Dhru Purohit Show - Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Pique Life, Momentous, and Lumebox.  When we think about disease and chronic illness, we don’t usually consider the possibility of a lab leak or a government experiment gone wrong. Today’s guest sheds light on her investigation into Lyme disease, its disturbing origins, and how it’s impacted patient treatment.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with writer and producer Kris Newby to discuss her theory on the origins of Lyme disease. She explores the possible role of weaponized ticks, the mismanagement of Lyme disease treatment, and the implications of military secrecy surrounding biological experiments. Kris also emphasizes the need for a deeper understanding of Lyme disease’s complexity and its broader impact on public health. She highlights the importance of awareness, research, and advocacy for better treatment options while sharing her personal journey with Lyme disease and how it affected her family. Kris Newby is an award-winning science writer and the senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary UNDER OUR SKIN, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was a 2010 Oscar semifinalist. Her book, BITTEN, won three international book awards for journalism and narrative nonfiction. Previously, she worked as a science and technology writer for Stanford Medical School, Apple, and other Silicon Valley companies. She is currently working on her second book. In this episode, Dhru and Kris dive into: The sinister origins of Lyme disease (00:10) What’s known so far and piecing together the facts (2:30) The discovery of Lyme, its impact on public health, and the role of Big Pharma (10:30) Theories of lab leaks and tick weaponization (17:00) Military secrecy and cover-up tactics (23:00) A congressman’s journey to investigate the origin of Lyme (28:00) Optimism for future research and treatment (30:00) Navigating tick-borne illness (32:30) Historical context of biological warfare (35:00) Connections between modern disease and bioengineering (36:20) The role of ethics and accountability (39:20) Kris’s personal journey with Lyme disease (41:20) Also mentioned in this episode: Kris’ book Bitten Lyme Disease Resources IGeneX Lab  Galaxy Labs For more on Kris, follow her on Instagram, Facebook, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, and her Website. This episode is brought to you by Pique Life, Momentous, and Lumebox.  Right now, Pique Life is offering 20% off the Radiant Skin Duo plus a free beaker and frother when you go to piquelife.com/dhru. Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the Momentous Three: Protein, Omega-3s, and Creatine made by and used by the best. Go to livemomentous.com and enter promo code DHRU to get 20% off any order. Lumebox is offering my community $260 off their FDA-registered portable Red Light device!  That's over 40% off! Go to thelumebox.com/dhru and get your Red Light device.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Newby, welcome to the podcast. I want to jump right in. You have a pretty mind-blowing and slightly sinister theory on the origins of Lyme disease, one of the fastest growing infectious diseases today in North America. And that theory is that Lyme isn't some natural disease that naturally evolved, rather that Lyme disease was essentially born from a Cold War Biological Weapons Program, in other words, bioweapon facility, that accidentally escaped into the public.

Number one, did I get that right? And number two, why should our audience care about this conversation today? A bunch of people got sick beginning in the late 60s around Lyme, Connecticut, which is just off Long Island near New York City. And they got sick with a really strange set of symptoms.

They were both neurological and crazy joint pains, giant swollen knees like balloons, Back then, sometimes they would name a disease after where it was first discovered. So the Yale rheumatologist called it Lyme disease. My theory is it was multiple organisms that got out of a military lab somehow. One of them might be the Lyme bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferide. The other one, according to the discover of Lyme disease, he told me at the end of his life. He believed that that was a weaponized germ that came out of his Cold War lab.

And there was an experiment gone wrong. So it's complicated in that what we call Lyme disease is this pyrichita bacteria, but I think there's no proof that that was weaponized, but there is this other organism, which might be related to Rocky Man in spot of fever, which Willy Bergdorfer, the discoverer called Swiss agent. So that's complicated, but it helps to know that in the Cold War, the military weaponized ticks, stuffing them with various viruses and bacterias to create a bioweapon that could be dropped on our enemy, make people sick with a confusing set of symptoms that couldn't be diagnosed. So you could weaken a population and tie up their medical resources before you invaded the country. So that's the premise of it. And why should we care now? Because there were a series of experiments

with these weaponized ticks during the Cold War. Sometimes the ticks with their evil germs got out. And that has a long-lasting effect on the environment to both the animals and the humans. How much of this is known and how much of this is you filling in the gaps to the best degree that you can from having your own individual research that's there? For example, this idea that America has a long history of creating bio-weapons and dropping it on our enemies, is that established and understood as truthful in our history and origin as a country? There have been rumors. Before I came along, the weaponization of ticks was not a known entity.

I feel like I've gathered enough evidence that that is established now. So the way I got that evidence was, first of all, the Lyme disease discoverer told me that he weaponized fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes during the Cold War for a couple decades. He said he stuffed plague and fleas, deadly yellow fever virus in mosquitoes, and then a grab bag of disease agents inside of ticks. So the way I know that is from Willie Bergdorfer. Later on, I got his lab notebooks and reports to the NIH in Fort Diedrich to prove that. I have a witness testimony from someone who worked for the CIA who dropped infected ticks on Cuba right after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. And so that's the main proof to eyewitness reports and multiple government documents. We'll come back to our Cold War history and why we were interested in some of these things.

