FW: Lyme Disease and the Bioweapons Problem
Ellen Thomas
Lyme Disease and the Bioweapons Problem
In 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory. He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on NBC’s Today Show, where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection. Lab 257 hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list soon after its publication. CNN discussed it and quoted a couple of people rejecting it without any argument. Eventually it nearly vanished, neither it nor the basic information it contained easy to find in discussions of Lyme disease. I have no expertise on Lyme disease, but I found the book’s argument persuasive, so I wanted that argument to either be accepted or seriously refuted, not just disappeared.
I understand that books don’t really exist in popular U.S. culture, which, for example, just witnessed a brouhaha over the medical experience of a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan who had written all about it in a book that was not mentioned in the recent debate by him, his supporters, or his detractors. Still, pretending a book’s evidence (that the U.S. government had spread Lyme disease) simply didn’t exist was only going to make me take that evidence more, not less, seriously.
In 2019, A new book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby oddly avoided discussing Carroll’s book. Newby claimed that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him (along with any memory of other books about it, I guess). Yet, Newby’s book reached the same conclusion as Carroll’s, placing blame on Plum Island. Newby reached this conclusion on page 224 after having mentioned Plum Island only once in passing in a list of facilities on page 47.
Here are the basics of what Carroll and Newby tell us and what little has been put forward in efforts to argue to the contrary. First, from Carroll:
Less than two miles off the east end of northern Long Island sits Plum Island, where the U.S. government researched biological weapons for decades, employing former Nazi germ warfare scientists in the 1940s to work on the same evil work for a different employer. These included the head of the Nazi germ warfare program who had worked directly for Heinrich Himmler. This work continued on Plum Island at least through 1969. The weapons researched were focused at least partly on destroying crops and non-human animals for the purpose of starving humans, and included weapons consisting of diseased insects that could be dropped from airplanes. I don’t think any of this is disputed. Some of it is mentioned by opponents of blaming Plum Island for anything, but only to suggest a sort of wacky conspiracism without actually disputing any of it.
The deer tick was pursued as a germ weapon by the Nazis, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the Americans. Deer swim to Plum Island. Birds fly to Plum Island. The island lies in the middle of the Atlantic migration route for numerous species. Critics assert that ticks were not used at Plum Island, but Carroll’s research established that they were.
In the 1970s, numerous cases of a rare, and then (at least publicly) unknown, disease appeared in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just north of Plum Island. Critics now point to discoveries of Lyme disease predating the 1940s and distant from Plum Island to prove that no one on Plum Island “invented” or “created” Lyme disease. But, as various scientists have pointed out, the pre-existence of a disease does not tell you that human interference with it (whether or not including manipulation of it) didn’t create an outbreak of the disease.
On Plum Island was a germ warfare lab that frequently conducted its experiments out of doors. Documents record outdoor experiments with diseased ticks in the 1950s (when we know that the United States was using such weaponized life forms in North Korea — see below). Even Plum Island’s indoors, where participants admit to experiments with ticks, was not sealed tight. And test animals mingled with wild deer, test birds with wild birds.
By the 1990s, the eastern end of Long Island had by far the greatest concentration of Lyme disease. If you drew a circle around the area of the world heavily impacted by Lyme disease, which happened to be in the Northeast United States, the center of that circle was Plum Island.
Plum Island experimented with the Lone Star tick, whose habitat at the time was confined to Texas. Yet it showed up in New York and Connecticut, infecting people with Lyme disease — and killing them. The Lone Star tick is now endemic in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
Now from Newby:
The outbreak of unusual tick-borne disease around Long Island Sound actually started in 1968, and it involved three diseases: Lyme arthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and babesiosis. A U.S. bioweapons scientist, Willy Burgdorfer, credited in 1982 with discovering the cause of Lyme disease, may have put the diseases into ticks 30 years earlier. And his report on the cause of Lyme disease may have involved a significant omission that has made it harder to diagnose or cure. The public focus on only one of the three diseases has allowed a disaster that could have been contained to become widespread.
Newby documents in detail Burgdorfer’s work for the U.S. government giving diseases to ticks in large quantities to be used as weapons, as they have been in Cuba in 1962, for example. “He was growing microbes inside ticks, having the ticks feed on animals, and then harvesting the microbes from the animals that exhibited the level of illness the military had requested.”
