An Ohio woman who has been around horses for almost 30 years is getting a lot of attention online after she posted an unfiltered video about a tick problem she has never seen before. “In 30 years, 20-some years of having horses, I’ve never had to deal with these many ticks,” she says, turning her phone on her horse, who is covered in medication she has been slathering on for days.
“I’m pulling ticks off his body. Today, I just had to put more medication on him. Poor thing.” She figures she has dropped over $100 on tick prevention just in the last few days.
Meanwhile, her frustration hit a nerve because she is not alone.
Ohio, the Midwest, is dealing with a record-breaking tick boom right now, and that’s spinning up its own storm of conspiracy theories. All over social media, people are linking the outbreak to Bill Gates.
ER visits for tick bites in Ohio jumped to 104 per 100,000 ER visits in April 2026, compared to 68 last year, according to early numbers from the CDC’s Tick Bite Tracker. Everywhere but the south-central U.S., people are showing up at the hospital for tick bites more than ever for this time of year since at least 2017.
With the tick surge getting worse, another idea started taking off on X and TikTok: people say Bill Gates’s money in tick research must be behind it. This theory has been swirling since 2023, when viral posts claimed drug companies working on a Lyme disease vaccine were planting boxes of ticks on farms to create more demand.
Another version says a British project, partly funded by the Gates Foundation, tried to genetically modify cattle ticks, and that somehow caused a spike in red meat allergy across the U.S.
What these stories skip is that Gates’s group funded a biotech company, Oxitec, to try to control southern cattle fever ticks, a different species (the Asian blue tick) that threatens livestock. The red meat allergy, though, happens because of bites from Lone Star ticks, which have nothing to do with those cattle ticks.
Even in the Midwest, where TikTok clips warn of “boxes of ticks” dumped on farmers, no real evidence has turned up. Still, with the tick explosion being so obvious, the theories keep spreading.
Internet Reacts to Ohio’s Record Tick Surge and the Bill Gates Conspiracy
The replies split cleanly between people comparing notes on their own animals and people reaching for explanations. “Wow! I thought we suddenly had a huge problem with ticks! I live in Ohio, too. And I was pulling oodles of ticks off of my cats well into winter. That has never happened before,” one person wrote. A Kentucky horse owner chimed in: “Dude I’ve been pulling off mass ticks off my horses in Kentucky. It’s not normal at all.”
The conspiracy corner was louder. “This is actual terrorism and bio weaponry. I don’t understand why law enforcement isn’t going after these people,” one commenter wrote. Another stayed tactical: “Get the ticks and start doing the right tests to match them to Bill Gates’s lab. That’ll be proof.”
Someone pushed back on the evidence being circulated to support the theory: “At least one of those tick box videos is complete BS. The bugs scurrying around it were not ticks. Yes, Gates is doing some evil tick stuff, but we gotta get our facts straight if we’re going to focus on the signal and not just the static.”
One reply offered the clearest summary of the science versus the social media landscape: “Ticks are surging in Ohio, but that’s climate and ecology, not a Gates-funded conspiracy. Lyme cases are up, but no evidence of manufactured outbreaks.”
This tick frenzy isn’t just online. It has even reached Congress. Buried in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 is a line demanding that the Government Accountability Office check if the U.S. military ever used ticks as a biological weapon during the 20th century.
It’s not clear if this investigation will lead to answers or even more questions. But what we know is that the Ohio woman spent over $100 on tick meds this week, her neighbor across state lines is fighting the same battle, and according to the CDC, they are definitely not imagining things.