But let's come back to the narrative a little bit more. So talk to us about this gentleman that you mentioned, Willie. Who was he? And why was his testimony and perspective to you that was included in your documentary so vital to your research? Well, Willie Bergdorfer was brought over by the Public Health Service, which is now NIH, and he had a contract with the bio-weapons headquarters for Dietrich, Maryland. After World War II, they interviewed the bio-weaponers in Germany and both Japan, and the Americans were pretty appalled at what they learned,

but they were terrified because they knew that the Russians got a hold of some of that information to. A lot of really diabolical bio-weapons experiments. They told Congress about it. The Pentagon got more funding. So there was an infusion of funding for the bio-weapons program and the chemical weapons program. And the bio-weapons program was almost as big as a Manhattan nuclear project and just as secretive. And so Willie was brought over because of his special skills in working with ticks. The Japanese were working with tick-borne diseases. And so he, at that time, America felt like they didn't have a good, handle on how to really supersize this kind of biological warfare. He was done there to do early pilot studies like what is the best combination of ticks and diseases in the ticks for a deadly strain, for an incapaciting drain for a kind of tick that could be dropped on Vietnam versus a colder climate tick which could be dropped on Russia. And on the Russian side, they were doing the same thing. So it's an escalation of this capability, even though it's just a lot of the

a stupid kind of weapon. When you have nukes, why do you need a kind of weapon that can't be controlled or targeted and has a high probability of affecting your own soldiers and population? Well, that's the theory that we have now with our understanding, especially with modern-day lab leaks. I'm sure you saw, I think you retweeted it, but now even the New York Times is openly admitting that the origins of COVID-19 are most likely from a lab leak. We'll come back to that later on. But back then, it sounds like your understanding and what you write about in the book a little bit is that the theory was how can you attack your enemies without it being something that could be immediately traced back to you or be something that, you know, the international public would

feel, you know, well in a good way, would say like, what the heck is this country using nuclear weapons again for, right? So it's kind of a hidden nuclear bomb. Is that a correct way to think about things of how they were thinking about back then? You couldn't trace bomb fuses or fingerprints on the back of a tick. It was very much a stealth, stealth weapon, I would say. Now, coming back to Willie, why would you think he was willing to admit to you that there was something more sinister going on? And how does that contradict the official origin that we've all been told about where Lyme disease comes from? Well, when Willie was 27, they brought him over here. He was thrilled at getting a really well-paid job in America in a beautiful place,

He got his own lab and his own assistant. So he was thrilled. And then as soon as he got his security clearance, then he learned, you know, the diabolical experiments that he was supposed to conduct. And, you know, I think it was a romantic and exciting at first. But then as he got deeper and deeper into the program, and he got more mature, he had two boys. And, you know, he would spend the days stuffing plague in fleas. plague that killed most of Europe time and time again. And it was the kind of thing where you wouldn't want to bring your work home, plague. It started eroding his resolve to have that profession. And then he realized he was stuck in that profession. He couldn't really publish his work because it was all top secret. But he went along with it. And over time, he became more dissatisfied. And then when he was sent out to investigate this mysterious outbreak in Lyme, Connecticut, that's when he really, he really, realized it was tick-borne, and there was another organism of Rickettsia, which is related to the Rocky Man in Spotted Spot of Fever, the most deadly tick-borne disease. It was killing people. He was

upset. And then he was told, well, there's also this spirocheat there. He discovered that, too, that we call Lyme, that is the causative agent of Lyme disease. But he was told, this other rickettsia hide it. Like, don't tell anybody you found it and just blame the whole disease on Borrelia burgdorferi. scientist, you're number one, you're supposed to always tell the truth, even if it doesn't fit your hypothesis. So in his original science discovery article of Lyme disease, he wrote about this second organism and he said, you know, this disease could be caused by Lyme disease, this Lyme bacterium, or this rickettsia, or a combination of both, but someone made him pull that out of his scientific article. And how do I know that? Because I had his first handwritten draft of the article, and then it disappeared. And then he told me that

it disturbed him. So first of all, it was undermining his code of ethics, such as they were, to lie about that. Second of all, is the frenzy of publishing about this new organism that had never been seen in the U.S. before. He got Lyme disease himself. It was a Sunday. The lab techs weren't in there. He was cleaning the rabbit cages of Lyme-infected rabbits. Urine splashed in his eyes, and all of a sudden he got Lyme disease. And he got really, really serious. sick. And I think that helped him grow a conscience. He was angry at his employers for making him covered up. He was realizing that he had unleashed a monster possibly onto the American public. So that's my theory. You know, one of the things you talk about is that most doctors in medical school

