A new book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby adds significantly to our understanding of Lyme disease, while oddly seeming to avoid mention of what we already knew.
Newby claims (in 2019) that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him. Yet, in 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory. He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on NBC’s Today Show, where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection. Lab 257 hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list soon after its publication.
Newby’s book reaches the same conclusion as Carroll’s, namely that the most likely source of diseased ticks is Plum Island. Newby reaches this conclusion on page 224 after mentioning Plum Island only once in passing in a list of facilities on page 47 and otherwise avoiding it throughout the book. This is bizarre, because Newby’s book otherwise goes into great depth, and even chronicles extensive research efforts that lead largely to dead ends, and because there is information available about Plum Island, and because Carroll’s best-selling book seems to demand comment, supportive or dismissive or otherwise.
In fact, I think that, despite the avoidance of any discussion of Plum Island, Newby’s research complements Carroll’s quite well, strengthens the same general conclusion, and then adds significant new understanding. So, let’s look at what Carroll told us, and then at what Newby adds.
Less than 2 miles off the east end of Long Island sits Plum Island, where the U.S. government makes or at least made biological weapons, including weapons consisting of diseased insects that can be dropped from airplanes on a (presumably foreign) population. One such insect is the deer tick, pursued as a germ weapon by the Nazis, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the Americans.
Deer swim to Plum Island. Birds fly to Plum Island. The island lies in the middle of the Atlantic migration route for numerous species. “Ticks,” Carroll writes, “find baby chicks irresistible.”
In July of 1975 a new or very rare disease appeared in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just north of Plum Island. And what was on Plum Island? A germ warfare lab to which the U.S. government had brought former Nazi germ warfare scientists in the 1940s to work on the same evil work for a different employer. These included the head of the Nazi germ warfare program who had worked directly for Heinrich Himmler. On Plum Island was a germ warfare lab that frequently conducted its experiments out of doors. After all, it was on an island. What could go wrong? Documents record outdoor experiments with diseased ticks in the 1950s (when we know that the United States was using such weaponized life forms in North Korea). Even Plum Island’s indoors, where participants admit to experiments with ticks, was not sealed tight. And test animals mingled with wild deer, test birds with wild birds.
By the 1990s, the eastern end of Long Island had by far the greatest concentration of Lyme disease. If you drew a circle around the area of the world heavily impacted by Lyme disease, which happened to be in the Northeast United States, the center of that circle was Plum Island.
Plum Island experimented with the Lone Star tick, whose habitat at the time was confined to Texas. Yet it showed up in New York and Connecticut, infecting people with Lyme disease — and killing them. The Lone Star tick is now endemic in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
If Newby agrees or disagrees with any of the above, she does not inform us. But here’s what she adds to it.
The outbreak of unusual tick-borne disease around Long Island Sound actually started in 1968, and it involved three diseases: Lyme arthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and babesiosis. A U.S. bioweapons scientist, Willy Burgdorfer, credited in 1982 with discovering the cause of Lyme disease, may have put the diseases into ticks 30 years earlier. And his report on the cause of Lyme disease may have involved a significant omission that has made it harder to diagnose or cure. The public focus on only one of the three diseases has allowed a disaster that could have been contained to become widespread.
Newby documents in detail Burgdorfer’s work for the U.S. government giving diseases to ticks in large quantities to be used as weapons, as they have been in Cuba in 1962, for example. “He was growing microbes inside ticks, having the ticks feed on animals, and then harvesting the microbes from the animals that exhibited the level of illness the military had requested.”
Burgdorfer published a paper in 1952 about the intentional infecting of ticks. In 2013, filmmaker Tim Grey asked him, on camera, whether the pathogen he had identified in 1982 as the cause of Lyme disease was the same one or similar or a generational mutation of the one he’d written about in 1952. Burgdorfer replied in the affirmative.
Interviewed by Newby, Burgdorfer described his efforts to create an illness that would be difficult to test for — knowledge of which he might have shared earlier with beneficial results for those suffering.
Newby, who has herself suffered from Lyme disease, blames the profit interests of companies and the corruption of government for the poor handling of Lyme disease. But her writing suggests to me a possibility she doesn’t raise, namely that those who know where Lyme disease came from have avoided properly addressing it because of where it came from.
Newby assumes throughout the book that there has to have been a particular major incident near Long Island Sound, either an accident or an experiment on the public or an attack by a foreign nation. Burgdorfer reportedly claimed to another researcher that Russia stole U.S. bioweapons. Based on that and nothing else, Newby speculates that perhaps Russia attacked the United States with diseased ticks, coincidentally right in the location where the U.S. government experimented with diseased ticks.
“What this book brings to light,” Newby writes, “is that the U.S. military has conducted thousands of experiments exploring the use of ticks and tick-borne diseases as biological weapons, and in some cases, these agents escaped into the environment. The government needs to declassify the details of these open-air bioweapons tests so that we can begin to repair the damage these pathogens are inflicting on human and animals in the ecosystem.”
Another product of U.S. bio-weapons tax dollars at work, of course, was the anthrax mailed to politicians in 2001. While Newby speculates that perhaps someone was trying to demonstrate the danger for our own good, I don’t think we should forget that one purpose served — whether or not intended — by the “anthrax attacks” was a significant augmentation of the Iraq war lies. The attacks were falsely blamed on Iraq, and even if people have forgotten that, they fell for it long enough for it to matter. The one bit of truth in current public understanding of Lyme disease is that it has not been falsely blamed on some country the United States is eager to bomb. Let’s keep it that way!
In kris Newby’s interview, 5/13/19 on Coast to Coast Radio Show, she also explains how the diseases were first made radioactive before they were transferred to the ticks, making them much more lethal, and how they were used as germ warfare against Cuba.
