Evidence of US Military Bio-Program in Outbreak of Lyme Disease

Recently, I was playing in the woods with my son in upstate New York when we came to this fork in the road. One path was sort of a normal path that was well-maintained and kept clean, but the other path was basically just overgrown woods. At that moment, I decided to be poetic and take the one less traveled by, the one that was overgrown, branches hanging down real low, and where the underbrush constantly touches your leg. Honestly, it wasn't that fun, but it was definitely harder. Anyway, though, when we came out and we got back to the car, I checked my kids' legs and they were fine. But then I checked my own legs and I found that I had some new friends. There were two ticks that were stuck to my right leg, actively sucking out my blood. Not a big deal, though. I removed them, but I did take one of them and I placed it in a Ziploc bag and I saved it just in case in the future I had to test it in case I developed any symptoms of either alpha-gal or Lyme disease. And so that experience, it led me on this process of looking into the symptoms of Lyme disease, which then sent me down this rabbit hole of research, which ultimately culminated in both myself as well as Eric, the researcher, looking into the origins of Lyme disease itself. And what we found is not exactly what you might expect. There is a very credible body of research which says that Lyme disease did not come about naturally. Rather, it was accidentally released into the wild by the U.S. federal government. Now, right off the bat, I'll tell you that there is no 100% definitive proof that this is the case. But the evidence that does exists paints a fairly compelling picture, compelling enough that the current sitting director of the NIH recently said the following, quote, it is possible and perhaps likely, though not proven, that the emergence and spread of Lyme disease may have been caused by this research program, which included large open air testing of intentionally infected ticks on U.S. soil. And so when you have the director of America's National Institutes of Health saying that, the evidence obviously cannot be ignored. And so today, let me present to you the full story, all the evidence, including firsthand testimony from one of the world's foremost experts on this topic. And then afterwards, you can make up your own mind as to what you really believe happened. And right off the bat, if you appreciate content like this, which in this episode, you will see how deep we went. And you'll probably understand why from the moment we decided to do this research up until now, when we're publishing the episode, it took over a full year. And so if you appreciate content like this, please do smash those like and subscribe buttons. Doing so really does help the episode get picked up by the algorithm and shared out with ever more people. Thank you so much for doing that. Now, to start with, I need to really set the historical stage for you in order to provide you with the proper context for what was happening in the mid-1970s when Lyme disease was first discovered. And to do so, we first need to discuss this term right here, entomological warfare. That term, entomology, it means the study of insects. And so entomological warfare simply means the use of insects as weapons of war. Specifically, it's a subcategory of biological warfare that uses insects to attack the enemy. And I'll mention right off the bat that this concept is not anything new. It's existed for centuries, both in Asia, as well as in Europe, and probably in Africa as well. There have been many prominent examples throughout history. You had the Mongols launch dead, deceased corpses into cities that they were sieging so that the fleas on those corpses would spread the Black Plague. You had Richard the Lionheart during the Third Crusade. He was said to use beehives as a weapon, launching them at his enemies. And there was also the case where the Kingdom of Hatra was under siege by the Roman Empire, and so they launched clay pots filled with scorpions at the Roman troops, and then the pots would break upon impact, and then the scorpions would come out and do what scorpions do, sting everybody in sight. If you're actually interested in learning about the historical use of those techniques, there is a great book called Six-Legged Soldiers Using Insects as Weapons of War by Professor Jeffrey Lockwood. I'll throw a link to that book. You can find it down in the description box below. But getting back to the point, though, in the 20th century, much like every other aspect of war, entomological warfare also experienced technological breakthroughs. No longer were you limited to the bees and fleas that were located in your geographic vicinity, and no longer did you have to use trebuchets to catapult them over a wall. Scientists now had access to pretty much all the bugs from all over the world, and there were also airplanes that you could use to launch these insects out of. All right, just to pause here for super quick moment, it's Medicare annual enrollment once again. And I know the hundreds of mailers, phone calls, and texts that you're receiving are probably very annoying. However, this is the one Medicare message that you should consider not skipping. Most Medicare plans, they change every single year. 