are trained that Lyme disease is, sure, out there in the world, but that largely the treatments are known and that addressing it is pretty straightforward. People get it. from a tick. They often have this spiral sort of rash that develops in that area and that all they need to do is to get antibiotics for a period of a few weeks. It goes away and the story is done. Tell us why there's so much more to the story about that to Lyme and why so many people today are suffering long-term consequences from miscarriage. managed Lyme's treatment. After Willie just announced the discovery of Lyme disease, that's 1982, there were a bunch of researchers from mostly East Coast who rushed in to participate in

the discovery because to be a disease discovery means you're going to be, have grants forever if you're one of the disease discovers. I call them the new disease carpet baggers. But about that time, the laws changed. And it all of a sudden allowed university researchers, and people like the NIH and the CDC to share in big pharma profits. So from the beginning, they knew that Lyme disease could be cured with an early dose of penicillin and doxycycline. But there was a lot more money in vaccines. So I think this group of scientists teamed up with pharma so they could take advantage

of this royalty sharing. And we've seen this with COVID too. And they de-emphasized the cure with antibiotics. and instead put all their eggs in the vaccine basket. Even though you can cure Lyme disease, which is with like two weeks of these very cheap off-patent antibiotics, all the emphasis went to the vaccines. As long as you address it early enough, right?

Yes. And they had also focused on one organism, the Lyme disease, and sort of ignored the fact that with ticks in America, there's just like 20 different viruses and bacteria they can be delivered at the same time as the Lyme disease. So if you have a vaccine for Lyme disease, well, that might not help you if you have this cattle parasite called Babysiosis or the Rocky Manonsvodin fever or the Powassan or Heartland viruses.

So even though this didn't make scientific sense and that we still didn't understand the mechanism of action or possibly that there was another organism involved, all this money went into the vaccine. As time progressed, people began to realize that Lyme could become very chronic. It can enter your joints and your brain, places where your immune system doesn't have full access and become chronic. Go dormant for a while. Then when your immune system was weakened, it would blossom again.

But if you're running a vaccine trial and you only want it to run a couple, you know, a few months, six months or whatever, If this turns out to be a chronically relapsing and remitting disease like MS or whatever, you can't run a scientifically valid a vaccine trial. Or if you don't screen those initial patients for all the other tick-borne co-infections you can have, that really screws up your vaccine results. So anyways, there were two vaccines that came out. They were about to come out around 1990. The trials were 1990-2000.

And they were both pulled from the market. I think because the underlying science wasn't right, but they said there was no market for it. So that's one factor. They started a vaccine before they understood how the organism makes people sick. The other factor is that was 82 was the beginning of the rise of medical insurance companies, HMOs. And they had a vested interest to not treat really expensive chronic diseases like Lyme disease turns out to be. it affects their bottom line too much. One New York State insurance execs said, well, AIDS is our number one.

Most expensive disease, Lyme is number two. So it was advantageous for them to side with the vaccine researchers that there is no chronic Lyme because now they don't have to pay for it. If they admit it, it doesn't exist. A little bit like long COVID, they don't have to pay for it. Wow. You know, coming back to the original origin story, if you were giving, I like to zoom in and zoom

out on interviews. So just zooming out here for a second to make sure that our audience is falling along. If you were giving the 30, 45 second elevator pitch around your book Bitten, which the link is in the show notes below, people can pick up a copy, what would you say to somebody about the origin just to make sure that they've gotten your understanding and your theory based on your research and your reports that are there? Could you share that with us? Here is the truth. Our outward appearance is a reflection of what we put inside of our bodies. I've seen this firsthand when I've had horrible acne growing up and changing my diet and improving my metabolic health significantly improve my skin.

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And this sparked this disease outbreak that is having long-lasting impacts on public health. It was a new kind of disease. The native population didn't have resistance for it. Just like when chickenpox was introduced to the Hawaiians, there's a fast die-off of that race because they had no natural immunity, similar to whatever was in the ticks. Let's talk about these two locations. I believe Plum Island and Fort Diedrich, right?

Is that accurate? Yes. What were the experiments that you believe were going on there? And then walk us through, how do we think, based on the best knowledge that you've gathered together, that essentially that there was a lab leak that led to this situation that you just described? Okay. There was two, well, three arms of the biopards.

