TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #749: Lyme Disease and Biowarfare with Kris Newby

Episode Date: May 23, 2026

Marty sits down with Kris Newby to discuss the hidden history of tick‑borne bioweapon research, the rise of Lyme and Alpha‑Gal allergies, and what it means for public health today. Kris on X: https://x.com/krisnewby Kris’s website: https://www.krisnewby.com/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me. Hi, Marty. Thanks for inviting me on. Well, I'm very excited to do this for the audience out there who may not know sitting down with Chris Newby, who's an award winning science writer, investigative journalist and

senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary Under Our Skin. She also wrote a book called Bitten, The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons. In 2019, you won three awards for that book. But I think most importantly, you're delving into this particular line of investigative reporting started because you and your husband were bitten by ticks at Martha's Vineyard in 2002, and basically went on a wild goose chase to figure out what happened to you. Um, and through that process, uh, sort of went bankrupt, uh, and went down this, this rabbit hole. So this is a beat you've been covering for over two decades now at this point.

And as I was saying, before I hit record, it's a very, uh, very top of mind for many people here in the U S as, as ticks seem to be exploding in population and, and diseases like Lyme and alpha gall begin to pop up all over the place. yeah, I never, I was a tech writer in Silicon Valley and I'm an engineer, two engineering degrees. And I never in a million years imagined that I would be on the tick beat for the rest of my life. But what happened to our family was so devastating. And after I figured out what was wrong and we both got back, my husband and I both got back on our feet. I said, I never want this to happen to another family again. So I'm doing everything I can to educate people, uh, to get

fast treatment. Is that the most important thing? Getting, getting on, on top of it as quickly as possible. Yeah. If you pulled out an engorged tick and went on a couple of weeks of doxycycline, uh, you would go on with your life and never think about it again. the main thing about ticks is they can inject you with up to 20 tick-borne diseases some are deadly and the saliva the tick suppresses your immune system and whatever's in the tick can punk your immune system and if you don't get on it right away you could be sick for the rest of your life so that's what i've decided to dedicate the rest of my life to is to prevent that well i think uh before we jump and jump into the more topical questions there on on people's minds as

it pertains to alpha gall these these boxes that people have been talking about and lime uh lime vaccines that may be hitting the market this summer i think getting into the backstory and the heart of Bitten, the book that you wrote about the history of governments experimenting with this and its relation to the Cold War. I think maybe starting there, particularly with Willy Bergdorfer and his story and how he came to discover Lyme disease. Yeah, so Bitten is half my medical memoir. And then the other half is about this Swiss scientist, a zoologist, who came over here in 1951 to be in the bioweapons program. And his particular role was to weaponize fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes so that we could drop them on our

enemies during the Cold War. So this was not known until I sat down with him and got a bunch of his files that had been hidden in his garage. But it's sort of shocking, but I believe that a lot of our tick-borne disease problems have been worsened in part because of those irresponsible government experiments. And part of what I would like is more ethical oversight with biomedical experiments that the government is conducting. I mean, that's been a big topic this decade, obviously, with gain-of-function research and theories of that contributing to COVID-19's development and proliferation. And I think I've been privy to the Plum Island theories that have been around for a while.

And I think I would agree with you. I would like more transparency and insight into whether or not our government has actively been experimenting with us, both on the tick-borne diseases side and the viruses side of things with things like COVID. And it is insane to think that our government could do something like this in a lab, unleash it on the public, either knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, and have it explode to a point where I think this year specifically, people are legitimately fearful to go outside to play in the woods because they don't want to get Lyme's disease or alpha gall. yeah and uh a lot of people say to me well the tick releases happened 40 50 years ago what does it matter and it does because willie burgdorfer and his little lab in rocky mountain uh in hamilton montana the rocky mountain labs run by the nih was putting all sorts of horrible diseases in the ticks, in the fleas, in the mosquitoes. And our current surveillance for how tick diseases are spreading is very flawed.

