The Government's Tick Problem

I know you have had a tick on you before. Did you know that in 1982 a scientist named Willie Bergdorfer discovered the bacterium that causes Lyme disease? A little bullseye infection around a a nasty tick bite. They named the disease after him. Borelia Berg Dorfery. Hilarious name. Tragic disease. What they didn't tell you is that he spent the previous 30 years weaponizing ticks for the United States military. And before he died, he sat in front of a camera and told the truth to a few people. This has recently been declassified and conspiracy theorists were proven right once again. All right, guys. Yeah. I mean, what? Again, again, and again, and again. How are we always this right all the time? This is crazy.

I'm not really a conspiracy theorist, but like a little bit though. Kind of. I'm starting to become more and more of one. I don't exactly trust the powers that be. You want to see the type of motherucker that trusts the powers that be? Friend of the show, Arnuki Beast. Spooky Island. Press like.

Willie Bergdorfer was born in Basil, Switzerland in 1925. Willie studied zoology, parasettology, and bacteriology at the University of Basil. and in 1951 he finished his PhD. His thesis was on burellia spyroets in ticks. He was 26 years old and already one of the world's foremost experts on tickborne pathogens. His entire academic career up to that point had been spent studying how spyroet bacteria survive and reproduce inside of a tickenheimer and how ticks transmit those bacteria to a new host when they suckle them. They feed. That is exactly what Lyme disease is. A spyroet transmitted by a tick during feeding. That's Lyme disease. L YME. You probably know somebody who's been infected and probably still dealing with it even years later.

3 days before Christmas 1951, he arrived at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana in a snowstorm. RML was a National Institutes of Health facility originally set up to study Rocky Mountain spotted fever. It also housed the largest living tick collection in the United States, which is disgusting and scary. And it had a second purpose that wasn't exactly televised. The US Army was running a biological weapons program out of Fort Dietrich, Maryland, and they needed someone who understood ticks better than anyone on the planet. Willie Burgdorfer was theiring guy. Port Dietrich, if you didn't know, was the center of the American biological weapons programs from 1943 to 1969. It was run by the US Army Chemical Corps. And by the late 1950s, the operation was big as they had labs that could breed 130 million yellow fever mosquitoes per month and 50 million fleas per week. Thank God. They had a million liter gas tight test sphere called the eightball where they tested airborne pathogens on animals and humans. At least they were volunteers most of the time, right? They had an entire enmological weapons department dedicated to turning insects into delivery systems of biological weapons. The logic is very simple and even scarier than let's say the logic of a bomb. Bomb kills people in a blast zone and then that's it. An infected insect bites someone, that person gets sick, the insect is still alive, bites another person. You don't have to keep dropping bombs. You just drop a bunch ofing bugs and they just work and live and people.

Willie Burgdorfer's first assignment was to figure out how to package plague infected fleas into cardboard tubes so they could be loaded into cluster bombs and dropped from airplanes. That's awesome. What is he? a aing scaven. His ongoing work luckily moved away froming plague bombs to tick. He developed techniques for force-feeding them through glass capillary tubes filled with pathogens. Okay, we're back to theing scaven fever, tomia, epidemic typhus, rabies, western ecoin encphilitis. All my homies hate western ecoin encphilitis. He and an entomologist named James Oliver worked on a program to drop weaponized ticks from aircraft over enemy territory. A military document from the era explained the system. Arthropods, these little guys, 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.

This all went on from 1953 to 1969, the year of our lord. And the whole time, Burgdorfer lived a completely normal life in Hamilton, Montana. A relatively normal life when you're spending your days developing scaven weapons tactics and bomb delivery methods. He married a local fellow named Dale C in 1953. It was it was a woman. They had two sons. He coached little league, went to church, and was known around town as the tick guy at the Rocky Mountain Lab. He would help you identify a bug and then he also just happened to spend his mornings force-feeding pathogens to tick through glass tubes for the DoD. So that's kind of like a you know kind of a put into perspective sort of moment.

Eventually Chris Newbie began an investigation that later uncovered that Burgdorfer maintained a Swiss bank account throughout his career separate from his NIH salary which she traced through documents in his personal files and he never explained what it was for. The reason I bring that up is because this wholeing thing is a really strange web, a strange bug nest of web pieces that's really freaky and it's a rabbit hole and a conspiracy and we'll get into it and it's been declassified recently and we were right the whole time.