biological weapons programs. At Plum Island, which is just about 12 miles from Lyme, Connecticut, there as the bird flies, that was the anti-animal bio-weapons program. And they were trying to find diseases that they could release on an enemy's food supplies of cows and chickens and things like that. Fort Dietrich was in Maryland, and that was the anti-human. division. And so they were trying to find germs to weaken or kill humans. And then there was also the anti-crop program, which was mostly at University of Wisconsin and Madison. And that was a second outbreak site for Lyme disease. That's where the first Lyme case was discovered. What's the belief of how you ended up having a leakage from these experiments into the natural environment? And how did it end up

being that ticks ended up being the best vehicle, so to speak, for that. Willie had the most to lose by admitting this. And he said, sometimes experiments go wrong. Something got out. So he said that, but he did not go any further as far as what exactly the organism is or how it got out. Now, there's the proximity of Plum Island. Plum Island had tick hatcheries where they were trying to mass produce hundreds of thousands of ticks. And they have a long history of safety breaches there. So hurricanes hit that island all the time. The safety ventilation systems failed. There are reports that sometimes animal was taken over on the ferry and dumped in the forests of Connecticut. So these are all leads I'm following up to try and fill in the

gaps that Willie did not answer, the questions he didn't answer before he died. That's one theory. Pfizer is right near Old Lyme, Connecticut, and they were developing antibiotics for the bio-weapons for the Army Department, and they would dump the waste for these antibiotics and the experiments into the Long Island Sound. You know, did it get out from Pfizer? So there are a lot of theories we don't know for sure. When you look at this whole situation, it's easy for somebody who's new to this topic to think, okay, is this just a bunch of conspiracy? connecting the dots, Pfizer, biological lab leaks, this situation, that situation, bio-weapons, or is it something else? For those that are listening that feel skeptical, primarily because they're new to the story, what are some important things that you want to share to them?

Well, some of these experiments are very well documented. I thought that one of the most outrageous experiments was with Lone Star Ticks on the Virginia coastline, right? on the Atlantic bird flyway. So the coastal birds migrate every year from South America all the way up past Cuba, past the United States, up into Canada. The Atomic Energy Commission and the Army hired a scientist near Newport News, Virginia,

he works for Old Dominion, to take lone star ticks, make them radioactive, then release them in a grid on the coast, and every month go out, use a Geiger counter to see how far the ticks would creep. Also, they did bird studies to see how far the birds would carry the ticks. The problem with that is lone star ticks are very aggressive, man-biting, and super hardy. They can live underwater for 88 days. Willie said that some lone stars could hang out in a refrigerator for a year and then be revived. Hardy ticks, and they also carry

spotted fever, which was one of the go-to bio-weapons that the army was doing. Deer ticks don't carry spotted fever. And so anyways, this set of experiments went from about 64 to 69. And shortly after they ended, these lone star ticks with their deadly rickettsias were spreading up and down Long Island and killed many people. And that's why Willie was originally brought out to see what was going on with that. And I think he knew that these experiments in Virginia were going on because he shipped the ticks that were made radioactive for this set of experiments. And what's more is at Rocky Manit Spotted Fever, Rocky Mountain Labs where he worked, he had a whole zoo of ticks from around the world. And sometimes, like, dangerous relapsing

fever would get into the ticks he would send to other scientists around the world. It's a recipe for disaster. Lab leaks extraordinaire. When I had first heard about your book and your work on another podcast that I was listening to, one of the reasons that it stuck out to me as being so important for us to chat about is it's really sort of two areas that kind of came up for me. And I'd love for you to expand on these and also share your own thoughts on this before we continue on the other questions that I had. The first one was, number one, one, I believe around 450,000 people or 470,000 people, something like that, based on the estimates, are diagnosed and treated for Lyme every year in North America alone. And if there's not

an honest conversation about the origins of Lyme and that it's not necessarily one thing, that it could be multiple things that people are getting infected with, then the people that are suffering with this aren't getting appropriate levels. of care because it's understood to be something more simplistic. And then the second aspect is that if we don't understand that our country has had a history in things like creating biological weapons and sure, maybe with well intentions that are enemies at the time in the Cold War, Russia, Cuba, other Soviet-aligned, communist-aligned countries, were also developing these things, trying to deploy it maybe on our own

citizens. So we might have had well-intentioned reasons to pursue it, but if we don't understand that it's possible that these biological weapons could backfire and impact our own population, then we're much less likely to understand the continuing research in those areas. And obviously, even the implications of our funding of gain of research work that happened during the coronavirus, which led to economic collapse. and the death of millions of people around the world, which obviously is also a theory, but is becoming more and more proven as information comes along. So those are the two things that stood out to me the most about why this conversation

matters besides just the curiosity of like, wow, this is nuts. If this is actually how it happened, this is actually freaking crazy. Any comments on that or anything that you want to expand on for why you also are super passionate about this topic? Are you looking for one of the most effective ways to now? naturally boost cellular and mitochondrial health? Let's talk about red light therapy. With over 1,000 scientific studies backing its benefits, red light therapy has been shown to strengthen mitochondria, reduce pain and inflammation, improve circulation, enhanced performance, speed up muscle

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That's over 40% off. and you can even use your HSA and FSA funds to pay for the device right at checkout. That's huge. Just go to the loombox.com slash Drew. That's the loom, L-U-M-E-B-O-X dot com slash D-H-R-U to get your device. That's loombox.com slash Drew to start your red light therapy today. The military has secrecy in its DNA and it's only gotten worse over time. and there's a certain cover-up playbook that they follow.

