Kris Newby
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
the military weaponized ticks, stuffing them with various viruses and bacterias to create a bioweapon that could be dropped on our enemy, make people sick with a confusing set of symptoms that couldn't be diagnosed. So you could weaken a population and tie up their medical resources before you invaded the country. So that's the premise of it. And why should we care now?
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Yeah. So during the Cold War, there was a tick weaponization program. There were many pilot studies with infected and non-infected ticks. And at some point, I think those non-native alien ticks with their alien infections got out in two places around Lyme, Connecticut and around Wisconsin. And this sparked this disease outbreak that is having long-lasting impacts on public health.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
It was a new kind of disease. The native population didn't have resistance for it. Just like when chickenpox was introduced to the Hawaiians, there was a fast die-off of that race because they had no natural immunity. Similar disease. To whatever was in the ticks.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Yes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Okay, there was two, well, three arms of the biological weapons programs at Plum Island, which is just about 12 miles from Lyme, Connecticut. Right. There, as the bird flies, that was the anti-animal bioweapons program. And they were trying to find diseases that they could release on an enemy's food supplies, cows and chickens and things like that. Fort Detrick was in Maryland. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And that was the anti-human division. And so they were trying to find germs to weaken or kill humans. And then there was also the anti-crop program, which was mostly at University of Wisconsin in Madison. And that was a second outbreak site for Lyme disease. That's where the first Lyme case was discovered.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Willie had the most to lose by admitting this, and he said, sometimes experiments go wrong, something got out. So he said that, but he did not go any further as far as what exactly the organism is or how it got out. Now, there's the proximity of Plum Island. Plum Island had tick hatcheries where they were trying to mass produce hundreds of thousands of ticks, and they have a long history of...
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
safety breaches there. So hurricanes hit that island all the time. The safety ventilation systems failed. There are reports that sometimes animal wastes were taken over on the ferry and dumped in the forests of Connecticut. So these are all leads I'm following up to try and fill in the gaps that Willie did not answer, the questions he didn't answer before he died. That's one theory.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Pfizer is right near Old Lyme, Connecticut, and they were developing antibiotics for the bioweapons for the Army Department. And they would dump the waste for these antibiotics and the experiments into the Long Island Sound. You know, did it get out from Pfizer? So there are a lot of theories we don't know for sure.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Because there were a series of experiments with these weaponized ticks during the Cold War. Sometimes the ticks with their evil germs got out. And that has a long lasting effect on the environment to both the animals and the humans.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Well, some of these experiments are very well documented. I thought that one of the most outrageous experiments was with lone star ticks on the Virginia coastline, right on the Atlantic Bird Flyway. So the coastal birds migrate every year from South America all the way up past Cuba, past the United States, up into Canada.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
The Atomic Energy Commission and the Army hired a scientist near Newport News, Virginia, he works for Old Dominion, to take lone star ticks, make them radioactive, then release them in a grid on the coast, and every month go out and use a Geiger counter to see how far the ticks would creep. Also, they did bird studies to see how far the birds would carry the ticks.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
The problem with that is lone star ticks are very aggressive, man-biting, and super hardy. They can live underwater for 88 days. Willie said that some lone stars could hang out in a refrigerator for a year and then be revived. Hardy ticks... And they also carry spotted fever, which was one of the go-to bioweapons that the Army was doing. Deer ticks don't carry spotted fever.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And so, anyways, this set of experiments went from about 1964 to 1969. And shortly after they ended, these Lone Star ticks with their deadly Rickettsias were spreading up and down Long Island and killed many people. And that's why Willie was originally brought out, to see what was going on with that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And I think he knew that these experiments in Virginia were going on because he shipped the ticks that were made radioactive for this set of experiments. And what's more is at Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Rocky Mountain Mountain Labs where he worked, he had a whole zoo of ticks from around the world.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And sometimes like dangerous relapsing fever would get into the ticks he would send to other scientists around the world. It's a recipe for disaster. Lab leaks extraordinaire.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
There have been rumors. Before I came along, the weaponization of ticks was not a known entity. I feel like I've gathered enough evidence that that is established now. So the way I got that evidence was, first of all, the Lyme disease discoverer told me that he weaponized fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes during the Cold War for a a couple decades.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
The military has secrecy in its DNA, and it's only gotten worse over time. And there's a certain cover-up playbook that they follow. I mean, our first use of biological weapons is believed to have happened in the Korean War. I believe that that's true. I just went to an archive and did the deep dive on it. But...