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And if you want to learn more about them, all their details will be down in the description box below. And now back to the program. And so as just one alleged instance of many, in the 1950s during the Cold War, the sudden presence of the potato beetle in Eastern Europe, it was used as a prominent propaganda tool by both sides. On the one hand, the United States accused the Soviet Union of introducing that particular beetle into Eastern Europe as basically a form of biological warfare, which was meant to weaken that region's agricultural production. But on the other hand, the Eastern European governments they accused the United States of introducing that beetle as a form of biological warfare that was meant to hurt the region's agricultural production basically it was obviously hurting that region's agricultural production but both sides were pointing the finger at each other and the East German government they claimed that the U.S. was dropping these beetles out of planes over potato fields in order to sabotage their crops which really were decimated. This beetle, it was a significant pest for the potato crop, and it caused massive losses for the local farmers. And at this time, there were several reports of American airplanes flying over these rural farmlands that immediately afterward reported a sudden infestation of the potato beetle. The East German government, they responded with basically an all-out media propaganda campaign depicting these beetles as tiny American soldiers. And in fact, here is a Czechoslovakian video from that period that was kind of a good timepiece showing the zeitgeist on the Eastern European side. Now I'll mention that the true origins of that beetle's presence is still debated to this very day with neither side admitting to anything, but similar instances were happening domestically here in America as well. For instance, in Operation Seaspray conducted in the 1950s, The U.S. Navy used one of their ships that was along the coast of San Francisco to spray two types of bacteria into the air. This was done to assess San Francisco's vulnerability to a potential bioweapon attack by an enemy. Declassified Army reports later indicated that the samples they took at 43 different sites, it showed that these organisms had actually spread through the city and into the nearby suburbs. Now, the part that I just stated came from declassified documents, and that's basically historical fact. However, in testing our vulnerability in this way, the Navy might have made some vulnerable individuals sick. That's because in the weeks following the test, you had Stanford Hospital record 11 rare bacterial infection cases, coincidentally from that very same bacteria that was being sprayed in the air. One person actually later died in the hospital. But I'll mention that the link between these Navy tests and the hospitalizations were never made official. The Pentagon, for their part, said that that outbreak was a coincidence, and the lawsuit that was brought forth by the deceased man's family was ultimately fruitless. They were never able to establish a connection. So take of that what you will. Similar tests, though, were also conducted in the mid-60s here in New York City, where scientists from the U.S. Army, they intentionally packed these light bulbs full of that same bacteria, and they smashed them on the tracks of the New York City subway system in order to track how that bacteria would spread throughout a major urban area. And so in total, these domestic experiments show us that the U.S. military was definitely running tests like these here in America, where they would spread pathogens in order to see what the impact might be from a defensive standpoint. That was just what was happening in the 1950s and 1960s based on the declassified documents, it's basically a known fact. Keep that in mind as we shift the discussion back to the study of insects, because aside from utilizing the inherent characteristics in certain insects, like for instance, the Colorado beetles big appetite for potatoes, there was also a weaponization effort. Specifically during the Cold War, you had the United States military run a secret entomological weapons program where fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, as well as other insects were filled with disease-causing microbes. The idea being that you would release them on your enemy in order to create disease outbreak disasters, sort of like what Japan did over China during the, in the lead-up to the Second World War. Now, this part of the story is, again, not conspiratorial or theoretical. This is just declassified U.S. history. Up on your screen right now is a trove of declassified documents that reveal that in 1954, the U.S. government ran a secret program called Operation Big Itch. And as a part of that program, the U.S. Army ran field tests to determine the feasibility of using fleas as a delivery system for biowarfare. The objective there was to determine whether fleas could be bred, transported, loaded into munitions, and then delivered to the target in numbers that were sufficient to spread the disease to an enemy population. This declassified document and details the operation that used a special cluster munition that was specially designed to release plague fleas. The operation included a hot trial conducted on September 17, 1954, in which four of these munitions were filled with Oriental rat fleas that caused bubonic plague, and they were dropped on a testing ground within the Army's Dugway Proving Ground, which is a facility that covers roughly 800,000 acres of remote territory in the Salt Lake Desert over in Utah. Now, the fleas that were used in that experiment, they could have spread bubonic plague, but the ones that they used were actually not infected by any biological agent, according to the documents. And the experiment itself was deemed to be a success, despite one of the four munitions malfunctioning and fallout outside of the target area, with all three passengers on board being bitten after fleas escaped their containers prior to