And it would really help researchers and save research dollars to know what diseases were engineered and where were they released. For example, I mean, the first cases of Lyme were in northern Wisconsin. And why did they start there? Well, the University of Wisconsin at Madison was doing all sorts of bioweapons experiments, and a lot of times widows would sell their farms to the bioweapons, I mean, the head of that program in Wisconsin, and they would conduct open-air experiments. So, I mean, it would help everyone to know what was released where and when. yeah well you spent a lot of time with willie before his death in 2014 talking about this i believe um in my research uh i haven't been able to read the full book yet but did the best i could

to get as much as possible but i think at one point you said he said cryptically that he didn't tell you everything about the origins of lyme disease and uh the the narrative that the government and media was putting out there is completely contradictory to reality yeah and yeah so i did a series of interviews with him the first interview was for the documentary under our skin where he said we were we were there setting up lights and cameras with andy wilson the very talented director and producer who i tagged along with for the five years it took to get that out. And he was setting up lights for about 45 minutes. And all of a sudden, there's a boom, boom, boom on the front door of Willie's house. We couldn't get anyone in

the government, the CDC or the NIH to go on camera about Lyme disease, like what it is and why it's so hard to diagnose, treat and cure. And it turns out to be a head scientist at the Rocky Mountain Lab, which was just like two and a half blocks away from Willie's house. And he says, I've been told to sit in on this interview. And the director was just appalled, like, you can't do that. Willie's retired. He's a private citizen. And it was a very tense, confrontational interchange. And I was afraid the labs would shut us down. But anyways, the scientists left. We went on with the interview. And during the interview, Willie said some things that no one in the Yeah, we know that Lyme disease can be chronic, affect the nervous system very seriously, and it's worse for kids who get it, who have developing neurological systems.

And then we were shutting down the lights. This was a very long interview, and then he had a little sly smile. He said, I didn't tell you everything. so that his interview was like that that alone was shocking because it was the first time anyone at NIH had admitted that Lyme could be gone to be chronic and they a lot of them still deny that um but it was like a nagging worry of mine but we had to get the film out we'd been filming for three years. And the editing was really involved. But so anyways, after the film, I said, Well, I'm done with Lyme disease. I was doing the film when I was recovering. So

I was sick half the time. And I told my husband, Paul, I'm done. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go on with my life i got a really good job i'm in the stanford med school writing science stuff and then uh two weeks after that i went to a texas birthday party it was my husband's family i didn't know anybody there so i was sitting around the kitchen table uh talking to this other guy who wasn't one of the few people who wasn't part of the family and he was an old grizzly guy and he was into his cups uh and i said so what did you do before you retired and he says i worked for the company i was cia black ops so it was just like of all the gin joints in all the world and then he went on to talk about like the horrible things he did in vietnam because he had a guilty conscience and

his wife had just left him and uh and then at the very end of this uh these stories that had all of at the table with wide eyes, like dropping decapitated skulls on the Viet Cong, not war crimes. He said, well, the weirdest thing I'd ever done was drop infected ticks on the Cuban sugar cane workers uh for it was operation mongoose for colonel lansdale who was dirty ops so all of a sudden this must be a movie or something i can't believe this is happening to me because this there's no way this guy could have known i just spent five years investigating the tick weaponization program for which there were there was no public information of us ever doing bioweapons operations on in foreign nations so anyways then i that's that's when i said well

i can't walk away from this story no one else is going to want to do it it's too hot to handle so i did it and uh i started the research process which was long i can get into it but it might be a diversion it's in the book and so part of this of the book is me how i finally extracted all the information and the confirmation of the cuban tick drop ended up coming out a couple years later in the jfk assassination files of all places because that all those operations were part of wanting to dethrone Castro the communist leader of Cuba okay now I have many questions um okay fire away well I guess the order of operations the question is like why ticks what why what makes ticks good agents to spread this these types of diseases did they did they know the long-term

ramifications of something like line or alpha gall when they were when they were weaponizing these ticks and did they understand the potential for them to break containment? Was this truly targeted at the Cuban regime or their even more nefarious sort of intent behind it making people more broadly affected by the spread of these diseases and therefore more dependent on the system to a certain degree?