I mean, our first use of biological weapons is believed to have happened in the Korean War. I believe that that's true. I just went to an archive and did the deep dive on it. But the military had a cover-up and disinformation plan ready to go, even before it leaked out, that bugs were raining down on the snow in Korea while we're in the middle of losing this war.

So this cover-up is continuing. to happen. And we saw that with Lyme disease. And Lyme disease is just like one little tiny facet of the biological weapons program. I could talk for an hour about the other things. But why do I care about this tick thing? Well, it's affected my family personally, multiple people. And I've experienced the seriousness of this disease. I mean, I had multiple tick-borne diseases, and my husband did. And then I did a film under our skin that I teamed up with a really talented director, Andy Wilson, and we went all over the U.S. and interviewed sufferers of tick-borne disease and Lyme disease. And that's when I realized this problem is just so much larger than just me

who had a bad doctor in California. It's nationwide, so 500,000 cases a year, at least now. And of the people that are treated quickly, there's a 20% failure rate on the mainstream medicine and recommendation for antibiotics, and I can go into why it's a bad protocol right now. And then we still, after more than 40 years, don't have a reliable test for Lyme disease, or this, as I mentioned, a reliable treatment. And ticks keep marching. You know, this outbreak on the East Coast started in Lyme, Connecticut. They're marching up through Maine, through Canada.

I heard that one Ontario elementary school forbid kids from sitting on the lawn anymore. it's gotten so bad up there. Same with the south. The ticks are marching down there. And then we have this new non-native tick, the Lone Stars, that through their saliva transmit alpha-gal meat allergy. And what is that? It's a protein in the saliva. Let's say you get bitten by them five hours later, so it's like a delayed allergic reaction, you might end up in the ER with anaphylactic shock or vomiting because it makes it impossible to digest red meat. So imagine never being able to have a steak or a hamburger again. Yeah, I heard about AlfaGal and I thought, wow, this is nuts. You literally can't eat meat. Like people get all sorts of crazy visceral reaction when they have meat. And so you're saying that

that is in some way potentially a derivative of these ticks that were experimented on? No one knows why it just showed up around the 80s. Is it related to the biological weapons? program, I don't know, but it is related to the lone star ticks, which I think were the go-to weaponized tick of the military at the time. They made them radioactive. They marched up the East Coast. The point is, I'm not a microbiologist or an entomologist or a genomicist, but my purpose is to tell this history in context and say, we, for some reason, have been ignoring the prehistory of why this happened. It's just when Willie Bergdorfer said all this illness

is caused by, you know, Borrelia Bergdorferi, don't look anymore, don't look up, don't look down, just mystery solved. And my point is the mystery isn't solved and there were huge incentives in the NIH research world

to not dig into, oh, wow, isn't this interesting? The NIH was curing diseases, but they were also creating diseases that were delivered through insects. So if your NIH funded, a scientist, you know, that works on bugs or Lyme disease, why would you go there?

You would never be funded again. Coming back to something else that you were chatting about earlier, after your book was written, I believe that there was a congressman that came across the book, Chris Smith, and called for an open investment into the origins of Lyme disease. How far did that go?

And what do you think ended up not having to have more momentum for that open investigation to be called? Congressman Chris Smith cares deeply about Lyme disease because New Jersey has been hit particularly hard. And so he entered it into the DOD defense budget four years in a row. every time it jumped over to the Senate for final approval, it would get pulled now. I think it was mostly partisan because the Republicans are trying to cut spending, but it hasn't been reintroduced this year. To me, it's a relatively cheap investment to find out from the military what ticks and germs were released in what locations.

because for each tick-borne disease, there's a preferred antibiotic treatment or antiparocyte treatment. So it would really help us to know what was released where. Save research dollars. That way we could focus, you know, on geographic areas. Right now, our surveillance, which was through the CDC, which has been, for tick-borne diseases, has been non-existence since COVID, is taking bed sheets, putting them on a stick and dragging them through fields. For a country the size of the United States, that's not a very wise use of public health dollars. So we need to be more intelligent. Disclosing these 50-year-old secret

documents, super cheap, would help researchers the world over. Do you feel more optimistic now that there is new leadership that's in position, whether it be the NIH, uh, whether it be things like the Maha movement that have now been embraced by more Republicans have long been embraced. Maybe it wasn't called Maha, but certain senators on the Democratic side were a lot more open to it over the years like Cory Booker talking about chronic disease. But do you feel more optimistic about the future investments that could be made in this area to help people who are still continuing to suffer?