the drop. So they say that it was successful, but obvious problems were there. They concluded, though, that airdropping of fleas was a viable means of introducing a vector, in this case, infected insects, after they went down and they examined the drop zone and they found that a bunch of the guinea pigs that were down there were covered in fleas. And I'll mention again that Operation Big Itch was not a one-off of this type of weaponization effort. You also had Operation Big Itch. Other classified documents, like the ones right here up on your screen, show that the very next year, in 1955, the U.S. was conducting a new entomological test, this Operation Big Itch. This test was done over in Savannah, Georgia, and it was meant to determine the feasibility of producing, storing, loading into munitions once again, and dispersing from an aircraft the yellow fever mosquito. Although the Army swears that the mosquitoes that they used in their test were not infected. Using the very same munition as the flea test for Operation Big Itch, the Army dropped roughly 300,000 mosquitoes from airplanes flying somewhere between 250 and 400 feet above the ground over the fields of Savannah, Georgia. They also shot rockets from the ground into the air as a means of disseminating these mosquitoes. Basically, they were testing whether they needed to fly airplanes or whether they could use ground-to-air munitions. The study, which was described as a qualitative preliminary test, and it found that the mosquitoes survived the drop, they dispersed over quite a wide area, and when they looked into it, they did in fact bite the study participants, meaning the test was basically a success. Now again, the 1950s were a big year for this type of stuff, because by the next year, 1956, the U.S. government was running Operation Dropkick. In this operation, the Army ran another series of tests involving the release of mosquitoes. Operation Dropkick was a study to see how well mosquitoes released inside or near urban buildings could penetrate structures and find hosts to bite. Basically, if you release mosquitoes in a city, could they find their ways into the buildings and bite the people inside of those buildings? Savannah, Georgia was again selected as the test site, with the Army asserting that it obtained consent and permission from the residents who helped with the test by reporting back to the Army any mosquito bites that they suffered inside of their homes during this window of time. And the summary report for that particular experiment, which was, by the way, declassified only in the 80s, it basically said that this could be feasible, but you have to get so close behind enemy lines in order to do this that it's not practical. Although they did mention that it could be much more useful to do in rural areas where it could hurt the livestock and sort of beef production industry. And again, in the 50s and 60s, there were so many of these operations and experiments. There were tests to weaponize bacterium to Lorenz. There were airplane spray experiments that were done over Salt Lake City, Utah. There was Operation Bellwether, which tested the use of female mosquitoes under different conditions. They were basically testing out their survival in different environments, how far they would disperse from their origin point, how frequently they would bite, and so on. There was Operation Magic Sword, where in May of 1965, we released uninfected mosquitoes from a ship off of Baker Island to study offshore delivery methods and biting habits. And there was also the radioactive tick release of 1967, wherein you had a contractor to the U.S. Army's Biological Weapons Program raise hundreds of thousands of ticks and then release them in Virginia as well as in rural Montana. them. Their radioactivity, it allowed the researchers to track their movement patterns to see how far the ticks would spread from their origin points. The details of this experiment are highlighted in this 1968 Journal of Medical Entomology paper that was written by Dr. Stonenschein. And so that was a bit long, but basically the reason we had to go through all that was to make the point that until President Nixon basically shut down this entire line of research, the U.S. military was experimenting with different types of insects, ticks, and bacteria for both offensive as well as for defensive purposes, both abroad, but also to our point, domestically right here in America. Now, I don't want to bog down this episode with too many of these examples, but I do think that it was important to give you the overall context that in the 50s and 60s, this was just the zeitgeist. This was a historical fact that these types of experiments were happening. And so all of that was the relevant backstory for what began to take place in the mid-1970s. Specifically, in 1975, you had a mysterious illness suddenly strike the small town of Lyme, Connecticut, leaving dozens of children being diagnosed with what medical experts at the time thought was juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Most of the patients, they were believed to have been bitten by ticks, and they exhibited a characteristic bull's-eye-shaped rash where that tick bite was. And it wasn't until years later that the illness was given the moniker Lyme disease, named after that small town in Connecticut where it was first found. Now, the problem with Lyme disease, aside from the bull's-eye-shaped rash that you develop, which only manifests, by the way, in a small percentage of cases, so that's not even like a telltale sign that you definitely have it, is that it's really difficult to diagnose. Lyme disease is commonly known as the great imitator because its symptoms mimic many other