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. Some infectious disease doctors, they don't believe in Lyme.
And they said that I was faking it and pretending so I could get out of school. Lyme is the fastest growing infectious disease in the country.
200,000 new cases here, maybe even more. It is a political disease and an economic disease as much as it is a bacterial-borne infection.
I would never, never have thought that something like a bacteriological infection can become so politicized that the truth can be so brutally distorted. I go into despair daily.
I cry daily. I want to die daily.
Well, when I saw this doctor, you know, he said, you've got a long road ahead of you. It's not going to be easy.
So that scared me. The unknown is pretty scary.
It is a national health crisis that is completely and totally being ignored and squashed. What is going on? Well, you could write it off, and again, some have as a figment of your imagination, but there are real neurological symptoms.
And if you know anyone who's had it, you know that it's entirely real. So again, what is this? Well, Chris Newby has spent a lot of time thinking and researching on this topic, has been affected personally by Lyme, is the author of Bitten, The Secret History of Biological Weapons and Lyme Disease, and she joins us now.
Chris Newby, thanks so much for coming on. So can you just give us a- Thanks for inviting me here.
Oh, absolutely. A quick and succinct overview of what Lyme is.
So Lyme disease is caused by a spirochetal bacteria, and you get it through a tick bite. And if you treat it immediately with doxycycline or amoxicillin, it will go away.
The problem is it's very often misdiagnosed or diagnosed late, and that's where the controversy comes in for the disease. 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.
So doctors can isolate, however, the organism that causes Lyme specifically. I mean, there's no mystery about where that comes from.
Is that correct? Well, there are antibody tests for Lyme disease. It's really, really hard to culture the, you know, take blood and culture it in a Petri dish.
Yes. The problem is the tests are not very reliable.
The Lyme disease antibody tests don't usually work in the first month. It takes a while for your body to develop antibodies to the level that they can be measured.
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.
Dr. Interesting.
So the problem with tick-borne diseases is there are a lot more ticks than there have been in our lifetimes anyway. Parts of the Northeast have seen an explosion in tick populations to the point where large mammals are being decimated, sucked dry of blood and dying because they have too many ticks on them.
So that's not anyone's imagination. That's measurable.
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? Yes.
And I would say just the cases of Lyme disease are going up, which is proving that ticks are biting people, the CDC estimates there are

half a million cases a year. That's on average 1,300 people a day.
So that's significant. 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.

Yes.

That's true in Maine.

And then part of it is... means winters aren't as severe and a lot of the ticks don't die off.
Yes.

That's true in Maine.

And then part of it is people are moving into the woods and are exposed more to the ticks.

Yes, all true in Maine and other northern states.

But it does raise the question, like, how did this,

I mean, if you're 75 years old, you did not grow up with Lyme disease. If you're 15 years old, you're worried about Lyme disease.
That's a pretty short period. Where do we think this came from? Well, the thing I found in my research for my book is Lyme disease wasn't a noticeable problem until the mid-70s.
And what my research said is that there are actually three really virulent tick-borne diseases that showed up right around Lyme, Connecticut at the mouth of the Connecticut River, which is right across from Plum Island, which was the U.S.'s anti-animal crop headquarters for the biological weapons program. So late 60s, the peak of the biological weapons program in the U.S., these three freaky diseases showed up.
So that was Lyme arthritis caused by the spirochete. There was a rickettsia, which is Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
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. all three, so you have a cluster effectively of these three previously rare diseases right across the water from the U.S.
government's biological weapons testing facility. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.
And it's, if you're like working for the CDC and on the lookout for natural versus unnatural disease outbreaks, having three new tick-borne diseases show up, extra deadly disease-causing than in the past,