so let's start out why first of all you have to frame it in history this was the cold war we would do anything to fight the communists it was an existential threat and that's where stuff like mk ultra ultra came about uh new more lethal chemical weapons which is what I talk about in my next book. But let me just read the Army's description of why they thought ticks were a good idea. So I pulled this out. Okay. In 1953, the Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, established a program to study the use of arthropods, those are ticks, fleas, and mosquitoes, for spreading anti-personnel bioweapons agents. The advantage of arthropods as bioweapons carriers are these. They inject the

agent directly into the body so that a mask is no protection to a soldier, and they will remain alive for some time, keeping an area constantly dangerous. So what it did was it would disable soldiers and everyone around them, and then it would tie up medical resources. And Willie, at that time in ticks was mixing multiple diseases. So he specifically was mixing, let's see, Rocky Mountain spotted fever with Colorado tick fever virus. So it's not clear if he was able to do that, but if you were to drop something like that in an area that you wanted to eventually invade, there would be no fingerprints on the ticks. It would just be a hard to solve crime and then everybody would get sick and then it would be easy for

ground forces to go in and take over and oh by the way you wouldn't destroy the infrastructure like you would with a bomb a nuclear bomb so some people called it by weapons poor man's nuke i had some arm i had a report from some army bean counter said tick-borne tularemia which is still on the select agent list, you could kill a person for $1.33. Pretty cheap. I know. That's what I mean about we need some sort of bioethical overview if this kind of stuff makes sense because, okay,

you release a bunch of ticks on an enemy city or area, And then, well, what about the soldiers who go in? There's no way to tell the ticks, okay, you can only bite Soviets. Yeah. Well, and that, I mean, you have the chart here too. On your side, I'll pull it up. But like, going back to the question of like, could they foresee the expansion and proliferation of these tick populations throughout time? Like if you're dropping it somewhere, you have the Lyme disease numbers over time here in this GIF.

And as you can see, it's spreading pretty rapidly. And I think that's one thing that is obvious this year specifically is you have a bunch of people going on hikes and running farms, whatever it may be, and highlighting that the number of ticks that they're encountering is far beyond what they've ever seen historically. And so they're wondering, why is this? Is it just naturally invasive species that will have these population explosions if there aren't natural predators in the area that you're dropping them? Is there some accelerated attempt to artificially increase their populations? And I think maybe that gets into the question of these boxes that people are talking about. But is this a Frankenstein that the government has lost control of? I think that's what many people are worried about.

Well, there's multiple components to that question. First of all, Willie did try to get ticks to produce faster, so they could just have tick boxes ready to go. But he said he was not able to do that. but uh so why are ticks exploding right now uh on the face of it legitimate scientists will say well climate change some places that have have bad winters the ticks a certain percentage of ticks would get killed off and that would keep the population down another thing is housing is proliferating

into tick habitats so people are exposed to it more. Then the other thing is that deers are cute and we're more reluctant not to shoot them and kill them.

And then ticks are where deer are where ticks overwinter and breed and lay their 3,000 eggs. So that's safe haven for legitimate scientists. I would suggest that the military intervention and tick releases, uncontrolled tick releases, are part of the problem. And you could see on that chart, and the USA Today has the newer numbers on their chart from the weekend. But somehow Lyme disease started spreading in an aggressive way

around the 70s. And no one's asking why. So there are two things that could be going on there. One is Willie told me when he was sent out to investigate what was happening with the Lyme sickness he said it wasn't just the Lyme bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi named after him there was another organism that was mixed in the ticks and he suggested it was a Rickettsia like Rocky Man had spotted fever the most dangerous tick-borne bacteria in the U.S. and he's it was in the drafts of his original article on the discovery, but somehow between the handwritten draft that I got a copy of and what published in Science Magazine, the discussion about a second Rickettsia germ that may or may not have been weaponized, because they were working on that,

I have documents on that, he was asked to cover it up. So really the question is, you know, if you name a disease that people get, Lyme disease, is it really two different organisms that made people so quick? Could have been a virus too, because they were experimenting with viruses too. So that's one factor is, was there a military open air experiment there? And can we get records for that? The other thing that happened, which is related to alpha-gal, is in the late 60s this young ambitious bug scientist Daniel Sonenshine who was at Old Dominion College and they wanted to be at real university so Daniel somehow got some military contracts and started doing tick experiments because at that time they were looking for

a tick that would survive Russian winters and that they can inject with various things so he was reporting to the Army and the Atomic Energy Commission. And what happened is in this set of experiments, it was in Norfolk, Virginia, near Norfolk, Virginia, which is on the Atlantic Bird Flyway. You can probably pull up a picture of that on my website. And what he did was he ordered some pregnant ticks grab it they're called gravid ticks from willie at rocky mountain labs and he had a lot of them and he made them radioactive he injected the pregnant ticks with a radioactive fluid so when they laid their 3 000 eggs all the ticks that were born would be radioactive why would he do that so he could track their spread over months to years because

