by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Does the pathogen that causes Lyme disease, one of the most insidious infectious diseases, originate from an American biological weapons program? Were ticks made “aggressive” in the process? A US journalist claims to have discovered evidence of this. Scientists involved in the research confirm her suspicions.
Running barefoot across meadows, roaming through forests in light clothing, off the beaten track, through scrub and undergrowth: for seniors like the author of this article, this was a natural part of a carefree youth. If we discovered a tick on our skin afterwards, we removed it without panicking; if it had already bitten, we pulled or twisted it out – and didn’t give it another thought, at least no more than we would a mosquito bite. Because virtually no one complained of severe, persistent symptoms afterwards.
Nowadays, however, spending time outdoors without protective clothing seems to be increasingly becoming a foolish test of courage. The media has long been frightening us with constant, shrill warnings. Because wherever there is greenery, the most dangerous animals on the planet lie in wait for us: insidious bloodsuckers that transmit the pathogen that causes Lyme disease. For more than 300,000 Germans each year (https://www.versorgungsatlas.de/fileadmin/ziva_docs/115/VA_21-06_Bericht_Borreliose_2021-06-24.pdf), it doesn’t stop at the typical rash that spreads in a circle but quickly subsides. They feel exhausted and feverish, with headaches and chills setting in. As the disease progresses, it brings with it further, more severe symptoms: muscle cramps and uncoordinated motor skills. Those affected experience impaired vision and hearing, and complain of joint pain and heart problems. Sometimes meningitis and cognitive disorders occur, and even psychiatric symptoms can develop. If not treated in time, Lyme disease leads to irreversible organ damage.
Why have tick bites become so much more dangerous recently? Why was Lyme disease first noticed in the mid-1970s in Lyme, a small town in the US state of Connecticut? Why does the bacterium that causes it have the strange nickname burgdorferi?
Uniquely dangerous
Und warum ist diese Mikrobe so besonders tückisch? Von den meisten anderen Bakterien unterscheidet sich Borrelia burgdorferi durch eine einzigartige Kombination von Eigenschaften, die Infektionen besonders schwer behandelbar machen:
Its shape and mobility are extraordinary: this pathogen is a spirochete—a spiral-shaped bacterium. Instead of external flagella, it has “internal motors” that allow it to move like a corkscrew. This enables it to burrow through tissue, joint cartilage, skin, and even the blood-brain barrier. There, it is less accessible to the immune system and antibiotics.
Er wechselt regelmäßig die Lipoproteine seiner Oberfläche, somit auch deren Antigenstruktur. Deshalb erkennt das Immunsystem den Erreger zwar zunächst und baut Antikörper auf – aber kurze Zeit später präsentiert die Borrelie ein „neues Gesicht“, vergleichbar mit einem Einbrecher, der ständig seine Kleidung wechselt. Infolgedessen bestehen Dauerinfektionen, trotz aktiver Immunabwehr.
Stealth strategy against the immune system. Borrelia burgdorferi can “hide” in connective tissue, the nervous system, and joints: it manipulates immune cells and produces anti-inflammatory cytokines that prevent a complete defense. Some Borrelia bacteria “disguise” themselves as host proteins – e.g. as “plasminogen”, a protein produced by the body that occurs in blood plasma and plays a central role in dissolving blood clots. This means that the immune system does not recognize them as foreign bodies. As a result, they can survive undetected for years.
This pathogen divides very slowly. Borrelia burgdorferi has an unusually long generation time of 12–24 hours; some researchers even assume up to 48 hours. (By comparison, Escherichia coli divides every 20 minutes.) However, many antibiotics are only effective during active division. As a result, long courses of antibiotic therapy are often necessary—short courses, as with other bacterial infections, are often not sufficient.
Under stress, for example from medication, Borrelia burgdorferii forms alternative “protective forms”: originally elongated in shape, they transform into cyst-like spheres that “sleep” but remain reactivable. And they form biofilms: colonies in protective mucus, similar to dental plaque. The pathogens also communicate with each other chemically, through a process known as “quorum sensing” using specific signaling molecules. These tricks also make them more resistant to drugs and the immune system – and cause relapses after seemingly successful treatment.
Genetic peculiarities: The genome of Borrelia burgdorferii is very unusual. Bacteria usually have a circular chromosome – a DNA molecule that looks like a closed circle. In the Borrelia burgdorferii pathogen, however, the DNA is arranged linearly: as in humans, it forms a strand with ends. In addition, its genetic material contains many plasmids: small DNA segments with genes that increase its adaptability. This makes it highly flexible and strangely complex for a bacterium.