Burgdorfer wasn't working alone. Fort Dietrich had recruited scientists through a program called Operation Paperclip which brought over 1,600 German and Austrian scientists to the United States after World War II. Some of them were bioweapons researchers who had experimented on prisoners in concentration camps. All of them were Nazis. Kurt Blom, the deputy Reich health leader, had proposed spreading malaria using mosquitoes as delivery systems and tested it on prisoners at Dau and Bookenbald. Edward May ran the enmological division of the SS Institute for Practical Research and received a commission in 1943 to experiment on concentration camp prisoners with humanly harmful insects. That's a quote. One of them was a man named Eric Tr who had been the lab chief at the leading boweapons facility uh Rhymes Island which was in the Baltic Sea where he worked directly under Hinrich Himmler on weaponizing animal diseases using biting insects specifically ticks. The were in on it as well. Chob came to the United States in 1949, consulted at Fort Dietrich, and helped establish a new research facility modeled after his era island lab. And that facility was built on an island off the coast of Long Island, New York. Talked about it once before with my buddy Isaiah and Jackson in the Redthread Podcast. Go check that out maybe if you want to. But things have changed cuz [ __ ] got declassified. But we'll get to it anyways. We'll get to the the cool island facility first. what the government actually did with the weapons Burgdorfer was building. Let's talk about that for a minute. So, Burgdorfer and Fort Dietrich had the weapons. The question is, what did they do with the weapons?

In 1962, the Kennedy administration launched Operation Mongus, which was a covert campaign to destabilize Fidel Castro's Cuba. Many things were done to destabilize Castro's Cuba. Most people know about the poisoned cigars and the exploding seashells, all that [ __ ] crazy [ __ ] What you might not know is task 33b. A declassified status report reads, quote, "Plan for incapacitation of sugar workers completed to February. Task as assigned was to develop a plan for incapacitating large sections of the sugar workers by the covert use of BW or CW agents. BW, if you didn't know, is Biological Warfare. CW, if you didn't know, is the channel in which you could find the hit television show Green Arrow. Cuba's economy during that time ran on sugar, and sugar was more than half of Cuba's export revenue. You could take out the workers during harvest season. You could completely [ __ ] the country's economy without a single soldier crossing the beach.

At a declassified meeting from September 6th, 1962, the special group on Mongoose shows how seriously they took the deniability part of all of this. Mc George Bundy, Kendy's national security adviser, said the sabotage would only be acceptable if it was completely deniable and attributable to local discontent or natural causes. In other words, it had to look normal and natural and like God did it or something like that. Chris Nubbie, our writer and investigator we spoke of earlier, spent years investigating this and she tracked down a former CIA operative who described what happened next. The operative said they loaded ticks infected with tuleria, relapsing fever, and Colorado tick fever onto C123 transport planes with what the military calls sheep dipped crews, meaning active duty personnel given civilian cover. sheep dipped. It's a prettying cool term. And they flew low over Cuban sugarcane fields and released a lot of ticks onto the workers below. The operative called it the strangest thing he ever did. And that's [ __ ] crazy. Bit of a caveat though. All right. This operative's testimony has never been independently verified and he spoke to Newbie anonymously. The declassified mongoose documents confirm the planning for task 33b, but the specific claim about dropping ticks from planes rests on a single person's account that was given anonymously. That being said, what the government did on American soil is documented, and it makes it all seem so muching worse, dude.

Between 1966 and 1969, the United States military released 282,800 Lonear ticks across Virginia, the state where I grew up. That's horrifying. Hopefully, they didn't inject them with radioactive carbon 14 so researchers could track their spread using geer counters. Oh, wait. That's exactly what they did. The releases happened at sites along the Atlantic flyway, which is a major bird migration route that runs up the eastern seabboard. My god, these people are [ __ ] demons, dude. The stated purpose was to study how disease carrying insects spread through wildlife and bird populations. And geography in this context is very very important. For those experiments, lonear ticks were not found above the Mason Dixon line. If you don't know what the Mason Dixon line is, cuz you're aing dork or some [ __ ] cuz you're a northerner. All right, it's right there. All right, guys. I'm just from right I'm a southerner. I'm from right there. This is the Mason Dixon line. I'm from right there. I'm I'm from the south. I'm from the deep south. Right there. Literally as north as you can possibly caning get in the south. Basically, within a few years of the Virginia releases, they had established populations on Long Island for the first time. So, the military released nearly 300,000 ticks into the wild along bird migration routes, and the ticks went north. Uh, what the And luckily, this was not an isolated program. The Virginia releases, they weren't the only ones. The government had a pattern of testing biological agents on its own citizens without their knowledge.