diseases. Patients with Lyme disease, they are frequently misdiagnosed as having chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, as well as various psychiatric illnesses, including depression, which is really wild if you think about it. I mean, you could be suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. You're tired all the time. You're even depressed. You do everything. You go to all the specialists and nothing works because unbeknownst to both you as well as your doctors, you actually have Lyme disease. Nowadays, the most common treatment for Lyme disease involves a course of oral antibiotics, which typically sees people recover if it's treated early. But back in the year 1975, when these cases were just emerging for the very first time, there was no known treatment because it wasn't clear what was even happening. People didn't even know what it was. And in fact, it wasn't until seven full years later that the bacterium responsible for Lyme disease was identified in 1982 by a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer. And that bacterium, it was actually named in his honor. And do remember his name because he becomes quite an important character in this entire story in just a moment. Now, in regards to the question of why Lyme disease was not seen before the year 1975, the scientific community settled on the narrative that the disease was present in North America for thousands of years, but it only manifested in humans after ecological changes happened in the 20th century, which basically created the perfect environment for its ability to spread. And spread it has. Nearly all 50 states, including Alaska, have reported increasing prevalence of Lyme disease cases in the recent years. The CDC estimates that around 500,000 Americans, half a million Americans, are diagnosed with Lyme disease every single year. Even A-list celebrities like Justin Timberlake are not immune from contracting Lyme disease, for whatever that's worth. Now, one person who rejects the scientific consensus narrative that Lyme disease is a naturally occurring illness is Ms. Chris Newby. She's an investigative journalist who specializes in U.S. tick-based bioweapon projects. After she was misdiagnosed and spent years seeking some form of treatment for both her and her husband's Lyme disease, Ms. Chris Newby dedicated her life to exposing what she believes is the truth behind the real origin story of Lyme disease, which she claims is likely a result of a biolab leak from a U.S. government-funded biomedical research facility located on Plum Island, some 12 miles from Lyme, Connecticut. Her research led her to be the senior producer of the award-winning 2008 documentary called Under Our Skin, which exposes the hidden epidemic of Lyme disease, and it reveals how difficult it is to get treated through normal channels of healthcare, and her book Bitten, The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons. It won three international book awards for journalism, as well as narrative nonfiction. And also, in July of two years ago, in July of 2024, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, is the current director of the NIH, he wrote a positive review of her book, which describes it as a, quote, incredible, infuriating, well-written book worth your time. The NIH director then went on to outlined some of the lessons that he learned from that book. And I quoted him at the top of the episode, but I'll quote him in full again, because it is really pertinent to our discussion. Quote, it is possible and perhaps likely, though not proven, that the emergence and spread of Lyme disease may have been caused by this research program, which included large open air testing of intentionally infected ticks on U.S. soil. Lyme disease and related syndromes are likely caused more than just by Borrelia burgdorferi, which is the bacterium. Newby makes a circumstantial case for a shadowy Rickettsia bacteria that Willy Burgdorfer studied, which he called the Swiss agent. And it's that last part that is the main crux of her argument. Essentially, Ms. Chris Newby's research project, it paints Professor Willy Burgdorfer as the arsonist fireman. Basically, he's credited with discovering a bacteria that she believes he had a hand in weaponizing. And well, I was lucky enough to be able to sit down and speak with Ms. Chris Newby, and she laid out her findings to me take a listen so Willy Burgdorfer was brought over from Switzerland in 1951 as part of the U.S. biological weapons program his job when he got here was to weaponize fleas ticks and mosquitoes and by weaponizing them i mean he would take these eight-legged six-legged organisms and stuff them with dangerous bacterium viruses and these the idea behind this is they would be stealth weapons for the U.S. military they would drop them on our enemies and there would be no fingerprints on them or shell casings so it would make a population really sick so it would make it easier for U.S. forces to take over later and uh it would tie up medical resources of the enemy too so he was working on that so fast forward to uh the mid 70s There was an outbreak around Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, of three really dangerous, virulent new pathogens. Pathogens mean disease-causing organisms. There was this thing that they labeled Lyme arthritis, but it was more. It wasn't just swollen knees and rashes. It was a heavily neurological disease that created mental illness. there was also babesiosis which is what my husband and i got and that's american malaria so it invades your red blood cells it also lets the Lyme hide out in your damaged red blood cells and then there was um uh rocky mountain a very deadly rocky mountain spotted