Author Kris Newby explains how the first Lyme Disease infections happened just a few miles from an animal-testing lab in Connecticut. Could the spread of the disease be related to a lab leak?

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If you live in certain parts of this country, rural areas particularly, you know people who have or who have had Lyme disease. And for some of them, maybe most, it's not a huge deal. You go in and you get a big dose of antibiotics, you have some symptoms, and then it seems to go away. But for some percentage, and you may know these people too, it's totally life-destroying. It's years in bed.

It's agony. It's really the end of your productive life. So what is that exactly? What is Lyme disease? Well, there's still an active debate about that very basic question.

Some have dismissed it as a psychological symptom, actually. But even people who acknowledge that it's a physical syndrome aren't always very clear, and they're certainly not in agreement with one another about what it is or where it came from. So back in 2008,, a woman called Chris Newby produced a documentary about Lyme. At that point, it was becoming a very serious global illness, and its origins were mysterious, unknown. People whispered about it, but no one could be certain.

That documentary was called Under Our Skin. Here's part of it.

What is going on?

Chris Newby, thanks so much for coming on. So can you just give us a-.

It can linger for months to years, and then it's really hard to get rid of. And to complicate it, a tick can transmit up to like 20 different disease-causing microbes. And so if you have like two or three or four of those in one tick bite, it creates a confusing set of symptoms that doctors have trouble diagnosing.

And then later on, the tests aren't that great. It's no better than a coin flip, because it just depends on what strain you have and what you're... If you're really sick, you won't produce antibodies.

So if you have a disease that's spread by ticks and there are a whole lot more ticks, you're going to get a whole lot more cases of the disease. Is this measured, measurable?

Now, why they're spreading so quickly, I go into that in the book a little bit. I mean, there certainly is global climate change, which means winters aren't as severe and a lot of the ticks don't die off.

That's true in Maine. And then part of it is people are moving into the woods and are exposed more to the ticks.

And then there was a cattle parasite. It was the second time it was found in man in that area called Babesia. And that's actually, I got Lyme and Babesia, which can be fatal and it's a serious disease.

S. government's Biological Weapons Testing Facility. Is that what you're saying?

. So, okay. So the CDC investigated this. What did they find?

He said, that's what's causing all the disease and the panic should stop, just take two weeks of doxycycline and the problem will go away, but it didn't. And that's where my book took off. I started looking at the backstory and wondering what really happened. And people associated with that disease weren't acting in the normal way. Normally, when you discover a dangerous new disease, you say, oh, this is horrible, give us money, we'll research it.

But instead, it just became more and more secretive.

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But these patients who went on to get the same symptoms over and over again, were not given any more antibiotics. And then we wanted to understand what was going on with the disease. So Andy and I called all the CDC people, the NIH people. They wouldn't talk to us. One of the original discoverers even hung up on me.

I said, I just want someone to go on camera and talk about how this disease, how this organism, causes a disease. But to have a professor who discovered the disease hang up on me, it was just unusual. There was paranoia amongst the specialists. So what we did was we went out to see Willie Bergdorfer, who was retired, the guy who discovered Lyme disease, at his home. And while we were setting up the cameras, someone from the lab knocked on the door and says, I need to sit in on this interview.

There's things Willie can't talk about. And the director was outraged and kicked him out. But during that interview, Willie intimated that there was more to Lyme disease than the public health was letting on, that. the disease is not just a rash, highly neurological, especially damaging for children. And two weeks of doxycycline doesn't work.

And they know it can go on to be chronic. So it was our first hard proof that something wasn't as it seemed on the surface with Lyme disease.

And so we got the film out. And one thing, one of the aspects that we covered in the film, is just conflicts of interest in medicine, because right around the time Lyme disease was discovered, researchers at universities, the CDC, the NIH, could share in the profits of a new test or vaccine for a disease. So there was a lot of, like. a CDC employee could match their salary and royalties for a vaccine or a test kit. So it corrupted the incentives in medicine not to share information about a new disease, but instead to save it as intellectual property so it can be monetized.

So anyways, we got the film out. There were rumors swirling around about Plum Island and Lyme disease being a biological weapon, but we had enough to cover with the patient story and the conflict story. And then I was done with it. And I got a great job writing science for Stanford Medical School in the science department. And I was going to walk away and get on with my life.

But then two things happened within the space of a month. And I said, I can't let this story go. I just have to know what is really going on with this disease. And one was I met a CDC, I mean, a CIA black ops guy who said in 1962, the weirdest thing he'd ever done in his whole crazy apocalypse. now career was dropping poison ticks on Cuban sugar cane workers.

That was Operation Mongoose. So that was the first evidence that we had dropped ticks on a foreign country as a bioweapon. And then the other thing is one of my filmmaker friends went out to Willie Bergdorfer. And in a very long interview, he at the very end, he said, yeah, when I investigated the Lyme disease sickness in the late 70s, early 80s, there was another organism there. It wasn't just Lyme that was making people sick.

It was, and I was told to cover it up. It was probably a Rickettsia. He didn't release all the information. But what he said was confirmed by copies of his lab books and subsequent interviews that I had with him.

And they tried to stuff it in ticks. I mean, so what is tick weaponization? So in the interviews with Willie, what he said was, I spent over a decade in the biological weapons program, a contractor to Fort Detrick, working on weaponizing fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes, trying to mass produce them, stuffing fleas with the plague, stuffing mosquitoes with deadly Trinidad virus, and then stuffing ticks with either deadly or incapacitating diseases like relapsing fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, rabies, leptospirosis, which is another spirochete. So it's just like Dr. Strangelove trying to make new diseases, mixing bacteria and virus in ticks with the intent of, this is the perfect stealth weapon, it's poor man's nuke.