In the 1950s, the Army sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide over dozens of American cities, including St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg, to simulate how biological weapons would disperse. They told residents it was a safety test. Unfortunately, they left out the radioactive particles. How about from 1932 to 1972, the Tuskegee syphilis study deliberately withheld treatment from black men with syphilis to observe the disease's progression for 40 years. In 1966, the army shattered light bulbs filled with bacteria on the New York City subway to test how biological weapons would move through the transit system. So, when the government says they released 282,800 ticks in Virginia for research purposes, you know, that's just one of the many things they've done to people without their knowledge. The military also released 600,000 mosquitoes across Georgia and Florida and they called the operations big itch and drop cake which is epic testing whether insects could deliver biological agents over those wide areas. Project 112, which was authorized in 1962, was a massive classified expansion of bioweapons testing involving the United States, Canada, and the UK, in which 134 separate tests were scheduled. By the time President Nixon signed an executive order in 1969 banning offensive biological weapons, the experiments had been running for nearly two decades. Ticks in Virginia, skaters in Georgia, bacteria on the New York subway, radioactive particles over St. Louis, infected insects dropped on Cuban sugarcane fields. It's all there, baby. And it's all done without the knowledge or consent of the people that were being tested on, except for the people in the lab in Montana, of course. They were they were volunteers, I think.

Now, back to that secret island lab. Okay. Plum Island was or is an 840 acre island off the northwestern tip of Long Island, New York, sitting at the entrance to the Long Island Sound. In 1952, the United States Army Chemical Corps took it over for anti-animal biological warfare research. 2 years later, the facility was transferred to the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, and the public mission changed to studying foreign animal diseases. Foot and mouth, African swine fever, render pest, whatever the is. It is the only lab in the United States authorized to study live foot and mouth virus. On paper, it's perfectly reasonable. It's a facility. It's an island lab that studies dangerous animal diseases isolated from the mainland. So, nothing could escape. Of course, that whole story that I just told about it, nothing could escape it. That was a story for 40 years. The government said repeatedly and on the record that no biological warfare research had ever taken place on Plum Island, Little Plum Island. But in 1993, an investigative reporter at News Dayd got his hands on declassifying records. They documented a 1950s military plan to [ __ ] the Soviet economy by weaponizing exotic animal diseases developed at Plum Island. A faximile of a 1951 army document ran on the front page of the news day on November 21st, 1993. government had been lying about the nature of research at Plum Island for four decades repeatedly and on the record for 40 years.

It's important. Plum Island sits approximately 10 mi across Long Island Sound from the towns of Lime and Old Lime, Connecticut. This is where it gets even more interesting, guys. In the late 1950s, a woman named Polly Murray moved with her family to a wooded area near the Connecticut River just outside the town of Lime. Starting around 1967, she began experiencing strange symptoms. Rashes, migraines, fever, aching joints that would not go away. Then her kids started getting sick. Then her neighbors kids. Then the neighbors. She went to doctor after doctor and they could not tell her what was wrong. One told her it was stress. One said anxiety. And she punched him right in the face. Another said it might be rheumatoid arthritis. Nobody had an answer that explained why an entire neighborhood was getting sick at the same time. This went on for 8 years. All being told by doctors that nothing was really wrong or that it might be stress or rheumatoid arthritis or anxiety. So Murray started keeping records herself. She logged every case she could find, every symptom, every doctor's visit, and another mother named Judith Mch was doing the same thing independently in nearby East Hatam. Both women separately pushed the Connecticut State Department of Health to investigate. And in 1975, Murray contacted them directly and presented over 40 documented cases. Dr. Alan Steel at Yale took it very seriously. He investigated and found 51 cases, 39 children, and 12 adults in the neighboring towns of Lime and Old Lime and East Hatam. They called it Lyme Arthritis, then Lyme disease. The disease was discovered and got its name because a couple of moms kept on bitching about their kids being sick. That's pretty epic. The first recognized cluster of the disease that now affects nearly half a million Americans a year appeared 10 miles from a government lab that had been running secret bowarfare experiments and lying about it. That's a crazy coincidence. Don't you think?