fever and what that's caused by is a very small bacterium it's almost virus size and it gets into your cells and just messes up your body so some people were getting all three of those at that time and it was raising alarms in that area so at that time which is the early 70s willie was out of the bioweapons program that was canceled in 69 and he had moved on to investigating all these strange rickettsia spotted fever outbreaks and so he was sent in when Yale couldn't figure out what was making people sick he was sent there and so he was very scientific and objective and he explored what was inside the ticks and what was inside the people who were so sick and who had the rashes and swollen joints and were were crazy uh supposedly and he found um three suspicious organisms there and he said in almost every tick he found an unnamed rickettsia that's the spotted fever organism and he also found the Lyme spirochete in some of the samples but not all of the samples so everyone was excited that he found that since he's a tick specialist and um but somehow when he came to discover to publish on that discovery they made him delete the Rickettsia and later on when I was investigating this I sat Willie down Willie down and he said there was something else that i was told to hide and i assume that's the rickettsia because the u.s bioweapons program was weaponizing rickettsias at the end of the program and the important thing about bioweapons are living bioweapons is you can release them into the environment but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube once you release a non-native organism in an environment it's there to stay um in my book i call this mystery rickettsia the swiss agent because in 78 when he identified it he took an emergency trip to switzerland and collected 4 000 ticks and he found the same swiss agent there and he he made tests for it in the u.s and so the rickettsia he found around connecticut and long island he tested it against every known rickettsia in the united states including the weaponized versions that were being brewed in Egypt and it only tested positive for this Swiss agent and uh yet it disappeared from the discovery notes and in science when you're announcing a new disease you want to list in your scientific article all the things it could and couldn't be and places where you need to explore but no it got buried and i had access to um all of willie's papers in the national archives some of the papers he stole about or he hid from the NIH on his early bioweapons work and i interviewed him several times and another documentarian got him on camera saying um yeah the thing i found around Lyme Connecticut i thought it was something that my lab had weaponized you know in the 50s well when when he spoke with you and he said that he was asked to bury uh his finding of the rickettsia in these ticks did he uh tell you who exactly uh asked him to to keep that part out no i i tried to get it out of him but he was seems like he was afraid to say it and he said to other people i was afraid if i gave too many details i would be deported which makes no sense because he's an american uh citizen so i mean one thing i always wonder is he said um accidents happen sometimes experiments don't turn out as planned in reference to this Lyme Connecticut outbreak so you know was it a u.s bioweapons program that went wrong or was it some sort of uh foreign state that released it and he discovered it i and willie was a mysterious guy very interesting character uh he had a secret swiss bank account that his family didn't know about he met with a lot of um eastern european scientists throughout his career so um the possibility that he was a double or a double agent uh could be true but i could not find proof yeah oh that would make the story even deeper i didn't even think of that yeah that element of it okay so you're so it seems like the picture that you're painting is that this individual comes from switzerland he's working on uh this kind of new well new in the technology sense uh entomological warfare program where they're weaponizing bacteria in ticks that program gets canceled but he knows that while he's working on the lab portion there i don't does he know that there are actual on the ground experiments happening in different parts of the country does he know that part when he's actually working on it yes he does he's in hamilton montana and they have a tick zoo there so if you're a bioweapons researcher in canada or or the example i'm going to tell you about is that old dominion university in coastal virginia you say you know i want uh a thousand pregnant african soft body ticks he would send it to you so um i mean the one example which i think may have contributed to the outbreak of deadly spotted fever uh in the 70s in long island was by this Virginia researcher academic and he got a bunch of lone star ticks and lone star ticks are very aggressive man biting ticks that spread spotted fever and alpha-gal red meat allergy so because that was I believe the tick of choice for bioweapons because very hardy he set off grids of ticks and would put a thousand ticks in each grid this is the researcher and he got those ticks from Willie so Willie knew about this And then they made those ticks radioactive. They released them in a field. And then every month, he and his students would go out with a Geiger counter and figure out how far the ticks had moved. And, you know, a year after that series, year-long, like three-year series of experiments happened, that's when the outbreak happened in Long Island. And part of the bioweapons program was to figure out how to spread weaponized ticks through birds who migrated. so this researcher in Old Dominion University