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
The military had a cover up and disinformation plan ready to go even before it leaked out that like bugs were raining down on the snow in Korea while we're in the middle of losing this war. So this cover up has continued to happen. And we saw that with Lyme disease. And Lyme disease is just like one little tiny bug. facet of the biological weapons program.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
I could talk for an hour about the other things, but why do I care about this tick thing? Well, it's affected my family personally, multiple people, and I've experienced the seriousness of this disease. I mean, I had multiple tick-borne diseases and my husband did. And then I did a film under our skin that I teamed up with a really talented director, Andy Wilson. And we went all over the U.S.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
and interviewed sufferers of tick-borne disease and Lyme disease. And that's when I realized this problem is just so much larger than just me who had a bad doctor in California. It's nationwide. So 500,000 cases a year, at least now. And of the people that are treated nationally, Quickly, there's a 20% failure rate on the mainstream medicine recommendation for antibiotics.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And I can go into why it's a bad protocol right now. And then we still, after more than 40 years, don't have a reliable test for Lyme disease or this, as I mentioned, a reliable treatment. And ticks keep marching. You know, this outbreak on the East Coast started in Lyme, Connecticut. They're marching up through Maine, through Canada.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
I heard that one Ontario elementary school forbid kids from sitting on the lawn anymore. It's gotten so bad up there. Same with the South. The ticks are marching down there. And then we have this new non-native tick, the Lone Stars, that through their saliva transmit alpha-gal meat allergy. And what is that? It's a protein in the saliva. Let's say you get bitten by them five hours later.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So it's like a delayed allergic reaction. You might end up in the ER with anaphylactic shock or vomiting because it makes it impossible to digest red meat. So imagine never being able to have a steak or a hamburger again.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
No one knows why it just showed up around the 80s. Is it related to the biological weapons program? I don't know. But it is related to the Lone Star ticks, which I think were the go-to weaponized tick of the military at the time. They made them radioactive. They marched up the East Coast. The point is, I'm not a microbiologist or an entomologist or a genomicist.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
But my purpose is to tell this history in context and say, We, for some reason, have been ignoring the prehistory of why this happened. It's just when Willie Bergdorfer said all this illness is caused by Borrelia burgdorferi, don't look anymore. Don't look up. Don't look down. Just mystery solved. And my point is the mystery isn't solved. And there were huge incentives.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
He said he stuffed plague in fleas, deadly yellow fever virus in mosquitoes, and then a grab bag of disease agents inside of ticks. So the way I know that is from Willie Bergdorfer. Later on, I got his lab notebooks and reports to the NIH in Fort Detrick to prove that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
in the NIH research world to not dig into, oh, wow, isn't this interesting? The NIH was curing diseases, but they were also creating diseases that were delivered through insects. So if you're NIH funded, a scientist that works on bugs or Lyme disease, why would you go there? You would never be funded again.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Congressman Chris Smith cares deeply about Lyme disease because New Jersey has been hit particularly hard. And so he entered it into the DOD defense budget four years in a row. Every time it jumped over to the Senate for final approval, it would get pulled. Now, I think it was mostly partisan because the Republicans are trying to cut spending. But it hasn't been reintroduced this year.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
It's to me, it's a relatively cheap investment to find out from the military. What ticks and germs were released in what locations? Because for each tick-borne disease, there's a preferred antibiotic treatment or anti-parasite treatment. So it would really help us to know what was released where. Save research dollars. That way we could focus, you know, on geographic areas.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Right now, our surveillance, which was through the CDC, which has been for tick-borne diseases, has been non-existent since COVID, is taking bedsheets, putting them on a stick and dragging them through fields. For a country the size of the United States, that's not a very wise use of public health dollars. So we need to be more intelligent now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Disclosing these 50 year old secret documents, super cheap, would help researchers.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
I have a witness testimony from someone who worked for the CIA who dropped infected ticks on Cuba right after the Bay of Pigs incident. fiasco. And so that's the main proof, two eyewitness reports and multiple government documents.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Definitely. So RFK Jr., his whole family has been devastated by Lyme disease over the years. He spends a lot of time in upstate New York and Massachusetts. So I know he understands the seriousness of this set of diseases.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Jay Bhattacharya, who just was nominated to the NIH, he read Bitten and wrote a glowing review about it, saying it's really important stuff we need to know about these secret military experiments and their long-term impact on health. And that's not just tick-borne diseases. There are other aspects of it. So, yeah. Yes, I'm more optimistic, but we'll see. Yeah, we'll see.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
There are also some more reliable tests coming down the tubes. The kind of tick-borne disease tests that test for three or four of the most common tick-borne diseases instead of just obsessing over Lyme disease, which isn't the most deadly or devastating of the tick-borne diseases.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
The best website, nonprofit for Lyme patients is lymedisease.org. Easy to remember. They can help you find a knowledgeable doctor. And then they have recommendations on tests. The people who've been in the trenches with tick-borne diseases Mostly we like the lab called Igenix. Igenix has been slandered and libeled intensely by the original cohort of research who were in on the discovery.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
A lot of that reason is because they were their early patent holders on the tests that were compatible with the failed vaccines. So they had undisclosed conflicts of interest in recommending certain tests. Now, what's wrong with those early tests?