Guys, Lyme disease has been around for 600 billion years. Don't you know that? Don't you know that Lyme disease have been million? Don't you know that's the official? Anyways, we'll get into it. Let's take the government's position. Their position is that Plum Island does not and has not performed research on Lyme disease. Now, that's maybe true, but the facility did conduct research on tickornne pathogens as a part of its animal disease work. And Eric Trout, the scientist who helped establish the lab in the 1950s, was specifically an expert in weaponizing diseases through tick. So it it looks pretty bad and honestly they can all go themselves to be honest. He visited Plum Island at least three times in the 1950s and was offered the directorship you know the was. It's like the same concept as the theing rhymes island lab in the Baltic Sea. Seems like ticks can swim or something cuz they got out for sure. The whole premise of Plum Island was that it being on an island would make it safe to work with dangerous pathogens cuz water is containment. Birds. Birds, guys. Birds. You can't Ticks ride on birds. They're tiny. It's like aing flea surfing a turd down a dark tunnel or whatever. The In fact, in 1978, foot and mouth virus escaped from the laboratory into cattle being held in outdoor pens. And more than 200 animals had to be destroyed. The virus luckily never reached the mainland, but only because of the island's geography, not because of the actual laboratory containment system. So, in the early 80s, two more outbreaks occurred. this time inside the bioontainment units, not of Lyme disease, but of other horrific things that shouldn't be outbreaking. A 200 fleet government accountability office report found parts of the facility were approaching structural failure. And the island sits directly on the Atlantic Flyway, which is the exact same bird migration route that the military used for the Virginia tick releases. So birds carry ticks, they carry 100 miles. Michael Carroll wrote the book Lab 257 about Plum Island and he put it this way. >> Plum Island presents more vectors for the spread of infectious disease than perhaps anywhere else. Plum Island is a Lyme disease tinder box.

When the CDC became aware and began national lime surveillance in 1982, the cases clustered in two places. The Northeast centered on the Connecticut coastline and the Long Island Sound. And then the upper Midwest centered on Wisconsin and Minnesota. From those two points, the disease spread outward in all directions. So the northeast epicenter is centered on Plum Island. So I mean, yeah, they didn't it didn't start from here. I swear to God, I swear. But it like it's it's it's like it's like on a map. It's right here and it started here. So like maybe it didn't start here, but it started here. Maybe it didn't start like here, but it started here though, you know? Maybe it didn't start here, but maybe >> Wisconsin and Minnesota are nowhere near Plum Island and nowhere near the Virginia tick release sites and nowhere near the Atlantic flyaway. So, you know, I don't know. It's not that's not a very convenient conspiracy one to be honest. I'm not I'm just going to ignore it. I'm just I'm just I'm just kidding. Some researchers have suggested that migratory bird routes could account for it birds carrying infected uh ticks along the Mississippi flyway from southern brooding grounds, but that is purely speculative. There is no equivalent to the Virginia tick releases or the Plum Island proximity to explain the Midwest cases. That is just the uh the reality. Maybe they started to see it. They're like, "Maybe we should maybe we should set it over there before it looks like it's only here." Hey, at least I'm being honest. All right, guys. Being honest matters a lot. It's very important, especially for this story because the evidence for a connection to government experiments is strongest in the Northeast. In the Midwest, we do not have that trail at all whatsoever. There's no D labs. There's nothing. It's just like the wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald and that's basically it.

Now, in November of 1981, the New York State Department of Health was investigating suspected Rocky Mountain spotted fever on Long Island. They collected deer ticks and sent them to the one person in the country they knew could identify what was inside them. Willie Burgdorfer. He dissected the ticks at Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana, stained the cells from the gut, looked up through his microscope, expecting to find short rodlike reets bacteria. I don't know how to say that. Retia. Expecting to find short rodlike rakettia bacteria, the kind that causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever. But instead, he saw something else. Long slender coiled spyroets. And he recognized them immediately because his PhD thesis 30 years earlier had been specifically about burillia spyroets and ticks and how they survive inside the tick and how they passed to the host during feeding the exact mechanism of transmission that was now making people sick across Connecticut the coastline. All right guys, he spent three decades studying and in some cases weaponizing the organisms he was looking at. In 1982, he published the discovery in science with his co-author Yorg Benak from Stonybrook University. It's George Binach uh or Benak, I don't [ __ ] know. The Spyroet was named Burelia Borgerferryy in his honor. He received the Robert [ __ ] medal in 1988, which is one of the most prestigious awards in medicine for some reason. And the man who spent three dec I'm just kidding. That's very impressive. I'm sorry. I can't even pretend to be funny or or disrespect. Uh that that's very very impressive. Beautiful mind, beautiful well normal looking guy, but also kind of him as well. The [ __ ] who spent three decades loading ticks with deadly pathogens for the army's weapons program was celebrated as the hero who identified the cause of Lyme disease. So kind of a win and a loss all in one.