Definitely. So RFK Jr., his whole family has been devastated by Lyme disease over the years. He spends a lot of time in upstate New York and Massachusetts. So I know he understands the seriousness of this set of diseases. Jay Batachara, who just was nominated to the NIH, he read Bitten and wrote a glowing review about it, saying it's really important stuff we need to know about these secret military experiments and their long-term impact on health. And that's not just tick-borne diseases. There are other aspects of it. So, yes, I'm more optimistic, but we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. There are also some more reliable

tests coming down the tubes. The kind of tick-borne disease tests that tests for three or four the most common tick-borne diseases instead of just obsessing over Lyme disease, which isn't the most deadly or devastating of the tick-borne diseases. Yeah, let's talk about that for a little bit. I have, knock on wood, not been diagnosed with Lyme or any of these co-infections or viruses, bacteria that come along with it. But I'm around enough people to know that it's a messy situation when somebody is or thinks they are. And it starts off with even the fact that even amongst the experts in the world that I come from, functional, integrative, holistic medicine, there are hot debates in terms of even what tests to do to figure out whether or not

somebody has some exposure to some tick-borne diseases. Based on your best understanding right now, are there resources or an organization for a person who is, you know, does see a tick bite or felt like, oh, you know what, I've had these chronic issues for a while. And yeah, I did get a tick bite once. Or I saw this rash. Maybe I didn't see the tick, but I saw the rash and I thought it was Lyme, but my doctor told me it probably wasn't Lyme. What is the best place for them to go to be thinking about navigating just the beginning stages, which is the diagnoses that come along with a tick-borne illness. The best website, nonprofit for Lyme patients, is Lyme disease.org. Easy to remember.

They can help you find a knowledgeable doctor, and then they have recommendations on tests. The people who've been in the trenches with tick-borne diseases, mostly we like the lab called igenics. Igenics has been slandered and libeled intensely by the original cohort of research who were in on the discovery. A lot of that reason is because they were their early patent holders on the tests that were compatible with the failed vaccines. So they had undisclosed conflicts of interest in recommending certain tests. Now, what's wrong with those early tests, they took out the most specific protein markers that were used in the vaccine, because to make a vaccine, you take part of the organism, put it in your body, and it creates a resistance, right?

But then they had to make sure you didn't use that in the test, because if you had the vaccine, you would test positive when you really didn't have Lyme disease. So,igenics says those vaccines haven't been on the market for decades, so we're going to put those proteins back because they're the most indicative of you really having Lyme disease. So there's a bunch of controversy there. Butigenics, I know the scientific director, she has a lot of integrity. They've been the most examined lab on the planet. So if you don't want to waste a lot of time, just go straight to them. There's another lab galaxy that has some good tests coming out. So those are the two I would recommend. Great. We'll link to those in the show notes

below. I want to go back to a little bit of our secret military history in the United States around some of these bio weapons. Let's go back to the Korean War. You mentioned that there was reports of bugs falling from the sky, falling over people and into the snow. What was the understanding of what was going on during the Korean War and what kind of bio weapons were we releasing as a country to our best knowledge. So General Ishii was the World War II bio-weapons stuff. And he'd done a lot of these experiments

or these bio-weapons operations on the Chinese and the Koreans before us. So we just used some of their scientists and stole those ideas. So we had leaflet bombs that were spreading propaganda on the Koreans and the Chinese. And they just, instead of the leaflets,

they put turkey feathers. and dusted them with hog cholera. So these feathers would drop down. They also had rodents that were infected with plague, so they would drop dead frozen voles on the snow. And then there were these little insects called thrips, and I'm not sure what diseases the thrips had, and there were flies too. So now I'm telling you this.

the official narrative is this is complete Russian and Chinese propaganda and it never happened. But I, from what I've read, I think it happened. We weren't very good at delivering those diseases, but it had a psychological effect against the enemy too, even though it wasn't that effective. Do you feel like separate from Lyme, there are any other modern diseases that we're faced with today that may have ties or connections to biological engineering operations. COVID. When COVID first came out, just based on my research, I thought, hmm, if I think about the experts that I've read, you have, these are the biosecurity experts that look out for biological warfare in our country who are active all the time.

You know, they say you have a highly unusual disease, high mortality and morbidity. I mean, it kills a lot of people and makes a lot of people sick. Point source outbreak. We certainly had that with Wuhan and the Lyme disease outbreak. And then sometimes it's more than one organism. We saw that with Lyme. You know, around Lyme, Connecticut, there were three diseases that were highly unusual, several first in man. So, yeah, so that didn't surprise me.

that finally this week they came out and said, the New York Times said, yeah, the lab leak could be real as far as an engineered thing. There, around the time, Lyme was out, there were a lot of unusual diseases. And it's outside of my bailiwick, but things like Legionaire's disease. That's a pretty suspicious outbreak right about the time. It was the height of the biological weapons program. So some people have written about that. Can you see an argument made from, let's say, the individuals that were in power or might have some awareness of this, you know, even though this work has spanned decades, this biological engineering?

