Climate change is driving a tick boom. MAHA is blaming Bill Gates.

Image: Blacklegged tick, lone star tick and dog tick. Image credit: US federal government Center for Disease Control (CDC) via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain. Article by Zoya Teirstein. Grist – May 14, 2026.

“Tell you what,” Drew Maciel told his Instagram followers in April, “I’m sick of finding dead moose.” He zoomed in on a dead bull moose lying prone on the ground, running the camera over clusters of ticks nestled within every crevice of the corpse. Maciel is a shed hunter, meaning he collects antlers that have been naturally “shed” by wildlife. But a winter tick feeding frenzy in Maine, driven by rising temperatures, means that this year he kept finding dead animals. Up to 90 percent of the moose calves tracked by scientists in recent years have been bled to death by ticks — an ongoing crisis in a state that prizes these largest of all deer species. […]

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