by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Does the causative agent of Lyme disease, one of the most insidious infectious diseases, come from an American biological weapons program? A US journalist claims to have discovered evidence of this.
Science journalist Kris Newby is one of nearly 400,000 Americans who contract it each year. In 2002, she and her husband Paul contracted the disease while vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the southern coast of Massachusetts. “It’s like having multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue, and joint pain all at the same time,” she describes her personal experience. “It’s primarily a neurological disease that leads to hyperinflammation Symptoms frequently travel throughout the body. You can be very debilitated, unable to perform the functions of a normal adult. We were distraught and went a year without a diagnosis.” She was with ten doctors. Nobody recognized what she was suffering from. Nobody knew what to do. “I thought it was the end of my life as I knew it.”
“These tick bites robbed us of our health,” Newby writes, “and sent me searching for an almost unimaginable possibility: that we were collateral damage in a biological weapons race that had begun during the Cold War.”
“It took us four to five years to fully recover.” (1) Her endured ordeal motivated Kris Newby to create a moving 2008 Academy Award-nominated documentary, Under Our Skin; six years later, she produced a sequel, Under Our Skin 2: Emergence.
The “invisible disease.”
Part of the reason why Lyme disease poses a particular medical challenge is that its symptoms mimic many other diseases, including multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, CFS, and even Alzheimer’s disease. This makes identifying them difficult and time-consuming. (2) To make matters worse, many Lyme disease patients look healthy on the outside. Even their blood values often give no cause for concern. It’s no coincidence that Lyme disease is considered an “invisible disease”. Doctors who are skeptical about it often have to accept the assumption that their problem is of a psychological nature and that they are “just imagining their symptoms”. Until the correct diagnosis is finally found, precious time elapses, during which the disease becomes chronic, causing ever greater suffering and becoming more and more challenging to treat.
Ticks transmit Lyme disease – and sometimes also by other biting insects – which are infected with the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. The bloodsuckers are not born with this pathogen. They pick it up from a host animal they infest (3), primarily mice and rats. (4) The habitats of their most important natural predators – including foxes, birds of prey, and snakes – are being destroyed by increasingly intensive agriculture and urban sprawl. Therefore, the populations of small rodents could increase more and more.
Borrelia burgdorferi poses a particularly insidious threat for several reasons. First, this bacterium can assume different shapes depending on the environment in the infested organism, allowing it to maneuver more skillfully, hide and survive. It is also one of the spirochetes: under the microscope, it appears as a spirally curved, very long, and flexible rod. Its corkscrew-like shape enables it to burrow deep into various body tissues, which is why it so often provides widespread multisystem involvement.
If detected early, Lyme disease can often be treated with antibiotics: doxycycline, ceftriaxone, vancomycin. However, the bacterium is often able to form a protective biofilm around itself, increasing its resistance to drugs. Faced with an antibiotic or immune system killer cells, it turns into a “dormant” cyst that can hide for months and years, only to strike again as soon as a weakened biological defense gives it the chance.
Lyme disease is also difficult to treat because ticks can also transmit other pathogens. Such co-infections can produce additional, very different symptoms; they often do not respond to measures against the bacterium burgdorferi. So getting all infections under control requires a sophisticated multi-pronged approach.
The official version
The man who named the pathogen its name is the discoverer of Lyme disease: Willy Burgdorfer, a bacteriologist and parasitologist from Switzerland. Throughout his professional life, he worked at Rocky Mountain Labs, a maximum biosafety level 4 (BSL 4) facility in Montana operated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an entity of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as its principal biomedical research agency. In the mid-1970s, according to the official narrative, Burgdorfer was commissioned to investigate an 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 suffered from remained a mystery at first but was eventually traced to ticks found in the local woods. Burgdorfer is said to have discovered the bacterium in the bloodsuckers in 1981, which today bears his name in his honor; Borrelia burgdorferi. As he found, it caused the disease.
He then published an article explaining that penicillin was a reliable means of killing the bacterium. Since then, the idea has persisted that Lyme disease can be treated quite easily. In fact, the opposite is the case.
