Today, on the Morning Update, there’s been a lot of attention paid to the problem of tick bites and ER visits this spring. It’s got people riled up and worried, and depending on where you look, it’s an apocalypse caused by everything from climate change to a manufactured outbreak. Guess what? It’s neither.
00:00 Introduction to Ticks and outrage
01:08 Personal Experiences with Tick Bites
02:57 ER Visits and Public Perception
Watch on the ‘Grok Rumble Channel if the embedded video does not load.
Ep 182 Links:
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2022/05/vermont-says-tick-season-is-all-year-now-of-course-it-is-the-place-is-run-by-democrats
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2022/08/white-dog-research-update-despite-warming-tick-season-did-not-extend-into-summer
- https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2026/2026-cdc-data-show-weekly-er-visits-for-tick-bites-higher-than-usual.html
- https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/data-research/facts-stats/tick-bite-data-tracker.html
Authors’ and Speakers’ opinions are their own and may not represent those of GraniteGrok.com’s sponsors, readers, authors, or advertisers.
Transcript [lightly edited]:
Welcome to your Thursday, May 28th, 2026. Morning update. The topic is ticks. I’m very familiar. Anybody who’s ever really followed GraniteGrok knows that we talk about ticks because it’s a climate change trigger issue. Back in 2022, I think it was, might have been a little earlier, I started publishing something called white dog research.
I have a white Labrador, as you well know, Cosmo. And it’s easy to see the ticks on him because he’s a short-haired dog and he’s very light-colored. But that doesn’t stop them from ending up on us, because while he gets preventatives that make them die if they bite him or jump off, they like to just jump on us. So we have to be diligent, persistent, precautious, and observant.
I don’t find a tick on myself every single day, but several days a week, and I usually get bitten a couple of times a year. This would be going on for a very, very long time. This is not advice to ignore the complications that result from tick bites. I’m just telling you that I’ve had many.
Anyway, tick bites have been a topic of outrage lately. The news broke. Record ER visits for tick bites. ⁓ my first thought there was that recording anything by ER visits is quite a bit like using PCR test results to gauge the infectious spread of, let’s say, the China virus, the Wuhan flu. It’s kind of subjective. Not everybody goes to the ER. As I said, I’ve been bitten many, many times, sometimes as many as three or four times a year.
I’ve never felt the urge to go to the ER because after you remove the tick, it’s itchy, and it looks like a bug bite. But if you don’t see any other changes, you’re probably fine. That’s not medical advice. You do you. But I just wanted you to know that if you skip the outrage that you’re seeing, if you skip the bombastic, hyperbolic fear mongering, things are kind of the same as they’ve always been.
And in many cases, there are a lot fewer ER visits and a lot fewer reported tick bites than just ten years ago. Take a look at this from the CDC.
You can see that in March and April, there were more ER visits for tick bites than in previous years. But if you look at May, it’s not really reaching the twenty-seventeen level when things were quite at their peak.
If you look at the Northeast version, there’s really nothing to see there, not a thing.
And of course, the Northeast is tick land, home to ticks, and we have it started out heavy.
Late March, once the snow melted, there were ticks everywhere. And then there weren’t. I’m out in the woods with my dog in the brush, walking on the side of the road every single day. Might see a tick on him, might not. That’s not the sign of anything unusual. Yes, ticks spread.
Mice, deer, birds, and they keep spreading. And there’s probably nowhere in the United States where a tick can’t thrive. And you just have to be cautious. You have to be perceptive, you have to be aware. And you should check. Sometimes you can have a friend check. That could get fun. But anyway, if you look at the data, there’s really no increase
It’s not caused by climate change. There’s no global conspiracy to infect us all with tick bites. It’s just kind of something to talk about. And in this case, they’re going a little overboard. They’re getting a little crazy. And the question you need to ask is what that’s all about.
That’s it for today. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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