You drop these insects on an enemy, it weakens the population, it ties up the medical resources, but doesn't destroy infrastructure like a nuclear bomb would. And in one report from a bean counter in the military, they said, tularemia, which is tick-borne tularemia, also rabbit fever, we can kill 10,000 people at $1.33 a life. So anyways, it was just, there was more to tick-borne diseases than we realized. And I began suspecting that Willie was right, given this context.

So these kinds of experiments were taking place on Plum Island. Is that confirmed?

But I'm not sure exactly what got out where, because if you draw like a five-mile circle around Lyme, Connecticut, there's Plum Island, there's several military bases. There are many pharmaceutical companies that were funded by the military to develop treatments for these diseases. And so they would have to have the diseases on site. So that's my continuing research. And there are a couple, well, first of all, back up, to weaponize a living system like a bug or the germs in bugs.

Or later on in the 60s, they separated the germs and aerosolized them. They would freeze-dry them, powderize them, and then spray them. The plan was to spray them on enemies from planes or buoys or vehicles. So to develop a weapon like that, you have to have someone like Willi Bergdorfer seeing if they can get these living systems to work and develop the lethal dosage of those organisms. Then you have to do pilot studies.

that usually could happen in Connecticut or Fort Dietrich in Maryland. And then there would be larger studies, and that would be at like Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. So there were a lot of leak points for any accidents that could have happened in this biological weapons program. So what Willi said, and I think he's a really credible witness because he had the most to lose by admitting towards the end of his life that, I covered up something really important, and now I feel guilty about it. All his fame came at 56 when he discovered Lyme disease.

So what he said is, and he wouldn't give me the details of the organism that was the bioweapon, but he said accidents happened. So my continuing work is to try and figure out, okay, where was the leak? And, most crucially, like why were there multiple tick-borne diseases in that very, very small spot? Also, there were some in Northern Wisconsin where we had a biological weapons, that's the anti-crop area in the genetic engineering area of the bioweapons program. So what I sort through in documents and grants and newspapers.com are, were there century die-offs of animals and people that are hidden there?

Because the biological weapons program was as secret as the Manhattan program, and a lot of the documents were destroyed after the program was canceled in 72.

. I have to say one of the most outrageous open-air experiments, which I think contributed to the problem around Lyme, Connecticut, is Coastal, Virginia, a tick researcher had an army contract and a contract with the Atomic Energy Commission, and he was testing Lone Star ticks as a potential.

weaponized organism. And the thing about Lone Star ticks is they were from the South, originally identified them in Texas, below the Mason-Dixon line. But here he was on the Mason-Dixon line, testing by the hundreds of thousands, a non-native tick. And he wanted to see how far they can creep in months to years, because if you're weaponizing it, you would want to know that information. So from Willie Bergdorfer in Montana, he got some pregnant ticks.

So they have, they're called gravid ticks, but they have 2,000 to 4,000 eggs inside of them. He would inject them with a radioactive isotope. The ticks would hatch all their larval babies, and then he would, and they would be radioactive for life. So first of all, if you're going to release them in nature, is it going to cause mutations in the organisms inside their gut? But anyways, what he would do is he would take 1,000 ticks and put 1,000 per grid in a marshy field.

And then he and his assistants would go out every month, they'd use a Geiger counter to figure out how far the ticks had creeped in that amount of time. And then write studies on them, which are actually in the public domain. But this is an open air test on the Atlantic Bird Flyway, 1966, 67, 68. And sure enough, like, after those tests ended, there was an unusual epidemic on Long Island of Rocky Mountain, spotted fever, which is spread by those kind of ticks. A lot of people died, usually on Long Island.

In the late 60s, there would be one death a year. But after this experiment, like, over 100 people, gravely ill, quite a few deaths. And actually, that's why Willy Berndorfer came out, is to try and figure out what happened there. So the point is, this is just one experiment we know about in the biological weapons program. And why does it matter now?

Because, human hubris, we can't control nature. And if we're going to play God and make these new germs inside ticks and then release them, there could be blowback, unintended consequences. And that's what I believe. This thing that we call Lyme disease, but which could be multiple organisms.

that are making people sick. But no, for some reason, the government said, it's only this one spirochete. It can be cured with two weeks of antibiotics. And I think that's fundamentally untrue.

And then also, there was epidemics of equine encephalitis, where really, high dollar horse flesh died. That's all the late 60s. And then you have the human illness, which we call Lyme disease. But I've talked to witnesses who went to school. I mean, they're my age now.

They went to school. And you would see a Lyme Connecticut bus pull up, and a third of the bus, these elementary school kids would be carrying crutches with swollen knees.

done anything to stop it, to help people who are suffering from it, to offer any kind of payment to people whose lives they destroyed?

The NIH, who has a pretty small budget for it, it's gone from $30 million to $50 million a year,

spends like 60% of the budget on basic research, but only less than 1% on treatments. So, even though the treatment recommended by the CDC, there's like a 20% failure rate in those people going to get sick, uh, they're not investing anything in treatment. It's pretty similar to what's happening with long COVID. They're just obsessed with the deaths and maybe the upfront acute disease, but not the chronic, the growing number of chronic people. So the thing I worry about is, it's, okay, go ahead.

Do you know?

So there's a small group of people controlling the information.

And the boots on the ground, the physicians now have been trained, the whole 15 minutes of medical school that they learn about tick-borne diseases, that Lyme disease is overdiagnosed, it's easy to cure. And they don't know this very elaborate, complicated backstory. So, I mean, that's what the book hopefully will do, is read them, that they need to treat tick-borne diseases.

Seriously, they're not minor, they're life-changing. And it's going to be a drag on our economy to have this many long COVID, chronic fatigue, and Lyme disease patients unable to work because they haven't invested in treatments.

And thanks for all the responsible research you've done into this. Appreciate it.