The source of lyme disease is interesting, but the cure is much more important. I’ve had Lyme disease twice and have cured myself twice. (I live in a forest with lots of ticks.) I’ve told people about the cure, but no one seems to listen. Here is is: 5 mg of folic acid (folate) and 1000 mg Vitamin C three times a day until the disease disappears. (Mine did in a week and a half.) 5 mg folate can be purchased from Life Extension Foundation and C is widely available. Happy cure.
It’s is a disease that is very difficult to detect. My wife was hit by a tic when she was in Detroit in 1972. She has been tested 6 times. She tested negative twice but again, it can fool tests. You can’t be cured from Lyme disease unless you take an antibiotic within the first week of the bite which, produces a ring around the bite. I’m sorry this has happened to you but there is no “cure”.
No magic incantations required?
Absolute nonsens. I have LYME for over 18 years, was misdiagnosed in 2004/2005 (when I was a very good engineering student who was training everyday on his mountainbike in the nearby forrest here in Germany) tried everything (Vit-C-salt-therapy, MMS/Chlorine-Dioxide, extensive fasting, raw food and much much more). There is no cure for LYME disease after a certain period of time …
David, as I have taught you in the past, Christians do not seek prominence as mega-preachers do. Your intellectual capabilities are better (BETTER) used in humility. Save your soul in your (perhaps) final hour (Egads, we just lost Tim Conway).
A message I don’t comprehend that is about something I’ve supposedly been taught before should get me humble if anything can.
I am curious if it matters to people looking for a cure where the disease came from. Maybe it was weaponized? Maybe it was a pet dog that picked it up in Germany? Does it matter? What matters to me is WHY is there such a small amount of money going to researching a cure? My theory is that some less than reputable doctors have made Lyme their ‘thing’ and this has repelled other doctors who do not want to be associated with Lyme. No idea if this is true. But that’s my theory. Real question is, what do we do about it?
as noted above, its origins may be a reason for lack of attention, and the complexity of its origins may be a reason for mis- and non-diagnoses and poor treatment
Knowing that the disease is engineered is helpful in devising treatments, and a release of information from DoD about exactly how it works would be far more helpful. In Newby’s book, she cites evidence that there are multiple infectious agents in addition to the Borrelia spirochete, including a virus which attacks the immune system, enabling the Borrelia to hide.
I contracted lyme disease in early 1977, with a perfect classic bullseye rash surrounding the tick bite, followed by lifelong lyme arthritis and other symptoms such as brain fog. I was living in rural southern Kentucky at the time. I had it, but had no idea what was wrong at the time, and so of course was never treated for it. Later experts would claim that lyme disease did not exist in that area yet. I know personally that they were wrong. One seasonal bird migration is all it would take.
Now today, whether intentional or a result of lack of concern for safety protocols, it seems likely to me that secret government biowarfare programs sickened me for life. Well, it’s no secret anymore! Whether it is technically provable, that lyme escaped from Plum Island, it would seem obvious (to me), and I would hope, to almost anyone who reads some of the documents and hears the story.
From the plutonium experiments, syphilis tests or other germ warfare tests on general populations, bomb text experiments, etc., we are all potential collateral damage of endless war.
We need real healthcare for all, not warfare. I will be going in for another lyme test this week, but of course Medicaid probably will not pay for the newer more reliable test now available.
I’d heard of Lyme disease called political before I knew much else about it. Until this moment, digesting this post while waiting for the results of my own test for Lyme disease, my guess was that the political had to do with conservatives’ aversion to improving healthcare, disability, and ecological threats. That the avoidance traces back to a fear of how the public will react to learning of the disease’s origins makes even more sense.
The thing is, the U.S. government has repeatedly gotten away with mass murder of its own people and widespread harm of its allies. The politically apathetic and the supporters of our current governments won’t care about the loss of control of any biological weapons. Not really. The rest of us are too overwhelmed by the negligence in our current military and federal Administration to focus long on what happened decades ago.
The U.S. population is dealing with lethal diseases, contaminated water sources, toxic food stuffs, drastic shifts in climate, and at-risk utilities with poor oversight. We as a whole pretend to be a “first world” country while ignoring third-world health crises complicated by federally-protected corporate greed.
What we need to do is replace our anti-American politicians who are currently in power with people who will lead the rebuilding of agencies who can support states and regional services develop urgent programs to save lives.
Is that solution simple? No. Neither is treating chronic Lyme disease.
Lyme disease eludes treatment because the doctors treating it have no understanding of what is going on. The collection of infections people call “lyme” shuts off the immune system and treating the infection won’t turn that back on . If you know how to turn the immune system back on then the immune system will clear the infections. Antibiotics are not appropriate.
I contracted Lyme Disease in East Texas near Tyler in 1982. I didn’t know it was Lyme Disease at the time but I did have a trip to a cattle ranch. I had found a tick and removed it. When I returned home to California I had a red bullseye with a hard center on my left calf. I remember it itching for several months before it went away. I did not seek out a doctor or get it tested. What followed were 2-3 years of periodic arthritic hot spots and severe afternoon nap, bed malaise. I couldn’t figure out why I was so tired. (It is quite a distant memory now.) I went ‘untreated’ for several years after that but I remember at some point getting tetracycline for the arthritis symptoms because this is what my mother would take sometimes. I noticed an improvement in my symptoms and the fog in my head cleared. I believe there was also some reason to take some stronger antibiotics at that time and when I did I could feel my body tingle, like something was dying or chemically changing. It was not until some years later when a celebrity was describing Lyme Disease that I said ‘that happened to me!’ (I’ve since read about Avril Lavigne battle with it.) I’ve looked at the Lyme Disease maps and sure enough it was in Texas when I was there.