Growing Doubts
How did Kris Newby come to doubt this story? She doesn’t have any clear evidence to the contrary, just circumstantial evidence, she admits. Taken together, however, they paint a highly suspicious picture in Newby’s eyes.
Why is Lyme disease more common in the United States than anywhere else on the planet?
The journalist met a former CIA agent at a party. He boasted of a Cold War-era operation that dropped infected ticks on Cuba. “At that point, I knew I wasn’t done with it,” says Newby. “I did some research, interviewed this CIA guy multiple times, and found it was a verifiable story.”
The fact that she was following a hot lead was confirmed when she met Willy Burgdorfer personally during the shooting of her documentary “Under Our Skin.” “He has suggested to several people that the origin of the outbreak was unnatural,” she said. “As it turned out, he was also under contract to Fort Detrick,” the notorious U.S. military base in Maryland where biological weapons had been developed and tested since World War II. (5) “When I interviewed Burgdorfer, he said, ‘Yes, I was in the bioweapons program. I was tasked with mass-producing ticks and mosquitoes.'” This was done as part of gain-of-function experiments “by mixing pathogens – bacteria and viruses – into ticks to create more effective bioweapons.”
Newby created an animation of the original eruption, which is said to have started at the mouth of the Connecticut River near Long Island. In doing so, she made a revealing discovery: “As I drew a 50-mile radius around this point, there were three new, highly virulent, tick-borne diseases emerging at the same time, in the late 1960s. That was 13 years before the Lyme bacterium was declared to be the cause of ‘Lyme disease’ in 1981.”
Now Newby began “searching the military records to see if the outbreak could be linked to bioweapons accidents. In doing so, I uncovered a large-scale program of producing insect weapons and a program involving the spraying of germs from airplanes over large areas, “Project 112,”: an experimental U.S. Department of Defense program allegedly suspended in 1973, the existence of which had been categorically denied until May 2000. (6) “Some of these pathogens were tick-borne diseases that were freeze-dried and sprayed as an aerosol.”
“Burgdorfer had worked with Q fever and ticks, experiences Rocky Mountain Labs needed for their bioweapons work. Once he received security clearance, he began injecting 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 Detrick were looking for ticks that could be dropped on an enemy without raising suspicion, and that was filled with pathogens to which the target population had no natural immunity (…) Ticks were the perfect stealth weapon, untraceable and long-lasting (…) It’s about what Burgdorfer said they want to cover up: 1) that another bacterium, maybe a rickettsia, related to Rocky Mountain spotted fever was developed as a bioweapon during the Cold War; 2) that it could be a combination of germs in the ticks that makes people sick.”
It is also surprising that the U.S. government has been operating a biological research facility on Plum Island, less than ten kilometers as the crow flies from Old Lyme – the site of the first official Lyme disease outbreak – since 1945 – access restricted, highly secured, shrouded in secrecy. From there to Long Island is just a mile, about 1600 meters. As a report from the U.S. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed in 2005 that deadly pathogens, including West Nile virus, Nipah virus, and Rift Valley fever, have been experimented with on Plum Island. (7) The prominent investigative journalist Karl Grossman also suspects Plum Island of having triggered the worldwide epidemic of Lyme disease. (8th)
What Kris Newby found, she presented in her 2019 book, Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons—a true thriller that made waves.
“Ticks were the perfect stealth weapon.“
One congressman, Republican Chris Smith, was so impressed by the evidence that he requested a review. He was successful: In July 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives actually directed the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate whether the Department of Defense “experimented ticks and other insects for use as biological weapons between 1950 and 1975” — and infected ticks unleashed upon the unsuspecting American public “accidentally or by attempt.” (9)
Open questions for the conspiracy theorist
As expected, the investigation came to nothing. There was no solid evidence; well-known experts immediately declared Newby’s suspicions to be absurd. “Ticks and Lyme disease would be a very odd choice for a targeted bioweapon because ticks are difficult to handle, don’t have wings, and Lyme disease would hardly be a power robber,” said Robert Peterson, professor of entomology at Montana State University.