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
They took out the most specific protein markers that were used in the vaccine because to make a vaccine, you take part of the organism, put it in your body, and it creates a resistance, right? But then they had to make sure you didn't use that in the test because if you had the vaccine, you would test positive when you really didn't have Lyme disease. So...
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Hygienics says those vaccines haven't been on the market for decades. So we're going to put those proteins back because they're the most indicative of you really having Lyme disease. So there's a bunch of controversy there. But iGenX, I know the scientific director. She has a lot of integrity. They've been the most examined lab on the planet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So if you don't want to waste a lot of time, just go straight to them. There's another lab, Galaxy, that has some good tests coming out. So those are the two I would recommend.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So General Ishii was the World War II bioweapons stuff. And he'd done a lot of these experiments or these bioweapons operations on the Chinese and the Koreans before us. So we just used some of their scientists and stole those ideas. So we had leaflet bombs that were spreading propaganda on the Koreans and the Chinese.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And they just, instead of the leaflets, they put turkey feathers and dusted them with hog cholera. So these feathers would drop down. They also had rodents that were infected with plague, so they would drop dead, frozen voles on the snow. And then there were these little insects called thrips, and I'm not sure what diseases the thrips had, and there were flies, too. So now I'm telling you this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
The official narrative is this is complete Russian and Chinese propaganda, and it never happened, but... I from what I've read, I think it happened. We weren't very good at delivering those diseases, but it had a psychological effect against the enemy, too, even though it wasn't that effective.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Well, Willie Bergdorfer was brought over by the Public Health Service, which is now NIH, and he had a contract with the bioweapons headquarters, Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
When COVID first came out, just based on my research, I thought, hmm, if I think about the experts that I've read, these are the biosecurity experts that look out for biological warfare in our country who are active all the time. They say you have a highly unusual disease, high mortality and morbidity. I mean, it kills a lot of people and makes a lot of people sick.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Point source outbreak, we certainly had that with Wuhan and the Lyme disease outbreak. And then sometimes it's more than one organism. We saw that with Lyme. You know, around Lyme, Connecticut, there were three diseases that were highly unusual, several first in man. So, yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Yeah, so that didn't surprise me that finally this week they came out and said, the New York Times said, yeah, the lab leak could be real as far as an engineered thing. There, around the time Lime was out... There are a lot of unusual diseases, and it's outside of my bailiwick, but things like Legionnaire's disease. That's a pretty suspicious outbreak right about the time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
It was the height of the biological weapons program. So some people have written about that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
After World War II, they interviewed the bioweapon ears in Germany and both Japan, and the Americans were pretty appalled at what they learned, but they were terrified because they knew that the Russians got a hold of some of that information too. A lot of really diabolical bioweapons experiments. They told Congress about it. The Pentagon got more funding.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Well, as far as loss of trust in our public institutions, with COVID, that ship has sailed. I think with Lyme disease, there is a feeling... Well, first of all, I've gotten into the heads of the people in the 50s and 60s, and the Red Scare was a serious concern, and the ends justified the beans. There was Project 112, and we were spraying all these weaponized germs on...