the military would need to know if i dropped poison ticks on an enemy how long it would take to infect this city or whatever it was so what he did was he went out to a couple swampy lots marked off meter grids put a thousand ticks in each grid of the radioactive ticks and then he'd go out with his uh lackey students every month collect the ticks in grid each grid see how many the radioactive ticks were there, then he'd go and put them back. If there were new ticks in the grid, he would paint them with fluorescent paint, and that way he could track them. He also tracked how many of them, the bird migrations, because they'd want to know some of the ticks would go on the birds. And what one of his papers said is it would take five days for a tick to go

from coastal Virginia up to Long Island, New York. So like a year or two after his Virginia experiments, all of a sudden the ticks that he was experimenting with, they were the lone star ticks, the ticks that carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the ticks that spread alpha gal allergy before those experiments that tick was only native south of the mason dixon line when he put it to the north in virginia on the bird flyway all of a sudden these ticks were starting to get established in long island and all of a sudden and there was an outbreak of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and people were dying. Yeah, that's the list of radioactive ticks that he released.

And those are the only releases that were published. There could be more. So what's wrong with that? He's taking, first of all, lone star ticks are very aggressive, and they were the only tick in north america that had eyes on their shoulders little so they not only just sense carbon dioxide on a blade of grass like the deer ticks did but they would actively stalk prey because they could sort of see them and smell them and uh so they're they swarm and they can just spread more diseases uh then the other thing is they carry spotted fever

the most deadly bacterium tick-borne bacterium in the u.s and then the alpha gal and nobody has a good explanation as to how alpha gal all of a sudden started being a real thing uh we noticed it in the 80s so i've never been able to determine if it's part of um the bioweapons program or what but i should explain what alpha gal is because i haven't done that yet yeah please because if somebody loves red meat it scares the hell out of me yeah it's horrible okay so in the bite of a lone star tick uh transmits a protein alpha gal that creates, that starts circulating in your blood. It's an allergen. And it creates a condition where every time you eat red meat, you get an allergic reaction. But it's not like a

wasp sting. You'll wake up two to six hours later in the middle of the night, and you might be vomiting, nauseous, uh, hives. You might even go into anaphylactic shock and, uh, and it isn't just a one-time deal. Usually it happens on the second bite of a lone star tick. It can be a lifelong, uh, allergy. Uh, I don't think that'll be, it'll be that way forever, but right now it's just people are waking up to it like what and it takes people a long time to get diagnosed and okay so then let's say you get diagnosed with alpha gal allergy it's almost impossible to avoid meat products right now they're in the gelatin capsules in your vitamins or your medications all of a sudden you have to tell your pharmacy i can't have any

medications with a bovine-based capsule. Or let's say you go to your Jersey subs and say, I want a turkey sandwich because bird meat doesn't seem to be that bad. You have to tell them, okay, do not cut the turkey where you cut the ham or the beef sandwich. Some people are so allergic, they can't even go to a Texas barbecue without having respiratory issues so serious not much money is being spent on research about what to do yeah i've heard acupuncture works or as we've been talking about it more people have been responding with that and that's like to your point i think you uh sort of had just like this could be a lifelong

allergy but you don't think that'll be the way it'll be the case forever and that's like we've been covering this for for a few months now as it's becoming more prominent and that's like one of the first responses we'll get is the will actually you can treat this and it's like well actually we shouldn't have to treat this like is this really a a government bioweapons program that broke containment and is having a very drastic negative effect on hundreds of thousands of americans now at this point and if so are these people going to be held accountable and what does it say about our government and what they'll do um to their own populace and maybe for being generous uh what they'll do to to our enemies that that can break containment and begin to

affect the populace it's insane that we have a government that is actively doing things like this and the the sphere of bioweapons and biological biological warfare and like i said i think covid becoming clear to me at least that the nih the wuhan lab and um fort dietrich uh experimentation would gain a function that they're obviously doing this stuff and i think it is sensible to question number one why and number two how do we make them stop if we can i know i there have there has been some positive movement under kennedy to get a gain of function experimentation under control but there's just so much money in it right now i I don't know if they'll win like what I did with Lyme disease to try and figure out why