Multi-organ tropism: Other bacteria often prefer to attack a specific part of the body, such as the lungs or intestines. Borrelia burgdorferii, on the other hand, like SARS-CoV-2, can attack virtually any organ system: from the skin to the joints and heart to the nervous system.
Have all these peculiarities developed naturally?
Science journalist Kris Newby began to explore these questions after she and her husband Paul became infected with the Lyme disease pathogen in 2002 while on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the south coast of Massachusetts. “It’s like having multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue, and joint pain all at the same time,” she says, describing her personal experience. “It is primarily a neurological disease that leads to hyperinflammation. And the symptoms often migrate throughout the body. You can be very weak, unable to perform the tasks of a normal adult. We were desperate and went a year without a diagnosis.”
She visited ten doctors because of this. None of them recognized what she was suffering from. None of them knew what to do. “I thought that was the end of my life as I knew it.”
“Those tick bites robbed us of our health,” Newby writes, “and sent me on a quest for an almost unimaginable possibility: that we were collateral damage in a biological weapons race that had begun during the Cold War.”
“It took four to five years for us to fully recover.” (1) Her ordeal motivated Kris Newby to make a moving documentary in 2008, “Under Our Skin,” which was nominated for an Academy Award; six years later, she produced a sequel, “Under Our Skin 2: Emergence.”
For mainstream media to copy: The official version
The man who gave the pathogen its name is considered to be the discoverer of Lyme disease: Willy Burgdorfer, a bacteriologist and parasitologist from Switzerland. He spent his entire professional life working at Rocky Mountain Labs, a biosafety level 4 (BSL 4) facility in Hamilton, Montana. It was operated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services, as its most important authority for biomedical research. In the mid-1970s, according to the official narrative, Burgdorfer was commissioned to investigate the outbreak of a novel disease in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Long Island. Several children and adults there had developed a range of unusual symptoms, including rashes, fever, fatigue, and joint pain. What they were suffering from remained unclear at first, but was eventually traced to ticks found in the local forests. In 1981, Burgdorfer is said to have discovered the bacterium in the bloodsuckers that had been collected, which is now named after him: Borrelia burgdorferi. He determined that it caused the disease. He claimed that penicillin could reliably kill the bacterium. So there was no need to worry.
Growing doubts
Her hunch that she was on to something was confirmed when she met Willy Burgdorfer in person while filming her documentary “Under Our Skin.” “He hinted to several people that the outbreak had an unnatural origin,” she reports. “As it turned out, he was also under contract at Fort Detrick,” the notorious US military site in Frederick, Maryland, where biological weapons have been developed and tested since World War II. (2) “When I interviewed Burgdorfer, he said, ‘Yes, I was in the bioweapons program. My job was to mass-produce ticks and mosquitoes.’” This was done as part of gain-of-function experiments, “by mixing pathogens—bacteria and viruses—into ticks to develop more effective bioweapons.”
One of Burgdorfer’s areas of expertise was infecting ticks with pathogens. He did this with two close relatives of the Lyme disease pathogen: Borrelia latyschevii and Leptospirosa. (3)
Newby created an animation of the original outbreak, which apparently began in Lyme, a small town of 2,000 residents at the mouth of the Connecticut River near Long Island, two hours’ drive northeast of New York City. In doing so, the journalist made a revealing discovery: “When I drew a 50-mile radius around that point, there were three new, highly virulent, tick-borne diseases that appeared there at the same time, in the late 1960s”:
– Babesiosis, caused by a single-celled organism similar to the malaria pathogen. The first cases appeared in 1969 on Nantucket Island (Massachusetts), and later in New York. Symptoms include malaria-like fever spikes, anemia, and chills. Babesiosis is often life-threatening for immunocompromised patients.
– Anaplasmosis, also known as human granulocytic ehrlichiosis (HGE), is caused by a small, intracellular bacterium that attacks white blood cells (granulocytes) and disrupts the immune system there. It was also first noticed in the late 1960s on the US East Coast near New York. Severe cases lead to respiratory distress, a dramatic decrease in white blood cells and platelets, and kidney failure. In the worst case, multiple organs fail – and the infection is fatal.
– Lyme disease itself – “13 years before the Lyme bacterium was declared to be its cause in 1981,” as Newby noted.
Ticks in “Project 112”
Newby then began “searching through military files to find out whether the outbreak could be linked to biological weapons accidents. In doing so, I discovered an extensive program for the production of insect weapons and a program in which germs were sprayed from aircraft over large areas, the “Project 112”: an experimental project of the US Department of Defense, allegedly discontinued in 1973, whose existence had been categorically denied until May 2000. (4) Manipulated microbes were released in at least 18 of over 50 tests. (5) “Some of these pathogens,” Newby found, “were tick-borne diseases that were freeze-dried and sprayed as aerosols.”
