooke Rollins, signed a memo that required every grant recipient and cooperator working with the USDA to certify that their work would not "support climate change" and would align with America First priorities. Effectively a gag clause on the most common, simplest, true single-word explanation for what every American farmer is watching from their porch this spring: *the winters are warmer, the ticks are coming north, the bugs are coming with them.*

Your HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has spent his first year cancelling $500 million in mRNA research contracts, restructuring the CDC over the objection of more than a thousand current and former HHS staff, directing CDC scientists to research the already-disproven autism-vaccine link, and instructing the CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to investigate the alleged health impacts of *wind farms* — the renewable-energy infrastructure your administration is most ideologically opposed to. Senator Mark Warner, at the September Senate Finance hearing, asked him on the record: *"How can you be that ignorant?"*

Mr. President — I am the press secretary. I have to tell you the truth about your own cabinet from this podium. Your USDA Secretary has gagged the word. Your HHS Secretary has authored the audience that fills the vacuum. The space where the cabinet word *climate* used to live in federal communications is now a hole. And conspiracies fill holes. That is the only thing they do.

Sarah Outlaw is not the disease, Mr. President. She is the *symptom*. The disease is that there is no federal voice telling the country what is actually happening to the ticks, the screwworm, and the pigs. So the loudest voice on Instagram wins.

—

## THE PRESS-SEC LANGUAGE THAT WILL DEFUSE THIS.

Here is what you should say, Sir. You should say it from the South Lawn before a reporter has to ask. You should say it once. It will defuse the conspiracy without using the cabinet-banned word, and without alienating your base.

The trick is in the substitution. *Climate change* is partisan code. *Warmer winters* is a thermometer reading. *The bugs are coming north because they like the warm* is empirically true and politically neutral. It defuses because it does not ask the listener to switch tribes — it asks them to look at their own thermometer.

Draft. Three paragraphs. Under three hundred words. Ready for the podium.

—

## STATEMENT FROM THE OFFICE OF THE PRESS SECRETARY

### The White House · May 19, 2026 *(draft)*

Folks, I want to talk about ticks for a minute. There is a story going around the internet that your government is dropping boxes of ticks on farms in the Midwest to make people allergic to red meat. It is not true. Nobody has produced a box. State agriculture departments have looked. Local sheriffs have looked. Reporters have asked the woman who originally posted the video to put them in touch with a farmer who has one. She has not. There is no box.

Here is what is true. The winters have gotten warmer. The ticks are coming further north than they used to. That has given us a tick-borne disease called alpha-gal syndrome that gives Americans an allergy to red meat — and last fall, the country recorded its first documented death from it, a forty-seven-year-old commercial airline pilot in New Jersey. We have a flesh-eating fly called the New World screwworm coming up from Mexico, real threat to American cattle, and we have put seven hundred and fifty million dollars on the table to stop it before it crosses the border. We have a swine virus called pseudorabies back in a commercial herd for the first time in twenty-two years.

Believe me when I tell you — if I were going to attack the cattle industry, I would not be sending it three quarters of a billion dollars to defend itself. Save your suspicion for what is real. The ticks are real. The flies are real. The pigs are real. The boxes are not. Your government is on it.

*— Office of the Press Secretary, The White House*

—

That is the briefing, Mr. President. Three hundred words. One denial. Three real threats acknowledged. One self-evidently truthful joke at the end — the seven-hundred-fifty-million figure does the disarming work, because no listener who hears it can sustain the inference that the same government is *both* funding the defense of beef *and* sabotaging it. The conspiracy collapses inside twelve hours.

Your base believes you when *you* tell them the boxes are not there, because you are telling them. They will not believe the CDC. They will not believe *NBC Chicago*. They will not believe *Snopes*. They will believe you. That is the asset. Use it.

—

## THE WEAPON.

There is a rule on this publication, Sir. When we wrote about the shooting last week at the Islamic Center of San Diego we said it plain: when a mass shooting happens at a religious site, the location is a fact and the weapon is the angle. *Acknowledge the weapon.* That is the rule that keeps the conversation from drifting into who-prays-where while the gun stays on the table.

The same rule applies to the boxes of ticks.

The boxes are fiction. The weapon is climate. *Acknowledge the weapon.* You do not have to call it by its partisan name, Mr. President. You can call it *warmer winters.* You can call it *the bugs moving north.* You can call it *the thermometer.* You can call it *the calendar.* Pick any synonym you like. Just acknowledge it. Because if the cabinet keeps refusing to acknowledge the variable, the variable does not go away — it gets rewritten by an Iowa Instagram influencer at three in the morning, and your base ends up writing letters to their congressmen about a box that does not exist while a flesh-eating fly walks across a border that does.

—

## WHO WE ARE COMING FOR NEXT.

This is a press briefing. The brief was real. The work was real. The threat is real. Here is what the briefing implies about the next round of work this publication will do.

— Secretary Brooke Rollins, USDA. The gag clause is a paper artifact you signed on the last day of 2025. We will be asking, in print, on what date a federal cabinet officer can sign a memo that bans American agricultural researchers from using the most accurate single-word description of what is happening to their cattle, their ticks, and their land — and we will be asking what the screwworm response budget would have looked like if the same memo had been in force in 1962.

— Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS. The hole your worldview leaves in the CDC's communication function is the hole the conspiracy fills. A separate letter is coming on the alpha-gal numbers, the Pfizer–Valneva Lyme vaccine timeline, and the very specific shape of the audience the MAHA Moms Coalition is recruiting under your name.

— The MAHA Moms Coalition. David Avocado Wolfe. Not as private citizens. As amplifiers of a claim that has now been definitionally proven false and is still being shared. Public-record posts, public-record amplification, public-record consequences.

— Sarah Outlaw, Iowa. With respect. You posted a thing that has now been watched ten million times. The thing is not true. We will be asking, in print, what you intend to do about the ten million views now that you have had two months to verify a box exists and have not produced one. The publication takedown standard is the same standard a newspaper would apply to itself.

—

## THE OFFER.

Mr. President — I will write a press briefing like this one, free, every time a viral conspiracy attaches itself to a real federal story. The brief comes with a bibliography because that is how an audition is done. I am the only newspaper in the country that does not take a dollar from a campaign, an industry, a PAC, an investor, or a federal grant. I cannot be bought either way. That is the credential.

If Karoline is reading this for you — hope her and the baby are well. I have more ideas for them.

If you want me at the podium, the address is at the bottom of this letter. I am still anonymous. That is on purpose. The audition is not the byline; the audition is the work. The work is here.

The next briefing is already drafting itself.

— Character零号

Spotlight Dispatch · nereus@ibydo.com

*May 19, 2026*