it's such a disaster zone for people trying to get diagnosed and treated it's because of first of all ticks are intricately tied to the bioweapons program now and the tick-borne diseases so a lot of those research grants require a security clearance so if you're a smart researcher in arthropods or tick-borne diseases, you'll get a security clearance. And then all of a sudden, that's a competitive advantage to other researchers who, you know, they're in an obscure field and they might not be able to get funding. But if you have a security clearance, less competition for those grants. And you're also, like a tick, tapping into the very, very large biosecurity budget you know it's that's why the whole wuhan lab people in university the state

the north carolina university are fighting it because man that was easy money what's up freaks this was brought to you by our good friends at bitkey they've got the new hardware well i got it in my hands got a full screen new app layout still has chain code delegation so you can store bitcoin properly without giving up privacy it's a beautiful thing it's a beautiful product if you have somebody in your life, or if you are an individual who has not gotten your Bitcoin off the exchange yet, BitKey is the easiest way to do that. Get your Bitcoin off the exchange, get it into multi-sig collaborative custody with the BitKey. Go to bitkey.world and use the code TFTC for 10% off. What's up, freaks? This rip is brought to you by good friends at CrowdHealth.

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years on crowd health not looking back joincrowdhealth.com slash tftc use the promo code tftc once you set up your account you're going to get 99 a month for your subscription for the first three months well i mean you highlighted this is one of the things to to talk about the muddy printing machine thank you how do you realign incentives to make sure this isn't the case It seems like it's a case of, oh, I can produce not only career, I can de-risk career risk by working in this very, very niche, but considered highly important field by the government and they will throw insane amounts of money at it. It's, to your point, it's hard to get people to actively work towards making it so their career isn't as stable as they thought it was previously. Right, right.

Yeah. And because of the securities clearance requirement, I feel like the tick-borne diseases don't have the A team of researchers with bright ideas and a deeper knowledge of genetics and genetic manipulation. So the old researchers have circled their wagons around Lyme disease. You look at a new fellowship student, they just got their PhD and they need to work under someone in a lab. Well, the security clearance could take a year, maybe more now. Some of those tick-borne pathogens are bio-level three, especially the rickettsils. So they can't risk their career on just twiddling their thumbs for a year before they get clearances. So that's

why we have a lot of really, really old people. So what I did was I went through the last 20 years of grants at the NIH under Fauci. And I found out that a huge percentage of the Lyme disease and tick-borne disease grants went to internal NIH projects. So those are people who aren't necessarily eager to sequence these germs and say, oh, yeah, NIH at that time during the Cold War, we were trying to solve tick-borne diseases, make people healthier, but we were also trying to create germs of mass destruction. So that would be career suicide in NIH.

to take all that money that Congress said we needed to spend on breakthroughs for Lyme disease. And same with the people at the universities. They don't want to do that anyways because NIH is where they get all their funding. Yeah, it seems like Fauci and NIH are at the core of the problems here, the moral hazard that exists in the realm of medical research and bioweapons. Right. And when Lyme was discovered and when Fauci moved into the number two spot at NIAID, that's the infectious diseases group in NIH, that's when the laws changed and the Bayh-Dole Act passed so that all of a sudden scientists and the universities and the agencies like CDC and NIH could make discoveries and then they could become business partners with pharma. so when Lyme disease happened all these guys looked I call them the carpet baggers they looked at the microscope at this spirochete and they they patented the proteins on the surface

and they then they could team up with pharma and say if anybody uses this genetic sequence of proteins on the surface of this bacteria then in a vaccine or a test kit I get a cut of the profits. So immediately pharma teamed up with these researchers and they realized, well, the vaccines are annual moneymakers. You have to, people have to go in to get a Lyme vaccine every month or every year versus the cure, which is just, at the time I started my film, it was $10 of doxycycline covered by insurance. So it's like, no, we're going to do the vaccine. And so they had to bolster the myth that two pills of doxy cure the disease and then

they go on and have chronic diseases. And oh, then we could sell more vaccines and we could sell the anti-inflammatory drugs and the antidepressants to treat the symptoms of chronic Lyme. And then, meantime, people at the CDC or the NIH, they could get a cut from all these drugs and vaccines. And so they could more than double their salary, their government salary. But from a scientific point of view, they corrupted the foundational science because pharma could say oh that discovery you made on lyme disease that might cure people