it would get their attention and there would be investigations, which is what happened. That sounds like a crazed conspiracy theory to me, just because you have previously rare diseases show up all at once across from a biological weapons facility doesn't mean, so, okay, so the CDC investigated this.
What did they find? Well, a housewife in Lyme, Connecticut, Polly Murray, was the first one to start documenting, and she started pounding on the doors of local health departments and the CDC. And it really took her seven years before the CDC responded, and a doctor named Alan Steer showed up and started from Yale.
He's a CDC EIS officer and started investigating it. And he figured out it was tick-borne, but he couldn't figure out the causative agent.
And at that point, the U.S.'s number one tick researcher, Willie Bergdorfer, a Swiss American tick guy who was in NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratory, came out to investigate. And that's where he found, I mean, the public facing story is he found the spirochete, it causes this bullseye rash.
He said, that's what's causing all the disease. And the panic should stop.
Just take two weeks of doxycycling 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. Yes.
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That's 1-800-780-8888. So is it your belief that Willie Bergdorfer, who I think is gone now, but knew the truth about what happened? And what do you think is the truth? Well, I worked on the Lyme disease documentary with fresh eyes because I didn't know anything about the disease until my husband and I got it.
And the thing that was unusual is the symptoms set on the CDC website and in the medical textbooks was totally different than what we had experienced. So then I teamed up with the director, Andy Wilson, and we spent three and a half years researching the disease.
And what we found out is it was just an enormous epidemic. So many people are suffering.
And the treatment recommended by public health, which was two weeks of doxycycline, wasn't curing it. 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. Like 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, you know, 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 it being 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, 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 pardon my ignorance, what is the disease you described, the other one? Rickettsia? So it's a Rickettsia. It is the same organism that causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and that's the most deadly tick-borne disease in the United States.
It also was a germ that was being weaponized by the U.S. military at the time, 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.
It's hard to digest all of this. is just so evil.
It's hard to believe it could happen in the United States. But I think you're right that it did and may be still happening.
Let me ask what you think happened in the specific case of Lyme. So these kinds of experiments were taking place on Plum Island.
Is that confirmed? Well, Plum Island only did animal diseases. There was another branch, which was Maryland, Fort Detrick.
They did anti-human weapons. 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 uh research there um and there are there are a couple well first of all back up to weaponize a living system like a bug or the germs and 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 on.
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 Willy Burgdorfer 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 happened, could happen, you know, in Connecticut or at Fort Dietrich in Maryland. And then there would be larger studies, and that would be at like Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.
So there was a lot of leak points for any accidents that could have happened in this biological weapons program. So what Willie 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 sentry 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, 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 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 hard they 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'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 forope. 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, it isn't going to cause mutations in the organisms inside their gut. But anyways, what he would do is he would take a thousand ticks and put,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 of 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 Willie Bergdorfer 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.
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You can check it out on their website, sambrosa.com. Two last questions um one did did you or have you discovered any die-offs uh the ones you referred to a minute ago of people or animals clusters of deaths yes yes in the late 60s, early 70s, there were duck die-offs.
The Long Island duck industry was decimated, which, yeah. And then also there was epidemics of equine encephalitis,

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

Grotesque. And so my final question, it's mostly rhetorical, but has the US government,

which is clearly responsible for this, I think it's pretty obvious,

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? Well, there is no hard proof that this epidemic was caused by them. It's circumstantial evidence, I would say.
And I'm really clear in my book to say this is what we know and this is what we don't know. But I find their response to be really inadequate because the symptom list isn't accurate.
It's been 40 years and we still don't have a good test. The NIH, who has a pretty small budget for it, it's gone from 30 million to 50 million a year, is, has, 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, and those people going to get sick, 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 growing number of chronic people. So the thing I worry about is it's...
Okay, go ahead. Well, I was just thinking I would never have done this segment if I hadn't seen it myself.
And so somebody has done a pretty good job of discrediting sufferers of whatever this is as crazy and suggesting that these are psychosomatic symptoms. And I'll just speak for myself.
I would have bought that if I hadn't known people personally very well who are not crazy at all or depressed or you know or fragile even who were decimated by it so where did that where did that piece of propaganda come from do you know um i think it's the same dynamic uh that we see with trying to discredit the lab leak theory.

I mean, there's a small group of people that were read into this biological weapons program.

I know that from reading the emails in NIH when my book came out.

Before they'd read the book, they discredited it because they hadn't read the facts, and it was so secretive. So there's a small group of people controlling the information.
And the boots on the ground physicians now have been trained, the whole 15 minutes of medical school that they learn about tick-borne diseases, that Lyme disease is over-diagnosed, 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.
So for people who are interested in learning more, can you restate the title of your book, if you would? It's written, The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons. And I have to say, I didn't prove that Lyme disease is a biological weapon, but I'm saying something unusual, which I think is related to the biological weapons program, had it happened in the late 60s, and the government wants to cover it up.
And it matters because how you treat an unnatural disease is different than a natural disease where people develop immunity.

For an unusual disease, you need a more well thought out, intelligent treatment plan.

Well, sure.

I mean, it's not like cholera, you know, we've been dealing with for millennia.

I sure appreciate your coming on.

Thank you.

That's fascinating.

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