also tracked how far the birds would spread the ticks so and it takes five days for a tick for a bird to fly from coastal Virginia to Long Island so that's one possibility too but the point is I'm just a journalist I found this stuff in open records and classified documents we need epidemiologists scientists to do more genetic work to see if this is a cause and effect thing you when you interviewed uh Willie Burgdorfer one thing you wrote about is how he had a stack of research papers and tick on tick research that he kept in his garage and that he wanted to turn over the stack to the medical community ahead of his death and on top of the stack was a note in his handwriting and the note said quote I wondered why somebody didn't do something, then I realized that I am somebody. What do you think that was in reference to? Well, I got to know Willie Burgdorfer pretty well over the course of the five-year research for the book. And I think he felt guilty about the work he had done earlier on bioweapons. And then he got the disease that he was named after, Borrelia burgdorferi, because he was cleaning infected rabbit cages on a Sunday and some of the urine splashed in his eyes so then he knew really how devastating this disease can be and he had more empathy for the patients and the patients who are largely marginalized by mainstream medicine as being hypochondriacs etc so um towards the end of his life he started leaking some of the work he had done and to me that yellow sticky was a confession from the grave. Like I, I knew what I was doing was not right, but I couldn't talk out about, speak out about it. And, um, then I realized I was somebody and I can be that kind of whistleblower. Of course. And you know, even, even the fact that you were able to find this out is in and of itself amazing. You know, it really is amazing that you were able to get these documents, which show that this was happening. Is there any hope of getting more documents specifically regarding Lyme disease with the new administration? I know RFK Jr., he's had you on his podcast. He's aware of the research. Even more notably, the current head of the NIH, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, he wrote a review of your book, a positive review. Is there any sort of development in that direction of declassifying more documents related to Lyme disease? Well, the move for declassification started with Chris Smith, a congressman in New Jersey, and he put it in front of the DOD budget and investigation three times, and it got booted for various reasons, mostly partisan, I think. But I am hopeful that Kennedy and Bhattacharya we'll try to declassify the documents because why does this matter now because back in the late 60s when all this started we could have contained this epidemic but because it was very secret and there's liability issues uh the ticks and the diseases that they carried were just continued to spread and uh and the pilot studies they did were all over the U.S. and they brewed the germs like in Arkansas there were open air experiments in Wisconsin on these these bioweapons so each one of these germs requires a different slightly different treatment sometimes different antibiotics so it would really help to know for screening tests screening people what they have and then how to treat them it would save research dollars but anyways so if we disclose these documents, and they are there. They're in some locked library in Fort Detrick, the headquarters of bioweapons. We could better treat this epidemic of tick diseases. Let me ask you something, because I've seen a lot of the other documents that have come out regarding the other operations that the U.S. government was running with other bacteria. It feels to me like it's been so long ago and Lyme disease is so prevalent now that it's like it's been long enough ago that anyone involved in it is probably either dead or like 90 plus years old. So that part doesn't really matter. And Lyme disease is such a big problem with so many people affected that like the only reason I could see that they don't release these documents. and this is actually from our earlier conversation is that there's a liability issue that if the DOD releases these documents and it reveals like hey actually yeah lyme disease we developed it we it was an accident that we released it sorry about that that if that's the case i'm not saying it is but if that's the case then there's a liability issue that people could sue the federal government in theory and say hey you know you owe me you owe me compensation for this lyme disease disease i've i've been suffering with uh for a long time besides that do you see any other reason that they would hide these documents or just continue to not declassify them well um it would it would cost the government a lot so think about the precedences of that there's agent orange and the compensation that they they've had to pay for the soldiers who release those agents including my dad who was involved with agent orange um so the liabilities for that um the people who were complicit in emphasizing the vaccine over treatments and cures a lot of them are doctors and they're probably worried about malpractice suits the other aspect is if they release all this like what are the did we release these bioweapons on foreign countries and that creates a diplomatic sticky wicket we i know from one of the people i discovered a participant in the program that we dropped infected ticks on cuba in 61 or 62 i can't remember right now and um i have other journalist friends looking into allegations that we dropped bioweapons insect-borne bioweapons on korea so it's diplomatically embarrassing and uh incriminating and it would cost the government