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
young soldiers, mostly conscientious objectors, religious exceptions, and And so it's just the ethics were different. I mean, at one point we were injecting VX nerve agent into young soldiers just to see what would happen. I think a lot of people who made those unwise decisions in the military are dead now. Most of them are really dead. So let's just move on.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Now, the government might not want to admit liability because just look at what happened with Agent Orange. That's the... herbicide chemical weapon defoliant that we sprayed all over Vietnam, the legal suits and the compensations to our soldier victims are immense and are ongoing. So there's a monetary disincentive to come forward with the truth, because I would say the health impacts of
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
the weaponized ticks and whatever was in them is financially even greater than Agent Orange.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So there was an infusion of funding for the bioweapons program and the chemical weapons program. And the bioweapons program was almost as big as a Manhattan nuclear project and just as secretive. And so Willie was brought over because of his special skills in working with ticks. The Japanese were working with tick-borne diseases. And so he... At that time, America felt like they...
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
I'm an engineer by training. I have two engineering degrees, one from University of Utah and then one from Stanford. I started out designing phones and computers early on in the 80s, the go-go 80s. I when I had kids, I moved over to Apple Computer and I did tech marketing there. So I was a tech writer in the valley for quite a while. My husband was an entrepreneur, tech person, too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So when we were in our early 40s, we took a vacation with our friends to Martha's Vineyard, a week long vacation. And that's when my husband and I, a week later, we came back to California and we were sicker than we'd ever been. And that began our hellish journey. through undiagnosed Lyme disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Crushing fatigue, exploding headache, like an alien on the back of your neck, everything hurting, just weak, super weak. As it progressed, just a couple of months later, we had what I would call a combination of symptoms that were like Alzheimer's. You couldn't think straight. Chronic fatigue. arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, like the peristaltic motion of our bowels wouldn't work.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So you just felt toxic all the time. Confused. Like my husband, he had to go to work because we needed the health insurance. This is about six months into the disease. And he would be at the whiteboard doing some technical presentation. He'd forget who he was, where he was, and what he was talking about. And he would have to leave the room so he could regroup. So it was a devastating disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And we get... The whole process was a year, 10 doctors, $60,000 to get diagnosed. All the doctors I talked to, I said, you know, it could be Lyme disease because we were on Martha's Vineyard. That was the number two state for Lyme disease. Can you test it? No, that's a rare disease. And your symptoms don't match what's on the CDC website.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So we're not going to test you for it, even though it's a cheap screening test, fast and cheap. Finally, we got to Stanford, and they test us for many diseases, and the test for Lyme disease was positive. It was the first positive test in eight months.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
But they ignored it because they said, well, that's not a very good test, so we're going to ignore it and fire you as patients because we don't believe in chronic Lyme disease. So all of a sudden, we had no place to go. We both felt like we were on the verge of death. We felt like it was like a month before we had to sell our house because we couldn't work.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And so that's when we found this very active online community of Lyme patients. And they directed us to a doctor who was very experienced in tick-borne diseases. She tested us, found our co-infections in Lyme disease, and we were on our way to getting better.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So it's Dr. Christine Green. She's trying to retire. Got it. She has trouble saying no, but she's really good. And that's the point I would like to make is that most doctors spend 15 minutes in med school learning about tick-borne diseases, but there's so much more to it. especially with the complexities of multiple germs. So it helps to get someone who's been to that rodeo many times before.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And that's go to limedisease.org, find someone who knows what they're doing. It would be just like if you had a rare brain tumor, you would find the person who had cured it a thousand times. Same with tick-borne diseases.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
They didn't have a good handle on how to really supersize this kind of biological warfare. He was done there to do early pilot studies, like what is the best combination of ticks and diseases in the ticks for a deadly strain, for an incapacitating strain, for... a kind of tick that could be dropped on Vietnam versus a colder climate tick, which could be dropped on Russia.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So it took about five years, but we both got over Lyme disease in our second co-infection, which is a red blood cell parasite called Babesia. And we were good for a while. My husband ended up relapsing a couple times, but then he would just go back on antibiotics and beat it off again. then COVID came along and he has long COVID now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So I feel like we're going through this chronic disease nightmare again. And same sort of resistance with, uh, chronic Lyme as long COVID, you know, he went to the hospital here and they said, Oh yeah, we have a long COVID clinic. And all they had to offer him was talk therapy. Now, uh, I think most people with long COVID would agree that talk therapy does not help.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