“Burgdorfer had worked with Q fever and ticks, experience that Rocky Mountain Labs needed for its bioweapons work. Once he had received security clearance, he began introducing the plague into fleas and deadly yellow fever into mosquitoes, then mixing viruses and bacteria into ticks to increase the virulence of these living weapons.”
“The weapons designers at Fort Detrick were looking for ticks that could be dropped on an enemy without arousing suspicion and that were filled with pathogens to which the target population had no natural immunity (…) Ticks were the perfect stealth weapon, undetectable and long-lasting (…) They are trying to cover up what Burgdorfer revealed: 1) that another bacterium, perhaps a rickettsia related to Rocky Mountain spotted fever, was developed as a biological weapon during the Cold War; 2) that it could be a combination of bacteria in the ticks that makes people sick.”
Among the top scientists who allowed themselves to be enlisted by the US military at Fort Detrick was biologist James H. Oliver Jr., a professor at Georgia Southern University. As he admitted in an interview, he bred ticks and mosquitoes there to drop them from airplanes. They wanted to find out how to get ticks to reproduce quickly and in large numbers, and how to spread them in certain areas.“ (6) In an interview, he explained: ”Everything was very secret, very confidential. I still don’t like to talk about it because I think they might put me in jail for revealing secrets. [Laughs.] It was a crazy time. We did all kinds of tests to find out where these animals move when you release them and what factors influence their migration. Could we drop them from planes, and how could we get the insects to the enemy? That was our job.”
What happened on Plum Island?
It is puzzling that less than ten kilometers as the crow flies from Old Lyme—the site of the first official outbreak of Lyme disease—the US government operated a biological research facility on Plum Island, a 3.4-square-kilometer islet, since 1952 – with restricted access, high security, and shrouded in secrecy. It is just one mile, or around 1600 meters, from there to Long Island. Officially, it was known as the “Animal Disease Center” and was under the authority of the US Department of Agriculture. When it allowed public tours, a press spokesman admitted: “We conduct defensive biological warfare.” (7) As a 2005 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed, Plum Island was secretly experimenting with deadly pathogens, including West Nile virus, Nipah virus, and Rift Valley fever. (8) Ocean currents are said to have washed strange, genetically malformed creatures onto the shores of the mainland opposite.
Nazi biological weapons expert Erich Traub is considered the “godfather” of the Plum Island facility. From 1942 onwards, he had headed a secret Nazi laboratory on the island of Riems near Rügen in the Baltic Sea, where he experimented with pathogens intended to poison cattle in the Soviet Union. After the war, the US Army lured him to its biological warfare headquarters at Fort Detrick, where he researched biological weapons and worked with more than 40 deadly germs until the 1950s. (9) He visited Plum Island several times.
Prominent investigative journalist Karl Grossman, a professor at the State University of New York, also suspects Plum Island of having triggered the global epidemic of Lyme disease. (10)
On April 7, 2015, the television station CBS News New York reported that a relatively new tick-borne virus called “Powassan” had appeared in several areas around Lyme, Connecticut, a relatively new tick-borne virus called “Powassan” had appeared. Why there of all places? It is transmitted within minutes of the bite. It is resistant to all known treatments. It causes symptoms similar to Lyme disease, including headaches, nausea, and fever. The virus can attack the central nervous system and lead to encephalitis and meningitis. Infection can be fatal. About half of survivors develop neurological symptoms such as muscle wasting and memory problems.
A four-part film series on the links between Lyme disease and biological weapons research is (still) available on YouTube.
What is going on in Manhattan, Kansas?
One of the strongholds of US biological weapons research is the Biosecurity Research Institute (BRI) in Manhattan, Kansas – recently expanded to include a high-security biological laboratory (BSL-4) for researching extremely high-risk human and animal pathogens. Experiments with ticks have probably been going on there for a long time. Is it just a strange coincidence that in 2014, 200 miles southeast, a new tick virus was discovered, the “Bourbon virus” (abbreviated BRBV) – named after a patient from Bourbon County (Kansas) who became seriously ill and died after a tick bite? And just 182 miles from Manhattan, the equally life-threatening “Heartland virus” appeared for the first time in 2009. (11) Both are transmitted by the particularly aggressive “Lone Star” tick (Amblyomma americanum).
Shocking evidence is mounting
A 1967 US Army report presents, starting on page 600, ticks that were experimentally infected with various pathogens. (12) Page 301, for example, describes how researchers introduced typhus rickettsia into Boophilus australis – which mainly infects cattle – and Dermacentor andersoni – which prefers wild animals, dogs, and humans in addition to cattle. They turned Dermacentor albopiotus into carriers of spotted fever, and so on and so forth.