Is there some room for an argument on their side? Or is their best argument, if you had to steal man, their side of it, that, hey, listen, our enemies were up to no good. This was a fight between good and evil. we believe that America was on the good side. We had heard that other people, nations that are much older than us were using biological weapons. We had to develop our own capacity for it. Nobody would have understood that nobody could have understood then the best scientists that were in charge of it, that our own population could be impacted or that there could be leakage that was there. What's happened has happened if we dig up all this stuff.

get into it now, there'll be so much distrust that's there for the American establishment, the military, whatever it might be, that will just lose the population and ultimately people will have less trust in America and our institutions. Is that what you believe the argument would be from the individuals that might have knowledge or an understanding of these events that you think or that you theorize took place? Well, as far as loss is loss of trust in our public institutions. With COVID, that ship has sailed. But I think with Lyme disease, there is a feeling, well, first of all, I've gotten into the heads of the people in the 50s and 60s. And the red scare was a serious concern and the ends justified the beans.

there was Project 112 and we were spraying all these weaponized germs on young soldiers, mostly conscientious objectors, religious exceptions. And so it's just the ethics were different. I mean, at one point we were injecting VX nerve agent into young soldiers just to see what would happen. I think a lot of people who made those unwise decisions in the military are dead now. Most of them are really dead. So let's just move on. Now, the government might not want to admit liability because just look at what happened with Agent Orange.

That's the herbicide chemical weapon defoliant that we sprayed all over Vietnam. The legal suits and the compensations to our soldier victims are immense. are ongoing. So there's a monetary disincentive to come forward with the truth because I would say the health impacts of the weaponized ticks and whatever was in them is financially even greater than Agent Orange. You had mentioned earlier that this is a topic that is also something that's very personal for you and your family. Let's take a moment here to talk a little bit about your background as an author, a journalist, a writer. If you could talk a little bit about that. And then intersect also how you and your family have cross paths with Lyme disease and a little bit of what that journey was like and how you're doing today.

So let's first talk about your career a little bit. I'm an engineer by training. I have two engineering degrees, one from University of Utah and then one from Stanford. I started out designing phones and computers early on in the 80s, the GoGo 80s. When I had kids, I moved over to Apple Computer and I did tech marketing there. So I was a tech writer in the valley for quite a while. My husband was an entrepreneur tech person too. So when we were in our early 40s, we took a vacation with our friends to Martha's Vineyard,

a week-long vacation. And that's when my husband and I, a week later, we came back to California and we were sicker than we'd ever been. And that began our hellish journey through undiagnosed Lyme disease. You said you were sicker than you ever had been. What was going on? What did you notice? And what kind of symptoms did you both have? Crushing fatigue, exploding headache, like an alien on the back of your neck, everything hurting, just weak, super weak, as it progressed. Just a couple months later, we had what I would call a combination of symptoms that were like Alzheimer's. You couldn't think straight. Chronic fatigue, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome. Like the peristotic motion of our bowels wouldn't work. So you just felt toxic all the time. Confused. Like my husband,

he had to go to work because we needed the health insurance. This is about six months into the disease and he would be at the whiteboard doing some technical presentation. He'd forget who he was, where he was and what he was talking about. And he would have to like leave the room so he could regroup. So it was a devastating disease. And we get, the whole process was a year, $10,000, $60,000 to get diagnosed. All the doctors I talked to, I said, you know, it could be Lyme disease because we were on Martha's Vineyard. That was the number two state for Lyme disease. Can you test it. No, that's a rare disease. And your symptoms don't match what's on the CDC website. So we're not going to test you for it, even though it's a cheap screening test, fast and cheap. Finally, we got to

Stanford and they test us for many diseases. And the test for Lyme disease was positive. It was the first positive test in eight months. But they ignored it because they said, well, that's not a very good test, so we're going to ignore it and fire you as patients because we don't believe in chronic Lyme disease. So all of a sudden, we had no place to go. We were, we both felt like we were on the verge of death. We felt like it was like a month before we had to sell our house because we couldn't work. And so that's when we found this very active online community of blind patients and they directed us to a doctor who was very experienced in tick-borne diseases. She test us, found our co-infections and Lyme disease, and we were on a way to getting better.

Is this doctor still practicing? Is it somebody that you would be willing to give a shout-out to? So it's Dr. Christine Green. She's trying to retire. Got it. She has trouble saying no, but she's really good. And that's the point I would like to make is that most doctors spend 15 minutes in med school learning about tick-borne diseases. But there's so much more to it, especially with the complexities of multiple germs. So it helps to get someone who's been to that rodeo many times before. And that's go to lime disease.org, find someone who knows what they're doing. It would be just like if you had a rare brain tumor, you would find the person who had cured it a thousand times. Same with tick-borne diseases. And lastly, on the

the personal side of things, how are you guys doing today? You know, many people that have gone through Lyme talk about the fact that their journey with Lyme, which is obviously much larger than just their just Lyme disease. It's all these other co-infections that come along with it is an ongoing thing that makes them sometimes more susceptible or not as able to recover from other things that they're working through in life. So how are you guys doing today? So it took about five years, but we both got over Lyme disease in our second co-infection, which is a red blood cell parasite called Babesia. And we were good for a while. My husband ended up relapsing a couple times, but then he would just go back on antibiotics and beat it off. Then COVID came along,