In the late 1970s, before the Belli discovery, Burgdorfer had been running tests on blood samples from lime patients sent to him by Alan Steer at Yale. He found something in those samples. Not Burrellia, but a different organism called Rakettzia Helvetica, which is not a font. It is a pathogen he'd first discovered in Swiss ticks during a 1978 trip to Bassel. He called it the Swiss agent. In Europe and Asia, Rkettzia Helvetica has been linked to sudden cardiac deaths, facial palsy, deafness, menitis, and temporary paralysis. Burgdorfer found it in at least a dozen lime patient blood samples with six additional probable cases. Deer was excited about the finding and he wrote to Burgdorfer, quote, "I am excited to pursue further the possibility of a recettial ethiology of Lyme disease. About 18 months later, Burgdorfer identified Bellia as the primary cause of lime and the Swiss agent research was set aside. By the way, the Swiss agent not published, not followed up on, and not mentioned in the 1982 science paper. Bert Dorfer's handwritten draft of that landmark paper included a reference to identifying Rkettzia in patient Sarah and ticks, but the published version removed it entirely. So, lime patients are also carrying Rkettzia Helvetica, and nobody's testing for that. They're being treated for one infection while some potential second infection goes undiagnosed and the symptoms of that second infection overlap with what chronic lime patients have been reporting for for decades.

My mom was diagnosed with Lyme disease uh after she had severe menitis. Uh my mom is very tough and she was crying one day cuz her head hurt so bad and she went to the hospital and she had menitis and my the doctor was like I don't know what the [ __ ] going on. This is really strange. that she had got tested for Lyme disease, but uh she didn't have a a ring, a little ring around her tick bite, but tested positive for it multiple multiple times at the uh university. What do they call? They have the dumbest mascot ever. Cavaliers, whatever those are. My grandfather also has Lyme disease uh and was really sick for years. And we were like, well, here goes grandpa. He's great now. But he had Lyme disease. They had to test him like two dozen times and just so so underequipped for this type of stuff. The standard two-tier lime test looks for antibodies to burilia burgfairy and does not test for rkettia helvetica. No commercially available lime panel does which means if you are carrying both infections you'll get treated for the burellia and the rkettia will go undiagnosed. I assume the treatment is probably similar but I don't know. George Benock, the co-author on Burgdorfer's original 1982 paper, reviewed the garage materials in 2016 and said that the Swiss agent research should be repeated with modern tools. Still, nobody has done it and people are being undertreated right now because nobody followed up on what Burgdorfer found 40 years ago. Uh why didn't he follow up on it? Thater could have done it. He's like the guy. He's like the tick man. I'll tell you why. Because the Swiss agent connected Lyme disease to the bioweapons work and publishing it would connect the outbreak to Fort Dietrich and or Plum Island. That's 100% what happened. I'm willing to put my life on it.

Bergdorfer died on November 17th, 2014 from complications of Parkinson's disease in Hamilton, Montana. He was 89 years old. After his death, a researcher named Ron Lindorf collected boxes of papers from Burgdorfer's garage in July of 2014. And most of Burgdorfer's official records had gone to the National Archives in Washington, but many more had been sitting in his garage and home office for decades untouched. In 2015, Lindorf found the Swiss agent materials, unpublished research showing Rkettzia Helvetica and lime patient blood samples, letters to collaborators, laboratory records, blood test results that never made it into any published paper. And sitting on top of all of that big stack of papers was a handwritten note in red ink that said, "I wondered why somebody didn't do something. Then I realized that I am somebody. I've been saying that this wholeing video, dude. This was 10 years ago." Stat news, which I've never heard of, published the investigation in October 2016. To this day, US laboratories do not test lime patients for rakettia helvetica. And Burgdorfer had already said more than the paper show. He said it on camera, guys.