In her book “God Science” (13), US author and publisher Patricia J. Langhoff describes in detail how, as a child in Illinois, she and her siblings heard a radio announcer report that researchers from a nearby facility were throwing objects out of an airplane and that people should leave these objects where they fell. Shortly thereafter, all the children in the neighborhood went hunting for them. Patricia found a strange capsule that had broken open upon impact. Funny-looking bugs she didn’t recognize crawled out of it. One bit her. She then developed a perfect ring-shaped rash. She went from doctor to doctor, but no one had the slightest idea what it was. And so Patricia went from being top of her class to a student with enormous learning difficulties. She has been struggling with persistent symptoms ever since. Years later, she tried to obtain official information about that tick program. But all references to it had disappeared from the records, even though all her siblings remember it as if it were yesterday.
When Pete Hegseth was not yet US Secretary of Defense under Trump, but a polarizing host on Fox News, he also had Kris Newby as a guest. He asked the journalist whether the government had released the ticks intentionally or merely accidentally. Newby then quoted from her conversations with Willy Burgdorfer: “It’s not 100% clear, but Willy said: ‘Accidents happen.’ There were many tests and pilot programs to find the perfect combination of ticks and diseases. There were field trials. I came across an experiment on the Virginia coast where more than 100,000 particularly aggressive Lone Star ticks were released.” (14) Less than an inch long, these arachnids—named for the white spot on the back of adult females—can detect the heat and carbon dioxide emitted by humans from several meters away. Then “they literally hunt you down,” explains Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. “They actually run toward you.”
“Ticks were the perfect stealth weapon.“
A thriller makes waves – all the way to Washington
Kris Newby presented her findings in her 2019 book, “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons” – a true thriller that made waves. One member of Congress, Republican Chris Smith, was so impressed by the evidence she had gathered that he requested an investigation. He was successful: in July 2019, the US House of Representatives actually instructed the Pentagon’s Inspector General to investigate whether the Department of Defense “experimented with ticks and other insects between 1950 and 1975 with a view to using them as biological weapons” and released infected ticks “accidentally or through an experiment” onto the unsuspecting American public. (15)
Groundless doubts about a pointless project?
As expected, the investigation came to nothing. There was no solid evidence, and renowned experts immediately dismissed Newby’s suspicions as absurd. “Ticks and Lyme disease would be a very strange choice for a targeted biological weapon, because ticks are difficult to handle, have no wings, and Lyme disease would hardly be a power thief,” explained Robert Peterson, professor of entomology at Montana State University.
That’s a really weak accusation,” agreed Jeffrey Lockwood, who teaches natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming. In his 2010 book “Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War,” he reported on attempts by the US Army to use ticks, flies, and fleas for biological warfare. During the Cold War, the army researched whether ticks could be used to spread tularemia, relapsing fever, and Colorado fever. Nevertheless, Lockwood remains “deeply skeptical” that the military has used ticks to transmit Lyme disease. “Ticks are not the best vector for spreading biological weapons because they don’t travel very far and Lyme disease is a slow-acting pathogen.” Other tick-borne diseases are much worse for humans, he said. “Using Lyme disease with a tick vector as a weapon just doesn’t make sense,” says Lockwood – which, of course, does not rule out the possibility that it was tinkered with for a while. “On the other hand, the development of US military weapons has not always made sense, to be honest.”
Although cases of Lyme disease are indeed noticeably more common near the northeast coast of the US, the alleged test area, than in most other regions, they are no more prevalent there than in parts of Wisconsin, for example, over 1,500 km further west:
If the military in Connecticut did indeed release ticks carrying biotechnologically enhanced pathogens , shouldn’t there have been much worse disease progression there than in other US states, let alone in Europe and North Asia, where Lyme disease has also been spreading epidemically for decades? Incidentally, Borrelia burgdorferi is not only widespread in North America, but also in Europe. Even if the pathogen had been genetically engineered and released somewhere in the US, how could it ever have crossed the Atlantic? As we know, ticks are not particularly good swimmers or flyers. However, migratory birds could have carried infected ticks from continent to continent as “stowaways.” Or the bacteria could have been brought to us in exported furs, domestic animals, and livestock.
Unfortunately, Burgdorfer himself, the key witness, can no longer comment on any of this. He died in 2014. (Erich Traub died in 1985.)
With gain-of-function research, it must finally come to an end. Immediately.