I like the FLCCC website. It's a group of emergency physicians who said, heck with this long COVID. We want to keep people out of our ERs because they're clogging everything up. And they did a bunch of literature-based research on prevention for COVID and treating it once you have it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So I think they recently renamed their site, but they have really good protocols for all stages of COVID and vaccine injury. Putrino Lab. In the East Coast, Putrino and Amy Pearl, I think they're working on some good studies. I think the NIH $1.1 billion was largely wasted on studies on treatment, and I hope with the new administration, they will fund more meaningful studies.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
The other thing I have to say about long COVID, in a perverse way, learning how to solve long COVID will help. An even more downtrodden disease group, which was chronic fatigue, ME-CFS. So that has viral roots and it's very devastating. So long COVID research will help them. It will help long Lyme people. It's the same root cause. It's chronic inflammation.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Yeah, I would just say if you find a bull's eye rash on your skin or you pull out a bloated tick, treat it very seriously. Take the tick, put it in a plastic bag with a moist paper towel, send it in for lab testing because the tick testing is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than human testing right now. And it will give you peace of mind. OK, what what was a tick infected with?
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And on the Russian side, they were doing the same thing. So it's an escalation of this capability, even though it's just a stupid kind of weapon. When you have nukes, why do you need a kind of weapon that can't be controlled or targeted and has a high probability of affecting your own soldiers and population?
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
It may not be transmitted to you, but at least you'll be on the lookout for the correct symptoms. Yeah, don't let people gaslight you and say it's no big deal because it can be. I mean, I know I've seen the worst of the worst. I've met thousands of people whose lives have been derailed by this. Act promptly. Find a doctor who listens to you. That would be my advice.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
It was May 2019, and it was largely dismissed. I spent a lot of time on conspiracy podcasts, but as soon as the COVID lab leak theories started gaining some traction, then all of a sudden people believe, well, maybe the government does lie to us sometimes. lab leaks happen. So I guess in a perverse way, that's helped.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Thank you so much, Drew. I appreciate it. Letting me ramble on about my crazy TikTok.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
My sub stack, which is under my name, Chris Newby, is where I'm posting ongoing research and then the research that didn't quite fit into the book. And I like to call them little evidence bricks that support this theory that... whatever diseases came out in Lyme, Connecticut, they're unnatural and we need to have extraordinary cures for these unnatural diseases and prevention too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Chris, thank you again for coming on the podcast. Thanks a lot, Drew.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
A bunch of people got sick beginning in the late 60s around Lyme, Connecticut, which is just off Long Island near New York City. And they got sick with a really strange set of symptoms. They were both neurological and crazy joint pains, giant swollen knees like balloons. Back then, sometimes they would name a disease after where it was first discovered. So the Yale...
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
You couldn't trace bomb fuses or fingerprints on the back of a tick. It was very much a stealth weapon, I would say.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Well, when Willie was 27, they brought him over here. He was thrilled at getting a really well-paid job in America in a beautiful place, Hamilton, Montana. He got his own lab and his own assistant. So he was thrilled. And then as soon as he got his security clearance, then he learned, you know, the diabolical experiments that he was supposed to conduct.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And, you know, I think it was a romantic and exciting at first. But then as he got deeper and deeper into the program and he got more mature, he had two boys and, you know, he would spend the days stuffing plague in fleas, plague that killed most of Europe time and time again. And it was the kind of thing where you wouldn't want to bring your work home, plague.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
It started eroding his resolve to have that profession. And then he realized he was stuck in that profession. He couldn't really publish his work because it was all top secret. But he went along with it. And over time, he became more dissatisfied. And then when he was sent out to investigate this mysterious case, outbreak in Lyme, Connecticut.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
That's when he realized it was tick-borne and there was another organism, a Rickettsia, which is related to the Rocky Mountain spot of fever, the most deadly tick-borne disease. It was killing people. He was upset. And then he was told, well, there's also the spirochete there. He discovered that too, that we call Lyme, that is the causative agent of Lyme disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
But he was told, this other Rickettsia, hide it. Like, don't tell anybody you found it and just blame the whole disease on Borrelia burgdorferi. As a scientist, you're number one, you're supposed to always tell the truth, even if it doesn't fit your hypothesis. So in his original science discovery article of Lyme disease, he wrote about this second organism and he said...