On February 28th, 2007, a film crew arrived at Willie Bergdorfer's home in Hamilton, Montana. Andy Abrams Wilson was directing a documentary called Under Our Skin about the Lyme disease epidemic. The film would go on to become an Oscar semi-finalist in 2009, and it followed Lyme patients who had been fighting for years to get doctors to take their symptoms seriously. People who had been told their chronic pain was anxiety or psychosmatic, that their fatigue was [ __ ] depression. It's such [ __ ] dude. They were told that the disease that they had tested positive for after it's treated doesn't exist in a chronic form. But it does. It does. It does. We know that now. Uh and the medical establishment had been justing dismissing people with Lyme disease for a very long time, decades. Our old investigative buddy Chris Nubbie was there as a senior producer. Newbie herself had gotten Lyme disease on a vacation to Martha's Vineyard. She and her husband both got it and she described it as the sickest she'd ever been in her entire life. That experience is what drove her to work on the documentary. And the documentary was what brought her face to face with Burgdorfer. She didn't start out looking for a bioweapons connection. To be clear, she didn't start out on the conspiracy side like I did. All right. She started out trying to understand why the medical system was failing lime patients so badly, which is a really earnest and and heroic and noble thing to just start with. The bioweapons trail came from Burgdorfer himself.

Bergdorfer at the time was 81 years old and Parkinson's disease was starting to affect him, but he was lucid, talkative, and willing to sit for a 3-hour interview. He told them, "The controversy in Lyme disease research is a shameful affair." And I say that because the whole thing is politically tainted. Money goes to people who have for the past 30 years produced the same thing. Nothing. Uh, partway through the interview, someone knock on the door. An uninvited researcher from the NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratories, which was the facility where Burgdorfer had spent his career, was standing on the porch. Andy Abrams Wilson described what happened. The man on the porch said, "I've been told that I need to supervise this interview. This comes from the highest levels. There are things that Willie can't talk about." Wilson turned the handler away at the door and continued the interview. Bergdorfer confirmed on camera that he had been a part of the biological weapons program during the entire Cold War. He described packaging fleas with plagues that could be dropped in bombs that would burst above a battalionsized area. And then when pressed about what started the Lyme disease outbreak, he was a bit evasive. He hinted at an accidental release using phrases like accidents happen. And sometimes experiments don't turn out as planned, but wouldn't say what or where or when. and he told Newbie that he had been repeatedly interviewed by government officials about something serious and worried about being deported and losing his NIH position. After the camera stopped rolling, Bergdorfer looked at the crew with what Newbie described as a ry smile and said, "I didn't tell you everything."

A few years later, in 2013, Tim Gray conducted another videotaped interview with Burgdorfer. He's 88 years old now. Parkinson's was far worse. His speech was deteriorating. and Gray asked him directly, "Was the pathogen he identified in 1982 as the cause of Lyme disease the same one or similar or a generational mutation of the one he'd written about in 1952?" Bergdorfer replied in the affirmative. In December of 2013, Newbie conducted her own follow-up interview, and Burgdorfer was still struggling from the Parkinson's, but still lucid and still good at deflecting sensitive questions when she pushed too hard on the bioweapons work. He changed the subject to old person things like the Kiwanas Club or Pancake Breakfast. He confirmed the weapons program again and hinted at an accidental release and still wouldn't give specifics or a legitimate answer. He died 11 months later on November 17th, 2014 at 89 years old.

Chris Newbie spent the next 5 years investigating what Bergdorfer wouldn'ting say. Just straight up. She's a Stanford educated science writer and in 2019 she published a book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme disease and biological weapons. In it, she laid out the full evidence chain for Dietrich, a tick weaponization program, Operation Mongoose, Plum Island, a Swiss agent, and the garage materials, and she was honest about the limits. She wrote, "I can't connect all those dots right now."

In July of 2019, the US House of Representatives passed an amendment ordering the DoD Inspector General to investigate whether the Department of Defense experimented with weaponized ticks between 1915 and 1975. Are you kidding me? Oh my god, guys. This is good news. It was introduced by Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, co-chair of the Congressional Lime and Tick Born Disease Caucus. This is huge. Why haven't I heard it? Failed the Senate. He tried again in 2021. Failed. But in the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, Smith's amendment finally cleared. It directs the Government Accountability Office to investigate all federal agencies, DoD, NIH, USDA, all of them for tick related experiments between January 1st, 1945 and December 31st, 1972. Specifically, experiments involving spyroets and rkett I don't know how to say the plural of both of those. spyroets and uh rakettias or whatever the exact bacteria classes that cause Lyme disease and that Burgdorfer spent his career working on. CBS News reported it guys. House passes amendment ordering Pentagon to review why the US experimented with weaponized ticks and the spreading of Lyme disease.