“That’s a really weak allegation,” agreed Jeffrey Lockwood, a professor of science and humanities at the University of Wyoming. In his 2010 book Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War, he wrote about experiments reported to the U.S. Army on biological warfare using ticks, flies, and fleas. During the Cold War, she researched whether ticks could be used to spread tularemia, relapsing fever, and Colorado fever. Despite this, Lockwood remains “deeply skeptical” that the military uses ticks has used to transmit Lyme disease.” Ticks are not the best vector for the spread of bioweapons because they don’t get very far, and Lyme disease is a slow-acting pathogen.” Other tick-borne diseases are much worse for humans. “The Weaponizing Lyme disease with a tick vector just doesn’t make sense,” says Lockwood – which, of course, does not rule out that been tinkered with for a while. “On the other hand, to be honest, the development of U.S. military weapons didn’t always make sense either.”
Although cases of Lyme disease do occur near the northeast coast of the USA, the alleged test area is actually more common than in most other regions – they are no more common there than, for example, in parts of Wisconsin, more than 1500 km further west:
If the military in Connecticut actually released ticks with bioengineered pathogens – shouldn’t the disease progression there since then be much worse than in other U.S. states, let alone in Europe and northern Asia, where Lyme has also been spreading epidemically for decades? The supposed “weapon” was probably more of a non-starter.
Unfortunately, key witness Burgdorfer himself can no longer comment on this. He died in 2014.
Gain-of-function research must finally come to an end. Immediately.
Whether Lyme disease, Covid-19, or other infectious diseases are due to biotechnological tinkering in laboratories or not; if so, whether such fiendish creations escaped accidentally or were released intentionally: does it ultimately matter? The important thing is that it could have been like this. And it could happen again at any time, with catastrophic consequences that would be far worse than any nuclear meltdown. Around the world, armies of diligent scientists are working on behalf of the military, secret services, and corporations in hundreds of high-security laboratories like mad to make already dangerous pathogens even more contagious, even more pathogenic, and even more deadly. Leaks keep coming. The very next could mean the end of mankind. Or it gives us a comprehensive “protective,” biofascist hygiene dictatorship, of which three years of the corona pandemic have only offered us a comparatively harmless foretaste.
(Harald Wiesendanger)
Remarks
1 So Newby in einem Interview mit dem Journalisten Paul D. Thacker, veröffentlicht am 28. Februar 2023.
2 Symbiosis (2009) 47/2009, S. 51-58 (PDF) http://www1.biogema.de/WEK/312-Margulis-final.pdf
4 Journal of Infectious Diseases 1996 Nov;174(5):1108-11, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8896518 ; Journal of Medical Entomology 1997 Jul;34(4):489-93), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9220684
5 Offizielle Historie von Fort Detrick, Memento vom 21. Januar 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”, J. of Bacteriology, 171 (1989), S. 104–113; „Gefährliche Viren sind weg“, Frankfurter Rundschau, 25. September 1986.
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_112, Abschnitt “Declassification”
7 news.cn, 25.8.2021: “Interview: U.S. bioweapon lab suspected of source of lyme disease: expert”, http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/25/c_1310146419.htm
8 http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/25/c_1310146419.htm
9 Siehe British Medical Journal 366/2019: “U.S. Pentagon is told to investigate claims that Lyme disease is escaped bioweapon from cold war”, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l4784; nj.com, 24.9.2021: “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
Image source
Bakterium Borrelia burgdorferi: Von Photo Credit:Content Providers(s): CDC – Dieses Medium stammt aus der Public Health Image Library (PHIL), mit der Identifikationsnummer #6631 der Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Hinweis: Cropped and uploaded originally to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Borrelia_image.jpg), Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=302837
Foto Zecke: Sven/Nicooografie – Pixabay
Grafik Verbreitung Lyme-Borreliose in USA: https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2019/05/29/more-ticked-off-the-growing-threat-of-lyme-and-tick-borne-diseases/
Lyme Disease, Lyme, Lyme Disease, Bioweapon, Biological Weapons Program, Fort Detrick, Plum Island, Kris Newby, Tick, Willy Burgdorfer, Borrelia burgdorferi, Project 112, Robert Peterson, Jeffrey Lockwood, Harald Wiesendanger, Gain-of-Function Research