Award-winning author Kris Newbyย educates healthcare providers on vector-borne diseases. She is the author of โBitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons.โ She also produced the 2008 Lyme disease documentary โUnder Our Skin,โ which was nominated for an Academy Award the following year.
Lyme disease is pernicious, and many new strains are worse.
In a Feb. 28 Substack article, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker interviewed award-winning author Kris Newby about the U.S. governmentโs history of manipulating pathogens to make them deadlier, and the secretive federal research that may be responsible for the epidemic of Lyme disease.
According to Newby, thereโs reason to suspect that Lyme disease might be a biological weapon. Thereโs no smoking gun; just circumstantial evidence.
The Party
She attended a party where a former CIA agent bragged about a Cold War operation that involved dropping infected ticks on Cuba [to spread Lyme disease].
โThis CIA guy was a little bit in his cups, but what he said rang true. I started doing some research, interviewed him several times, and found that it was a verifiable story.โ
Newby also got tipped off by Willy Burgdorfer during the filming of โUnder Our Skin.โ
Burgdorfer, a Swiss medical zoologist, is credited with discovering Lyme disease. He worked his entire career at Rocky Mountain Labs, a National Institutes of Health-run biosafety level 4 (BSL4) facility in Montana. He had contracts with Fort Detrick. They oversee the U.S. chemical and biological weapons programs.
While he made some important admissions during that interview, at the very end, he broke into an โevil little smileโ and said, โI didnโt tell you everything.โ Was he hinting that Lyme disease was a bioweapon?
Newby told Thacker:
โHe started hinting at the unnatural origin of the outbreak to several people โฆ
โWhen I interviewed him for the book, he said, โYes, I was in the biological weapons program. I was tasked with trying to mass produce ticks and mosquitoes.โ
โThatโs also when he told me that he was called to investigate the outbreak of what was called โLyme disease.’ But which couldโve been caused by one or more organisms. In Army documents, they said they were conducting early gain-of-function experiments by mixing pathogens โ bacteria and viruses โ inside ticks to create more effective bioweapons.โ
The official story
As described by Newby, the official story is that Burgdorfer was sent to investigate a novel disease outbreak in Lyme, Connecticut and Long Island. In 1980, he discovered the bacterium that now bears his name, Borrelia burgdorferi, and determined that this was what caused the disease.
He subsequently published an article stating the organism was easily killed off with penicillin. The notion that Lyme disease is easy to diagnose and treat has stuck ever since, even though the reality is often the opposite.
If caught early, that can be true, but many patients go undiagnosed.
Holes in the official storyline
While researching for the book, Newby produced an animation of the original outbreak, which supposedly began at the mouth of the Connecticut River, near Long Island. This turned out to be rather revealing.
She told Thacker:
โWhen I drew a 50-mile radius around that point, there were three new, highly virulent tick-borne diseases that showed up at that same time, in the late โ60s. This was 13 years before the Lyme bacterium was declared the cause of โLyme diseaseโ in 1981.
โI started looking through military records to see if the outbreak could be tied to any bioweapons accidents. And thatโs when I discovered this massive bug-borne weapons program, as well as a program where germs were sprayed from airplanes over large areas, called Project 112.
โSome of those germs were tick-borne diseases that they freeze-dried and aerosolized for spraying โฆ Whatever happened in Lyme, Connecticut, we donโt have all the details. But I put together a solid circumstantial case, based on available evidence โฆ
โBurgdorfer โฆ had worked with Q fever and ticks, experience that was needed at Rocky Mountain Labs for their bioweapons work. As soon as he got a security clearance, he started putting plague in fleas; deadly yellow fever in mosquitoes; and then mixing and matching viruses and bacteria in ticks to increase the virulence of these living weapons.
Designer Ticks
โThe Detrick weapons designers were looking for ticks that could be dropped on an enemy without arousing suspicion, filled with agents for which the target population wouldnโt have natural immunity โฆ Ticks were the perfect stealth weapon, untraceable and long-acting โฆ
โI went as far as I could as a journalist to put together the circumstantial evidence that says Lyme disease is not the big problem โ meaning the bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi.
โItโs what Burgdorfer said that theyโre covering up: 1) that a different bacteria, perhaps a rickettsia related to Rocky Mountain spotted fever, was developed as a bioweapon in the Cold War; 2) that it might be a combination of bugs inside the ticks that is making people sick.โ
What do you think? Read the entire story at Children’s Health Defense.
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