Whether Lyme disease, Ebola, COVID-19, or other infectious diseases can be traced back to biotechnological tinkering in laboratories or not; if so, whether such diabolical creations escaped accidentally or were deliberately released: does it really matter? The crucial point is that it could have been the case. And it could happen again at any time, with catastrophic consequences that would be far worse than any nuclear meltdown. Around the globe, legions of diligent scientists, working on behalf of the military, secret services, and corporations, are working feverishly in hundreds of high-security laboratories to make already dangerous pathogens even more contagious, even more pathogenic, even more deadly. Time and again, leaks occur. The next one could spell the end of humanity. Or it could bring us a comprehensive “protective” biofascist hygiene dictatorship based on the Chinese model. Three unspeakable years of the coronavirus pandemic have given us a comparatively harmless foretaste of this.
Notes
(1) Newby in an interview with journalist Paul D. Thacker, published on February 28, 2023.
(2) Official history of Fort Detrick, Memento from January 21, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20120121062629/http:/www.detrick.army.mil/cutting_edge/index.cfm?chapter=contents; B.D. Green, L. Battisti and C.B. Thorne, “Involvement of Tn4430 in Transfer of Bacillus anthracis Plasmids Mediated by Bacillus thringiensis Plasmid pX012a”, Journal of Bacteriology 171 (1989), pp. 104–113; “Dangerous viruses are gone,” Frankfurter Rundschau, September 25, 1986.
(3) https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/07/01/surveillance-for-heartland-bourbon-viruses-in-eastern-kansas/; https://galacticconnection.com/lyme-disease-mycoplasma-and-bioweapons-development-timeline/
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_112, section “Declassification”
(5) Jeanne Guillemin: Biological Weapons: From The Invention Of State-Sponsored Programs To Contemporary Bioterrorism (2005), S. 109-110.
(6) Siehe https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/07/31/tick-expert-admits-to-working-on-ticks-dropping-them-out-of-airplanes/; Marlin E. Rice & James H. Oliver, Jr.: “Ticks, Lyme Disease, and a Golden Gloves Champion,” American Entomologist 62 (4) 2016, pp. 206–213, doi:10.1093/ae/tmw073.
(7) Quoted from https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2021/11/12/interview-u-s-bioweapon-lab-suspected-of-source-of-lyme-disease/
(8) 7 news.cn, August 25, 2021: “Interview: U.S. bioweapon lab suspected of source of Lyme disease: expert.”
(9) Glen Yeadon/John Hawkins: The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century. Joshua Tree CA 2008, p. 381.
(10) Andrew Nikiforuk also blames the activities on Plum Island for the spread of Lyme disease, see his book Pandemonium: How Globalization and Trade are Putting the World at Risk, St. Lucia, Queensland 2007, p. 208.
(11) http://www.fstribune.com/story/2150107.html; https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/21.07.2019/got-15-minutes-the-officially-ignored-link-between-lyme-plum-island/
(12) pps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/660311.pdf, no longer available; see https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/12/19/its-1984/
(13) Patricia J. Langhoff: God Science – The Secret World of Rampant Genetics, Hidden Illness, and Biotech Profiteering (2011). In a book published in 2008, It’s All In Your Head, Around the World in 80 Lyme Patient Stories: Valid Reasons to Debate Current Treatment Guidelines, 80 patient experiences with Lyme disease from different countries are collected and documented. Many of those affected report that chronic cases are often not recognized by conventional medicine or are dismissed as “psychosomatic.” Langhoff questions the controversial official treatment guidelines.
(14) Quoted from https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-friends-lyme-disease-weaponization?
(15) See British Medical Journal 366/2019: “US Pentagon is told to investigate claims that Lyme disease is escaped bioweapon from cold war”; nj.com, September 24, 2021: “Did Pentagon turn ticks into bioweapons that spread Lyme Disease? House just approved a study,” https://www.nj.com/politics/2021/09/did-pentagon-turn-ticks-into-bioweapons-that-spread-lyme-disease-house-just-approved-a-study.html
(16) See Harald Wiesendanger: Corona puzzle – What is really behind this pandemic? Who benefits from it? What will the next one bring us?, June 2020.
Image sources:
Bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi: Photo Credit: Content Providers(s): CDC – This medium comes from the Public Health Image Library (PHIL), with identification number #6631 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Note: Cropped and uploaded originally to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Borrelia_image.jpg), public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=302837
Tick photo: Sven/Nicooografie – Pixabay
Graphic showing the spread of Lyme disease in the USA: https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2019/05/29/more-ticked-off-the-growing-threat-of-lyme-and-tick-borne-diseases/
Plum Island – aerial view: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/21.07.2019/got-15-minutes-the-officially-ignored-link-between-lyme-plum-island/