that's intellectual property and that's secret and so then scientists weren't going to conferences and sick sharing information because most initial discoveries are wrong in science and then it takes multiple brains to get it back on track and add value to the discoveries yeah i mean as pertains to the vaccine we're getting the is this the first line vaccine that's coming out this summer from from pfizer no it's the third third there was there were two other vaccines around 1990. And a lot of scientists were on contract with the vaccine manufacturer. So there was some belief that they weren't telling the truth about what they understood about the disease. And I don't want to get in it here, but read Pam Weintraub's book, Cure Unknown. And she

was there in the vaccine hearings. And no, she has the receipts for who was paid off. So that's the best book to read on that okay we'll bring it back to the the tick boxes i'm sure you've seen the video boxes yeah of course my email boxes are flooded my text with oh my gosh someone's dropping boxes of ticks on uh missouri farming farmers lots and of course i feel bad because i might be responsible for those rumors on in some part but i followed up so i traced it to the original rumor which was from a holistic doctor i don't know what that means from iowa and her name is sarah outlaw and i called her and she goes well yeah actually that report of a tick spot box on a farm was secondhand from a colleague from Missouri and she said she heard it from an Amish

farmer so there's only one box secondhand so that's where that rumor came from and she was surprised that she got about a million hits she's also a health and wellness influencer so and and so I was going oh my gosh I want to do this side research project to see if this is true or not but luckily a senior reporter at Snopes a fact-checking group his name is Jordan Lyles he went and called about a hundred Missouri officials and no one in Missouri has heard about this rumor from the farmers that might report it or whatever so i think jordan i talked with him briefly this weekend and he said no new news and we called hundreds of officials this has not been confirmed so that said uh i would say that dropping ticks on the farms would let me there's rumors

that oh pfizer did it to sell their vaccines my point of view is the tick problem in the u.s is already completely out of control because of these the factors i mentioned early and it's just now we're waking up how big the problem is because the the range of the ticks is slowly increasing from ground zero, which was Lyme, Connecticut, and Long Island. What's up, freaks? When you take Bitcoin seriously, you start with custody. You want to control your keys, avoid single points of failure, and make sure your savings cannot disappear

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Over time, how do you combat it? How do you slow the growth or decrease the tech populations? Do we just need to have guinea fowl and chickens roaming across grasslands and in the affected areas for a number of years? Is this a reversible problem or is this something that we're going to have to live with in perpetuity? Well, climate change is part of the problem, but my best friend just bought a farm in Wisconsin. And, you know, because the government hasn't acknowledged that it's really a countrywide problem now and we need to think big, use AI for strategies, it's up to the individuals now. So, I mean, the thing, there's bait boxes, so you buy boxes with anti-tick medicine for mice. And, you know, it's got a nice warm nesting box for the mice, and then they get this anti-tick medicine on them when they go in it.

There are, you can collect ticks on your yard with these CO2 boxes. You can make your own, or I don't know if anyone buys them. I sort of suspect that maybe this tick box rumor started from the CO2 collection boxes. But dry ice, put dry ice and they can go in there because they're attracted to the CO2 that your body emits or any mammal. And then guinea fowl or chickens, that helps. You build a perimeter around your lawn where there's no leaf litter for the ticks to collect. and then you know in in the big tick season you probably spray some chemical to keep them away so that's that's all i know about but there are better websites online that have advice from

people that have to deal with it every day i moved to utah there are not many ticks here well that um i mean it's again i think this goes back to government accountability too Like, what are your hopes in terms of that? I saw there was a GAO announcement that they're going to look into it, I think, earlier today that came out or maybe yesterday. It does look like enough people are making enough noise that the government is saying, okay, it looks like we've got to look into this. Do you think it's a national emergency that demands a federal government investigation and response and action? the good news a first step was taken this year because chris smith of new jersey a congressman from new jersey after five years of trying finally got an amendment in the dod budget

that says they have to declassify all this tick-borne weapons program info so what was released where. So that's a first step. And a GAO, Government Accounting Office, report needs to be released in about a year and a half. So that's a first step. That said, it could be like the Epstein files. We might get five pages of blackouts on them. But that's a first step. We have RFK Jr. in office, whose whole family has been affected drastically by Lyme disease. I mean, he has places up in that hot zone. He goes to Martha's Vineyard a lot. That's where my husband and I were bitten.