a lot of money what would you tell somebody who believes sort of in the what would you call it like the uh the mainstream medical consensus that lyme disease was just sort of endemic to that area and of the ticks in that area for a long time and as human settlements developed lyme disease naturally uh experienced an outbreak and more and more people got it or something to that effect that there was nothing related to any kind of um uh dod research and it was just sort of naturally developing naturally developed disease but what would you tell somebody who believes uh sort of in that theory i would say if you look at the earliest records of patients in the lyme connecticut area and i did that recently at the yale medical archives it was a highly unusual disease that caused a lot of death and destruction. And the rebuttal I often hear is that, oh, well, Ötzi the Iceman 5,300 years ago had Lyme disease. It's been genetically proved. Well, that was like about 20 years ago when our genomic tools weren't as good. And there has been a rebuttal to that article saying, well, those French scientists only sequenced 60% of what looked like Lyme disease, but it was just part of the Borrelia genre. So, it could be gingivitis, which is part of that large family of bacterium. So, I would say I have a Substack with The Haunting of Lyme, Connecticut, where you can read about the really unusual symptoms. And I also interviewed specialists in biosecurity and asked them, well, what do you look for when there's an outbreak is it natural or unnatural and top three top clues were is it a point source outbreak and certainly that was the case with Lyme Connecticut and is it an especially virulent disease and yeah we found that and is it multiple pathogens so you know if you're going to do a bioweapons attack if it's multiple pathogens that would be your strategy not just one you'd want to make sure it really was effective so um that's that would be what i would say to people who say oh it's been around forever and the other thing is i interview a lot of people who've gone to europe for treatment and the doctors in europe say well we can treat the Borrelia burgdorferi in europe really easily but the cases in the u.s are different a different how um just harder to treat harder to treat and then i'll add something other other um i have a lot of people discrediting my whole book saying well Lyme couldn't possibly be a bioweapon because it's slow growing and uh it's been around forever but and i i don't say lime was a bioweapon but i do say it its genome is highly irregular it's got more plasmids than any other bacteria and plasmids are these little circular chromosomes that are often signs that a bacterium has been genetically juiced for whatever reason in pharma or bioweapons. And then recent bioinformaticists have said the evolution of Borrelia burgdorferi is mysterious and rapid, which, you know, are trigger words for was it genetically altered mysterious and rapid yeah you know it's the what you just said regarding the genome being highly irregular and also this mysterious and rapid evolution i imagine and i'd love to know if it's true or not that after covid after in 2020 and and you know the aftermath of covid when people woke up to the idea of of uh genetic modifications and and uh what's the word they use uh gain-of-function research on these viruses did more people kind of wake up and accept the possibility that your work is is true uh did you see sort of a resurgence in interest in your work after covid definitely the whole covid wuhan lab leak theory has awakened the public to the possibility that the government is lying to us and there are these stealth bioweapons programs going on around the world that we didn't know about. So it's the shattering of the belief system. So definitely my book has been more popular in the last year than since it came out five years ago. And then lastly, I just wanted to close out this episode. If you're watching by this point, it's already whatever, like 46 minutes into the episode. So you are invested enough to hear my conclusion. I started the video by saying that the whole way this got sparked was that I was hiking through the forest with my kid, and we took the path less traveled by because I wanted to, I guess, be poetic or teach him a lesson about taking the path less traveled by. But then the only thing I got out of it was a rougher journey and some tick bites on the bottom of my foot. And I thought, okay, maybe that wasn't a great lesson. But actually, thinking it through even further, it was a great lesson because that set me on this path of discovery, which ultimately culminated in this research project, which culminated in this, in my opinion, phenomenal episode detailing the origin of Lyme disease. So take that for what you will. I guess taking the path less traveled by is great, even though immediately afterward, you might think, wow, that was not worth it. Maybe a year or two later, you'll look back and say, wow, that actually was worth it. Then in closing, if you want to see the research notes for today's episode, I'll throw all my research links down into the description box below, which is, again, below those like and subscribe buttons, both of which I hope you smash. Listen, if you're watching by now, take a moment to smash because it'll really help the video reach ever more people. I see it very clearly in the back end when people are smashing those like buttons, when more people are subscribing to the channel via the video, the video does get picked up by the algorithm and shared out. So thank you so much for that. And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epoch Times. Stay informed, and most importantly, stay free.