Now there is a problem with all this stuff. Borrellia Burgdorferryy the bacterium that causes Lyme disease is not new. In 2017, researchers at Yale sequenced 148 full genomes of the bacterium and determined it has existed in North America for about 60,000 years. Uh, so they didn't create it, but they spread it and they made it they made it a lot better. So there's tens of thousands of years before humans ever even arrived on the continent. In 1990, scientists use PCR testing on museum tick specimens from a long island collected in 1945, 9 years before Plum Island even existed. And they found borellia DNA in 13 of them. And they also found it in nine specimens from Cape Cod dating to 1896. And in the European Alps, researchers found 2/3 of the Burellia genome in the pelvic bone of Ulti the Iceman. Uh this guy, a natural mummy that is 5,300 years old. So he had Lyme disease and he is old as way older than Plum Island. So they they definitely didn't invent that [ __ ] Okay, guys. But maybe they maybe they uh spread it a lot. That makes sense. But just because something's old doesn't mean some bad [ __ ] did something with it and spread it to a bunch of people and gave it to my mom and almost ruined her life. You [ __ ] dick and my grandfather. Who am I supposed to blame if not the government?

Now, to ruin my fun even further, Sam Telford, a professor of infectious diseases at Tus University, said there was no way the military could have manipulated the disease because they did not know what it was. Pathogen wasn't identified until 1981. You can't weaponize something you haven't yet discovered. That's what his quotes. He also raised another point that the first American case wasn't in Connecticut. In 1969, a physician in Spooner, Wisconsin, identified Lyme disease in a patient who had never traveled outside the area. Cases also appeared in Northern California in 1978. So, you know, Telford said, "How could an accidental release take place over three distant locations? It couldn't get the out of here, dude. Oh, man." And then Maria Dakwaser, a professor at Columbia, called Lyme disease a terrible bioweapon. She said that it's not lethal. Only 11 people in the world have died from Lyme disease between 1985 and 2011. And it cannot spread from person to person. It requires a a tick to bite you and to stay attached to you for at least 24 hours. And it's curable with antibiotics that you can get at CVS. So yeah, maybe maybe it's not such a big deal, but uh you know, I kind of feel stupid now. I'm just kidding. I thought it'd just be important to to bring all sides to this. That's just the opposite side. You know, we don't really care about that. Berger was studying it and wrote his thesis long before it was formally discovered and named after him. So like yeah, you know, they did know what it was and they were testing a little bit and all this stuff. I'm sure I'm sure it's a mix of all. Usually that's what it is. Nothing ever happens. They had something to do with it, I'm sure, but like at the same time it's like, you know, maybe a tick got out, maybe a couple more people got it. This is really close to Plum Island and like, you know, maybe they just kind ofing maybe they I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they just bred a lot. I don't know. [ __ ] I don't know.

Jokes aside, the United States government did not create Lyme disease. The bacterium is older than civilization itself. It was in American ticks decades before Fort Dietrich or Plum Island even existed. Unless you want to say that all those things are fake or whatever, but that's prettying unlikely. That being said, the documented record is extensive. The government did run biological weapons programs that weaponized ticks for a long time, released them in Virginia along bird migration routes. So, they they didn't invent Lyme disease, but they certainly didn't do anything to stop it from hurting people. All right. All right. They did more to spread Lyme disease and create Lyme disease than I've done. Let's be honest. They also planned to drop infected ticks on Cuban workers from planes and they built a bow warfare uh lab 10 miles from where Lyme disease first exploded then lied about the lab's mission for 40 years. So then the man they celebrated for discovering the disease had turned out had been weaponizing the exact vector that carries it since 1951 and then found a second pathogen in patients. Buried it told a film crew he was part of the weapons program his entire career. smiled and said he didn't tell him everything and then had an NIH handler show up in interview to stop him from talking, saying it came from the highest level. So, all that being said, in 2026, Congress has ordered the GAO to investigate whether the Department of Defense has used ticks to deliver biological weapons. We'll find out hopefully soon, guys. Anyways, thank you. I'll see you in the next one.