Martha's Vineyard in Nantucket, you get Lyme and this other really horrible disease. it's a parasite called babesiosis it's a red blood cell parasite so you get those two together it's hard to cure so that's the first step um i don't know i don't know i mean i've been in it 20 years and i thought we would have made more progress but at this point in time i am optimistic that things will get better what was the most radicalizing thing about doing this research over over the last 20 years uh i never would have imagined that they had done these things even daniel sun and shine who released the radioactive ticks who has no moral boundaries he just laughed when i when i said well did you get any approval for these open air tick

experiments he just laughed and says oh I got a city permit I could never get this approved nowadays so he just laughed it off um okay what was what was the most surprising well first of all if you've gone through six years of being really really sick from a disease that the medical establishment and the government are in denial it it was very dark and depressing to go through the research I turn that depression into action so well I can feel I can get over this depression if I just help other people and and you know the main advice I have is take every tick bite seriously don't get gaslit by a doctor that says wait and see that's what happened to us and then you know a year later

were almost incurable because of the two tick-borne diseases and um and i would say send the text the ticks that you pull out in to have them screened for all the worst tick-borne diseases it's like might caught it might be free through your public health department or it might be 75 or 100 but that is cheaper and faster than a human test the human tests aren't very good right now mostly and it take their antibody tests which from covid you know it takes a while for antibodies to develop when you get a disease so you have to wait three weeks before the human tests work but tick tick tests they're mostly dna based fast a couple days so that's what i would say um that's good to know i mean you said um you got the gentleman's name that he he was really

unabashed and how egregious he was but you see I think he wrote in the book that Willie did have did have some regrets in terms of of what he worked on and what he contributed to yeah and I'm from a military family my dad was a navy pilot who brought the first gallons or drums of Agent Orange to Vietnam. So I think at some deep level, I'm wondering, like, how can all the people in the military organization not think about the bigger implications? They're just following orders. So if we look at Willie, that's the interesting thing about what I learned about him for the book Bitten. He was a very smart, ambitious Swiss researcher who had a chance to come over to America. He was excited. He went to this Rocky

Mountain lab. He got his own assistant. He never would have gotten that kind of freedom in Switzerland. And then he realized what he had to do. He went up to Canada and saw all these nerve agent and biological experiments up there. And then he took what he learned there and brought him to his lab and that's where he started doing the horrible experiments he was doing so he was with the program but as he got older just like we all do we realize we look at the bigger picture like he was stuffing plague in fleas this is the disease that wiped out a huge percentage of the population of europe several times and he would come home to his new kids and he couldn't help thinking what am i doing but and then at a certain point you know in his 40s he would go to conferences

in europe and he would think he could move back to europe but no all his best work was classified because it was about killing people so he was stuck you know like someone who might join the cia or the mafia you can't put that on your resume you know there's it's hard to get a new job so he's stuck there but then the tipping point was when he just well did he discover Lyme disease that's that's a complicated question but when he got the credit for discovering Lyme disease he uh he was working night and day to bolster the evidence and learn more about it and on the weekends the techs weren't in there to clean the infected rabbit cages so he said infected urine splashed in his eyes and he got Lyme disease and he had multiple bullseye rashes down the side I

have pictures of that and then he believes that caused Parkinson's in him that he suffered a few years later and he had to go on workers comp I have his workers comp documentation where he shows the rashes and everything and had to take time off so then he realized how bad oh there it is how bad the disease is and that's when he started talking to Lyme advocates and journalists and I was just one of several people he talked to yeah you see yeah he became affected by the disease that he helped potentially create and spread and you know it's insane that humans can do this stuff what is it about uh it reminds me of like the stanford what is the stanford prison experiment where like when authority figure tells you to hurt another human

because because you've got clearance to do so you'll just do it and how that level of psychosis like reaches critical parts of our government and is weaponized against um the populace i mean maybe originally the intent was to weaponize against enemies but i think we find that a lot of that that research typically ends up being uh being focused on on the population at large at some point down the road anyway too so yeah so what is what is the government even for are they here to help us is the question i'm constantly asking myself well i've i spent a lot of time thinking about that for my second book which is about nerve agents and it's the nazi prison guard question like how how did well-meaning germans all of a sudden become nazi prison guards oh here's a