Burgdorfer published a paper in 1952 about the intentional infecting of ticks. In 2013, filmmaker Tim Grey asked him, on camera, whether the pathogen he had identified in 1982 as the cause of Lyme disease was the same one or similar or a generational mutation of the one he’d written about in 1952. Burgdorfer replied in the affirmative.
Interviewed by Newby, Burgdorfer described his efforts to create an illness that would be difficult to test for — knowledge of which he might have shared earlier with beneficial results for those suffering. Newby, who has herself suffered from Lyme disease, blames the profit interests of companies and the corruption of government for the poor handling of Lyme disease. But her writing suggests to me a possibility she doesn’t raise, namely that those who know where Lyme disease came from have avoided properly addressing it because of where it came from.
Newby assumes throughout the book that there has to have been a particular major incident near Long Island Sound, either an accident or an experiment on the public or an attack by a foreign nation. Burgdorfer reportedly claimed to another researcher that Russia stole U.S. bioweapons. Based on that and nothing else, Newby speculates that perhaps Russia attacked the United States with diseased ticks, coincidentally right in the location where the U.S. government experimented with diseased ticks.
“What this book brings to light,” Newby writes, “is that the U.S. military has conducted thousands of experiments exploring the use of ticks and tick-borne diseases as biological weapons, and in some cases, these agents escaped into the environment. The government needs to declassify the details of these open-air bioweapons tests so that we can begin to repair the damage these pathogens are inflicting on human and animals in the ecosystem.”
Now let’s turn to Nicholson Baker:
In 2020, Nicholson Baker’s book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, overly painstakingly documented his research — the struggle to pry information out of the government making up the main topic of the book. But Baker assembled incontrovertible proof that the U.S. government had a significant, offensive, biological weapons program (if not as major a program as it dreamed of having), that it experimented on human beings during and after World War II, and that it routinely lied about what it was doing.
Baker documented tests using not-so-harmless substitutes for biological weapons that were conducted by the U.S. government in numerous U.S. cities, and the intentional destruction of great masses of insects and mammals, and the poisoning of ecosystems, water supplies, and crops. Scientists studied the eradication of species, the elimination of fish populations, and the use of all sorts of birds, arachnids, insects, bugs, voles, bats, and feathers to spread infectious diseases. In the process, they slaughtered large numbers of test subjects, including monkeys, pigs, sheep, dogs, cats, rats, mice, and humans. They devised mines and torpedoes for poisoning oceans. The aquifer that lies beneath Fort Dietrich is among the most polluted in the United States, according to the EPA — polluted with materials intentionally developed as pollutants.
Baker’s book presents overwhelming evidence that the United States used biological weapons in Korea, and strong evidence that the United States didn’t just drop diseased feathers and bugs on Korea from airplanes, but also used retreating U.S. troops to distribute such disease carriers in houses to which people would return — as well as evidence that the victims of this madness included U.S. troops themselves. The book provides persuasive evidence that the United States spread hog cholera in East Germany, gave diseases to crops in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary, sabotaged the coffee crop in Guatemala, spread a horribly effective disease to the rice crop in Japan in 1945 — possibly including with flights that happened five and six days after the bombing of Nagasaki, and killed off much of the durum wheat crop in the United States with disease in 1950, accidentally inflicting on the United States weapons developed for Soviet wheat.
Baker blames on bioweapons labs, not just Lyme disease, but also outbreaks of Rabbit fever, Q fever, bird flu, wheat stem rust, African swine fever, and hog cholera. Self-inflicted injury and death, as with nuclear tests and other war preparations, have been common with scientists and staff and people who just lived in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Lately, there seems to be an uptick in discussions of the possible blame that might be placed on bioweapons research for the spread of Lyme disease. This is probably due to discussion of the origins of the Covid pandemic, and spin-off speculations about the origins of other outbreaks, aided by the trend of public officials and political commentators to openly speculate about any theory, substantial or not — and exacerbated by the realization that wherever Covid came from, the reason that anyone might conceive of it having come from a bioweapons lab located (like Plum Island) at the scene of the crime is that governments have never ceased and show no indication of ever ceasing to maintain bioweapons labs. Also, the U.S. Congress appears set to pass a mandate that the U.S. government investigate itself on the origins of Lyme disease.
Now to the case against:
In 2019, an article called “No, Lyme disease is not an escaped military bioweapon, despite what conspiracy theorists say” was published by Sam Telford, Professor of Infectious Disease and Global Health, Tufts University.
