Dhru Purohit Show
Was Lyme Disease a Lab Leak? The Sinister History of One of the Fastest-Growing Infectious Diseases
Mon, 24 Mar 2025
This episode is brought to you by Pique Life, Momentous, and Lumebox. When we think about disease and chronic illness, we don’t usually consider the possibility of a lab leak or a government experiment gone wrong. Today’s guest sheds light on her investigation into Lyme disease, its disturbing origins, and how it’s impacted patient treatment. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with writer and producer Kris Newby to discuss her theory on the origins of Lyme disease. She explores the possible role of weaponized ticks, the mismanagement of Lyme disease treatment, and the implications of military secrecy surrounding biological experiments. Kris also emphasizes the need for a deeper understanding of Lyme disease’s complexity and its broader impact on public health. She highlights the importance of awareness, research, and advocacy for better treatment options while sharing her personal journey with Lyme disease and how it affected her family. Kris Newby is an award-winning science writer and the senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary UNDER OUR SKIN, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was a 2010 Oscar semifinalist. Her book, BITTEN, won three international book awards for journalism and narrative nonfiction. Previously, she worked as a science and technology writer for Stanford Medical School, Apple, and other Silicon Valley companies. She is currently working on her second book. In this episode, Dhru and Kris dive into: The sinister origins of Lyme disease (00:10) What’s known so far and piecing together the facts (2:30) The discovery of Lyme, its impact on public health, and the role of Big Pharma (10:30) Theories of lab leaks and tick weaponization (17:00) Military secrecy and cover-up tactics (23:00) A congressman’s journey to investigate the origin of Lyme (28:00) Optimism for future research and treatment (30:00) Navigating tick-borne illness (32:30) Historical context of biological warfare (35:00) Connections between modern disease and bioengineering (36:20) The role of ethics and accountability (39:20) Kris’s personal journey with Lyme disease (41:20) Also mentioned in this episode: Kris’ book Bitten Lyme Disease Resources IGeneX Lab Galaxy Labs For more on Kris, follow her on Instagram, Facebook, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, and her Website. This episode is brought to you by Pique Life, Momentous, and Lumebox. Right now, Pique Life is offering 20% off the Radiant Skin Duo plus a free beaker and frother when you go to piquelife.com/dhru. Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the Momentous Three: Protein, Omega-3s, and Creatine made by and used by the best. Go to livemomentous.com and enter promo code DHRU to get 20% off any order. Lumebox is offering my community $260 off their FDA-registered portable Red Light device! That's over 40% off! Go to thelumebox.com/dhru and get your Red Light device. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the sinister theory behind Lyme disease's origins?
Chris Newby, welcome to the podcast. I want to jump right in. You have a pretty mind blowing and slightly sinister theory on the origins of Lyme disease, one of the fastest growing infectious diseases today in North America. And that theory is that Lyme isn't some natural disease. That naturally evolved rather that Lyme disease was essentially born from a cold war biological weapons program.
In other words, bioweapon facility that accidentally escaped into the public. Number one, did I get that right? And number two, why should our audience care about this conversation today?
A bunch of people got sick beginning in the late 60s around Lyme, Connecticut, which is just off Long Island near New York City. And they got sick with a really strange set of symptoms. They were both neurological and crazy joint pains, giant swollen knees like balloons. Back then, sometimes they would name a disease after where it was first discovered. So the Yale...
Chapter 2: What symptoms were observed in early Lyme disease cases?
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.
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...
the military weaponized ticks, stuffing them with various viruses and bacterias to create a bioweapon that could be dropped on our enemy, make people sick with a confusing set of symptoms that couldn't be diagnosed. So you could weaken a population and tie up their medical resources before you invaded the country. So that's the premise of it. And why should we care now?
Because there were a series of experiments with these weaponized ticks during the Cold War. Sometimes the ticks with their evil germs got out. And that has a long lasting effect on the environment to both the animals and the humans.
How much of this is known and how much of this is you filling in the gaps to the best degree that you can from having your own individual research that's there? For example, this idea that America has a long history of creating bioweapons and dropping it on our enemies. Is that established and understood as truthful in our history and origin as a country?
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Chapter 3: How were ticks weaponized during the Cold War?
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.
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.
Chapter 4: What evidence supports the theory of a lab leak?
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.
We'll come back to our Cold War history and why we were interested in some of these things. But let's come back to the narrative a little bit more. So talk to us about this gentleman that you mentioned, Willie. Who was he? And why was his testimony and perspective to you that was included in your documentary so vital to your research?
Well, Willie Bergdorfer was brought over by the Public Health Service, which is now NIH, and he had a contract with the bioweapons headquarters, Fort Detrick, Maryland.
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.
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...
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.
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?
Well, that's the theory that we have now with our understanding, especially with modern day lab leaks. I'm sure you saw, I think you retweeted it, but now even the New York Times is openly admitting that the origins of COVID-19 are most likely from a lab leak. We'll come back to that later on.
But back then, it sounds like your understanding and what you write about in the book a little bit is that the theory was...
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Chapter 5: What role did Willie Bergdorfer play in Lyme disease discovery?
And, you know, I think it was a romantic and exciting at first. But then as he got deeper and deeper into the program and he got more mature, he had two boys and, you know, he would spend the days stuffing plague in fleas, plague that killed most of Europe time and time again. And it was the kind of thing where you wouldn't want to bring your work home, plague.
It started eroding his resolve to have that profession. And then he realized he was stuck in that profession. He couldn't really publish his work because it was all top secret. But he went along with it. And over time, he became more dissatisfied. And then when he was sent out to investigate this mysterious case, outbreak in Lyme, Connecticut.
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.
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...
You know, this disease could be caused by Lyme disease, this Lyme bacterium or this Rickettsia or a combination of both. But someone made him pull that out of his scientific article. And how do I know that? Because I had his first handwritten draft of the article and then it disappeared. And then he told me that it disturbed him.
So, first of all, it was undermining his code of ethics, such as they were, to lie about that 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.
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.
One of the things you talk about is that most doctors in medical school are trained that Lyme disease is, sure, out there in the world, but that largely the treatments are known and that addressing it is pretty straightforward. People get it from a tick.
They often have this spiral sort of rash that develops in that area and that all they need to do is to get antibiotics for a period of a few weeks. It goes away and the story is done. Tell us why there's so much more to the story about that to Lyme and why so many people today suffering long-term consequences from mismanaged Lyme treatment.
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Chapter 6: Why is Lyme disease mismanaged in modern treatment?
Chapter 7: What are the implications of biological warfare history on Lyme disease?
So I think this group of scientists teamed up with pharma so they could take advantage of this royalty sharing. And we've seen this with COVID, too. And they de-emphasized the cure with antibiotics and instead put all their eggs in the vaccine basket.
Even though you can cure Lyme disease, which is with like two weeks of these very cheap off patent antibiotics, all the emphasis went to the vaccines.
As long as you address it early enough, right?
Yes. And they had also focused on one organism, the Lyme disease, and sort of ignored the fact that with ticks in america there's just like 20 different viruses and bacteria 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 8: How does awareness of Lyme disease impact public health?
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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.
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.
Let's talk about these two locations. I believe Plum Island and Fort Dedrick, right? Is that accurate?
Yes.
What were the experiments that you believe were going on there? And then walk us through, how do we think, based on the best knowledge that you've gathered together, that essentially that there was a lab leak that led to this experiment?
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.
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.
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