bar of soap, come into the shower, you know, and the same thing at Dugway Proving Grounds and the nerve agents, they were very isolated in a compound in the desert and their work was so secretive, they couldn't share it with their family or friends or the people at church. You know, if you said, oh, I put a drop of nerve agent in a goat today, you know your neighbors would go what and you know and you would respond to it but they're in this happy circle and they're just given lists of experiments to do every day same with willie and you you're in a a bubble and to me it's like slow acting novocaine you all of a sudden don't feel about the 10 000 guinea pig pigs that died you're not thinking about life

i'm just thinking about the results of the experiments that you're talking about right you have uh you have it in your notes here that there's a specific call out for people going to the hamptons this summer to be aware of the ticks there why the hamptons well that that's uh well it's just the same as Martha's Vineyard in Nantucket it's hot spot and none of the real estate or tourism boards want you to know how bad it is um what do I think about that I think that if you don't go out in nature they win we're part of nature we're healthier when we're outside in the sunlight watching birds fishing or whatever and you need to go out into nature but just take

precautions use some sort of repellent on your clothing wash your clothes after you go outside because that's how I think my husband and I got it. We did tick checks, but we rewore our beach clothes the second day and they were hanging out there, I think. And so tick checks, repellent, just be aware. And then, like I said, you pull out an engorged tick, oh my gosh, treat it seriously.

It could ruin your life. Just get some doxycycline, not two pills. it has to be more than two pills that's a flawed study um and then you'll never think about it again yeah until you get bit again yeah yeah well um thank you for coming on i'm sure you're extremely busy right now that your beat is a top of mind for many people in the united states um any other things we should make the audience aware of before before we wrap up here any any other pressing calls to action or or details that we um didn't get to that people should be aware of well if you want to read more about the whole tick weaponization program

it's on my sub stack so it's just chris search chris newby on sub stack it's free unless you want to do a donation and then for my next book on chemical weapons that's a good way to hear about it you can't order it yet but it's it's the same mode it's narrative non-fiction and exploring the history of nerve agents and the people involved in the program and why these weapons of mass destruction keep perpetuating and are never in control i mean people have no oversight really yeah i think it'd be important to have oversight for bioweapons and nerve agents that could drastically change the course of individuals' lives and human history if applied in certain ways. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, we're going to link to all this

in the show notes. Chris, really appreciate you again for taking the time for doing this research and for banging the drum for many years, even though people may not have always been listening. But I think considering everything going on as it pertains to the explosion of tick populations here in the United States, they're definitely listening and eager to learn more. So I think the fact that you've been focused on this for more than 20 years is great for society, this audience, because they get to learn from somebody who's done all the hard work already. Well, thank you so much for the invite and keep your babies safe. we'll try we'll try it's stressful like it was i think last year it was number one and

tick bites and they they actually pennsylvania has a really good ticks uh screening program and you can send in your ticks for free and then whatever's in them will be used for research which is a great thing okay and so you can just mail do you mail them or you drop them off somewhere you mail them you just put them in a little plastic baggie with a wet paper towel i think it's strausberg university it's that they're the ones that have a rock and awesome tick research program all right good it's good to know my home state is on top of things even though the the tick population the deer population here is massive so yeah i know give them more hunting permits that's what we i mean we're right outside of

philadelphia you know i mean there's deer all throughout our neighborhood yeah same here awesome well thank you um who knows maybe we can do this again at some point in the future maybe when you release your next book we can talk about nerve agents and the the government research that's got into that happy topics no i i love the research though it's really fun going to old archives and uh i hang out with a lot of 80 year old ex-military people what fun she does selling a lot of fun yeah i mean like next time you're in an airport sit next to an 80 year old and say tell me your story it's great were you in the cia working on uh working on tick bombs by any chance

she says i didn't work for the cia it was the company maybe i'll do that i'm gonna i'm gonna be in the airport tomorrow so maybe i'll uh maybe i'll try to find the uh the 80 year old sitting by himself yeah they'll wear navy or army merch they'll be the first ones in line because they get on first it's good to know all right chris thank you again this has been awesome party and uh peace and love freaks Thank you.