Telford admits this:
“Ticks can indeed carry infectious agents that could be used as biological weapons. Military research has long focused on ticks. Sites around Long Island Sound, near the military’s Plum Island research lab, were some of the first places where the American Lyme disease epidemic was identified.”
and then declares this:
“But there was no release of the Lyme disease agent or any other onto American soil, accidental or otherwise, by the military.”
How could he possibly know that?
He cites the fact that cases of Lyme disease have been identified predating Plum Island. As discussed above, this hardly exonerates anyone.
He points out that Lyme disease is not a very deadly disease, that some other diseases would be better tools for mass-murder. But that hardly prevents Lyme disease being a subject of experimentation and accidental release.
He follows these apparently very weak arguments with a couple of arguments that I may just not know enough to dismiss. First:
“Population genetics research on Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterial agent of Lyme disease, suggest that the northeastern, Midwestern and Californian bacteria are separated by geographical barriers that prevent these populations from mixing. Had there been a lab strain, particularly one engineered to be more transmissible, that escaped within the last 50 years, there would be greater genetic similarity between these three geographic populations. There is no evidence for a recent single source – such as a release from a lab – for Lyme disease spirochetes.”
If true that Lyme disease is distinct by region, that would seem to weigh against blaming at least solely at least a single laboratory. In recent years Midwestern cases have begun to rival Northeastern ones. Can a disease be both clearly unaltered over centuries and millennia (and therefore not altered in a lab) and clearly distinct from region to region? I have no idea. But I’m smart enough to know that a lab could help spread something even without altering it.
Or is Newby right that Burgdorfer and others worked to put a combination of three diseases into ticks, and that this combination led to the spread of the disease, so that research into just one of the three doesn’t tell us everything we need to know? I have no idea.
Second:
“The real reasons for the epidemic becoming so burdensome include reforestation, suburbanization, and a failure to manage deer herds.”
The problem with this one, of course, is that there can be more than three reasons for something. Do these three explain the spread of Lyme disease without Plum Island? I have no idea. And I see no reason to think that Telford has any idea either.
In 2025, Joedy McCreary published “Lyme Disease Did Not Come From a Secret Military Lab, Contrary to FDA Chief’s Claim.” McCreary cites Telford and two other experts declaring their opposition to blaming Plum Island, and then makes the same arguments Telford did.
I’m afraid that once a theory gets picked up by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. it’s doomed, even though the guy has to have been right about something at sometime. But let’s imagine it’s wrong, that Lyme disease is purely the result of bad luck or climate change or reforestation or the spread of deer or some combination of such factors. This would not change history. This would not alter the fact that the U.S. military found the worst of the worst of the Nazi and Japanese weapons makers of all varieties of weapons from rockets to chemicals and insects and did everything it could to exploit them for the spread of death and suffering in the world. We know that U.S. bioweapons efforts in Korea were mostly a failure on their own terms. We could be overestimating their accidental impacts as well. But that would not change the fact that the ongoing conflict with Cuba includes, in Cuban if not U.S. memory, the fact that the U.S. government intentionally brought hunger and death to Cuba, introducing swine fever to the island as well as tobacco mold, and creating “an epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue fever in 1981, during which some 340,000 people were infected and 116,000 hospitalized, this in a country which had never before experienced a single case of the disease. In the end, 158 people, including 101 children, died.”
Another product of U.S. bio-weapons tax dollars at work, of course, was the anthrax mailed to politicians in 2001. While Newby speculates that perhaps someone within the U.S. government was benevolently trying to demonstrate the danger for our own good, I don’t think we should forget that one purpose served — whether or not intended — by the “anthrax attacks” was a significant augmentation of the Iraq war lies. The Anthrax was falsely blamed on Iraq, and even if people have forgotten that, they fell for it long enough for it to matter. The one bit of solid truth in current public understanding of Lyme disease is that it has not been falsely blamed on some country the United States is eager to bomb. Let’s keep it that way!
A few other things we can be fairly certain of are:
- The bioweapons labs did virtually nothing to protect us from Covid, whether of not they were responsible for it.
- The possible causes of disease epidemics, including weapons labs, but also including environmental destruction, climate collapse, disruption of ecosystems, and the defunding of health measures in order to fund the war machine of which the weapons labs are a tiny piece, are all being increased at an increasing rate with no slowdown in sight.
- The replacement of Plum Island being planned in Kansas will keep its work secret for your “safety.”
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