and he has long COVID now, so I feel like we're going through this chronic disease nightmare again. and same sort of resistance with chronic Lyme as long COVID. You know, he went to the hospital here and they said, oh, yeah, we have a long COVID clinic. And all they had to offer him was talk therapy. Now, I think most people with long COVID would agree that talk therapy does not help. Any final words on long COVID, which is something that, you know, again, as you mentioned, the medical establishment and a lot of people view it as not existing. And then there's people like yourselves that are dealing with it and putting the other resources. Just like you mentioned, the Lyme Foundation, what are the best

groups that you found out there for people that are suffering from long COVID? I like the FLCCC website. It was a group of emergency physicians who said, heck with this long COVID. We want to keep people out of our ERs because they're clogging everything. up and they did a bunch of literature-based research on prevention for COVID and treating it once you have it. So I think they recently renamed their site, but they have really good protocols for all stages of COVID and vaccine injury. Putrino Lab in the East Coast, Putrino and Amy Perel, I think they're working on some good studies. I think the NIH 1.1 billion was largely wasted on studies on treatment, and I hope with the new administration, they will fund more meaningful studies. The other thing I have to say about long COVID, in a perverse way, learning how to solve long COVID will help an even more downtroddened disease group, which was chronic fatigue, ME, CFS.

So that has viral roots and it's very devastating. So long COVID research will help them. It will help long Lyme people. It's the same root cause. It's chronic inflammation. Chris, this has been fantastic to be able to talk to you about this secret history as your book talks about, the secret history of Lyme disease and biological weapons. And most importantly, why it matters, the implications for people who are still suffering from. this and why we really need a different way forward. But if we're going to have a different way forward,

we have to have a little bit of a truth and reconciliation with ourselves and our history. Any final words you want to leave with our audience? Yeah, I would just say, if you find a bull's eye rash on your skin or you pull out a bloated tick, treat it very seriously, take the tick, put it in a plastic bag with a moist paper towel, send it in for lab testing. Because the tick testing is faster, cheaper and more reliable than human testing right now. And it will give you peace of mind. Okay, what was a tick infected with? It may not be transmitted to you, but at least you'll be on the lookout for the correct symptoms. Yeah, don't let people gaslight you and say, it's no big deal. Because it can be. I mean, I know I've seen the worst of the worst. I've met

thousands of people whose lives have been derailed by this. Act promptly. Find a doctor who listens to you. That would be my advice. That's great advice. The book has been out there since 2020, right? Like, kind of at like the beginning and early days of the pandemic is when the book came out, I believe, somewhere around June. Is that right? It was May 2019. And it was largely dismissed. I spent a lot of time on conspiracy podcasts, but as soon as the COVID's lab leak theories started gaining some traction, then all of a sudden people believe, well, maybe the government. does lie to us sometimes. Lab leaks happen.

So I guess in a perverse way, that's helped. Yeah. When I first heard about the lab leak as really being presented as a conspiracy theory from a group that I thought sometimes gets things right, but often I'm not sure. Is this a conspiracy? I thought, no way in is there something like this that were involved. And like a lot of people, the more you learned about it, you're like, there's way more of the story here and this looks real.

And so the fact that we're having this conversation here about something that happened well before that just shows how important of an event COVID was that it opened people's minds that, number one, we may not know the answer to everything, right? Even if you believe that, you know, government and scientists and everybody largely is operating well intentionally, that doesn't mean that they have. have the answers for everything. And then secondarily, that there are a small group of people that will do what they need to do to cover their tracks. Because if stuff got out about what they were involved in, hell would break loose. And we've definitely seen that firsthand. And it looks like it's

very likely to be the case with the history of Lyme disease now that we have access to the work and research that you've done. So on that note, I want to thank you for not only coming on this podcast, but to taking something that happened to you and your husband, which was extremely terrible going through all your healing on the journey of getting better from Lyme, but then turning into something positive for people, which is putting a magnifying glass on this terrible part of our history that's still having ongoing implications for people's health. So, Chris, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for all your work. Thank you so much, Drew.

I appreciate letting me ramble on about my crazy TikTok. TikTok. I like that. Speaking of, where's the best place for people to follow you and to continue to stay up to date on everything that you're writing about? My substack, which is under my name, Chris Newby, is where I'm posting ongoing research and then the research that didn't quite fit into the book. And I like to call them little evidence bricks that support this theory that whatever diseases came out in Lyme, Connecticut, they're unnatural. and we need to have extraordinary cures for these unnatural diseases and prevention too. Fantastic. Well, we'll link to your substack below in the show notes.

Chris, thank you again for coming on the podcast. Thanks, so that, Drew.