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
You know, this disease could be caused by Lyme disease, this Lyme bacterium or this Rickettsia or a combination of both. But someone made him pull that out of his scientific article. And how do I know that? Because I had his first handwritten draft of the article and then it disappeared. And then he told me that it disturbed him.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So, first of all, it was undermining his code of ethics, such as they were, to lie about that article. Second of all is the frenzy of publishing about this new organism that had never been seen in the U.S. before. He got Lyme disease himself. It was a Sunday. The lab techs weren't in there. He was cleaning the rabbit cages of Lyme-infected rabbits.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Urine splashed in his eyes and all of a sudden he got Lyme disease. And he got really, really sick. And I think that helped him grow a conscience. He was angry at his employers for making him covered up. He was realizing that he had unleashed a monster, possibly, onto the American public. So that's my theory.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
After Willie just announced the discovery of Lyme disease, that's 1982, there were a bunch of researchers from mostly the East Coast who rushed in to participate in the discovery because to be a disease discovery means you're going to have grants forever if you're one of the disease discoverers. I call them the new disease carpetbaggers. But about that time, the laws changed.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Rheumatologists called it Lyme disease. My theory is it was multiple organisms that got out of a military lab somehow. One of them might be the Lyme bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi. The other one, according to the discoverer of Lyme disease, he told me at the end of his life, he believed that that was a weaponized germ that came out of his Cold War lab. And there was an experiment gone wrong.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
changed, and it all of a sudden allowed university researchers and people like the NIH and the CDC to share in big pharma profits. So from the beginning, they knew that Lyme disease could be cured with an early dose of penicillin and doxycycline. But there was a lot more money in vaccines.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So I think this group of scientists teamed up with pharma so they could take advantage of this royalty sharing. And we've seen this with COVID, too. And they de-emphasized the cure with antibiotics and instead put all their eggs in the vaccine basket.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Even though you can cure Lyme disease, which is with like two weeks of these very cheap off patent antibiotics, all the emphasis went to the vaccines.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Yes. And they had also focused on one organism, the Lyme disease, and sort of ignored the fact that with ticks in america there's just like 20 different viruses and bacteria that can be delivered at the same time as the lyme disease so if you have a vaccine for lyme disease well that might not help you if you have this cattle parasite called babesiosis or the um
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or the Powassan or Heartland viruses. So even though this didn't make scientific sense and that we still didn't understand the mechanism of action or possibly that there was another organism involved, all this money went into the vaccine. As time progressed, people began to realize that Lyme could become very chronic.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
It can enter your joints and your brain, places where your immune system doesn't have full access and become chronic, go dormant for a while. Then when your immune system was weakened, it would blossom again. But if you're running a vaccine trial and you only want it to run a couple, you know, a few months, six months or whatever.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
This turns out to be a chronically relapsing and remitting disease like MS or whatever. You can't run a scientifically valid vaccine trial. Or if you don't screen those initial patients for all the other tick-borne co-infections you can have, that really screws up your vaccine results. So anyways, there were two vaccines that came out. They were about to come out around 1997.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
The trials were 1990 to 2000, and they were both pulled from the market, I think, because the underlying science wasn't right. But they said there was no market for it. So that's one factor. They started a vaccine before they understood how the organism makes people sick. The other factor is that was 82 was the beginning of the rise of medical insurance companies, HMOs.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
And they had a vested interest to not treat really expensive chronic diseases. like Lyme disease turns out to be, it affects their bottom line too much. One New York State insurance exec said, well, AIDS is our number one most expensive disease. Lyme is number two.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So it was advantageous for them to side with the vaccine researchers that there is no chronic Lyme because now they don't have to pay for it. If they admit it, it doesn't exist. A little bit like long COVID, they don't have to pay for it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
So it's complicated in that... What we call Lyme disease is this spirochetal bacteria, but I think there's no proof that that was weaponized. But there is this other organism which might be related to Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which Willy Bergdorfer, the discoverer, called Swiss agent. So that's complicated, but it helps to know that in the Cold War...