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- [00:00]
A
Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me.
- [00:02]
B
Hi Marty. Thanks for inviting me on.
- [00:05]
A
Well, I'm very excited to do this for the audience out there who may not know. Sitting down with Chris Newby, who's an award winning science writer, investigative journalist and senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary Under Our Skin. She also wrote a book called Bitten the Secret History of Lyme Disease and biological weapons. In 2019. You won three awards for that book. But I think most importantly, you're delving into this particular line of investigative reporting started because you and your husband were bitten by ticks in Martha's Vineyard in 2002 and basically went on a wild goose chase to figure out what happened to you. And through that process sort of went bankrupt and went down this rabbit hole. So this is a beat you've been covering for over two decades now at this point. And as I was saying before I hit record, it's a very, very top of mind for many people here in the US as ticks seem to be exploding in population and diseases like Lyme and alpha gall begin to pop up all over the place.
- [01:17]
B
Yeah, I never, I was a tech writer in Silicon Valley and I have an engineer, two engineering degrees, and I never in million years imagined that I would be on the tick beat for the rest of my life. But what happened to our family was so devastating. And after I figured out what was wrong and we both got back, my husband and I both got back on our feet, I said I never want this to happen to another family again. So I'm doing everything I can to educate people to get fast treatment.
- [01:53]
A
Is that the most important thing, getting on top of it as quickly as possible?
- [01:59]
B
Yeah. If you pulled out an engorged tick and went on a couple weeks of doxycycline, you would go on with your life and never think about it again. The main thing about ticks is they can inject you with up to 20 tick borne diseases, some are deadly, and the saliva of the tick suppresses your immune system and whatever's in the tick can punk your immune system. And if you don't get on it right away, you could be sick for the rest of your life. So that's what I've decided to dedicate the rest of my life to, is to prevent that.
- [02:43]
A
Well, I think before we jump in, jump into the more topical questions that are on, on people's minds as it pertains to alpha gall, these, these boxes that people have been talking about and Lyme, Lyme vaccines that may be hitting the Market this summer, I think getting into the backstory and the heat. The Heart of Bitten, the book that you wrote about the history of governments experimenting with this and its relation to the Cold War. I think maybe starting there, particularly with Willy Ergdorfer and his story and how he came to discover Lyme disease.
- [03:25]
B
Yeah. So Bitten is half my medical memoir and then the other half is about this Swiss scientist zoologist who came over here in 1951 to be in the bioweapons program. And his particular role was to weaponize fleas, ticks and mosquitoes so that we could drop them on our enemies during the Cold War. So this, this was not known until I sat down with him and got a bunch of his files that had been hidden in his garage. But it's sort of shocking, but I, I believe that a lot of our tick borne disease problems have been worsened in part because of those irresponsible government experiments. Part of what I would like is more ethical oversight with biomedical experiments that the government is conducting.
- [04:29]
A
It's been a big topic this decade, obviously with gain of function research and theories of that contributing to Covid 19's development and proliferation. And I think I've been privy to the Plum island theories that have been around for a while, and I think I would agree with you. I would like more transparency and insight into whether or not our government has actively been experimenting with us both on the tick borne diseases side and the, the viruses side of things with things like Covid. And it is insane to think that our government could do something like this in a lab, unleash it on the public, either knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, and have it explode to a point where I think this year specifically, people are legitimately fearful to go outside to play in the woods because they don't want to get Lyme's disease or Alpha gallery.
- [05:30]
B
Yeah. And a lot of people say to me, well, the tick releases happen 40, 50 years ago. What does it matter? And it does, because Willie Burgdorfer and his little lab in Rocky Mountain, in Hamilton, Montana, the Rocky Mountain labs run by the nih, was putting all sorts of horrible diseases in the ticks and the fleas and the mosquitoes. And our current surveillance for how tick diseases are spreading is very flawed. And it would really help researchers and save research dollars to know what diseases were engineered and where were they released. For example, I mean, the first cases of Lyme were in northern Wisconsin. And why did they start there? Well, University of Wisconsin at Madison was Doing all sorts of bioweapons experiments. And a lot of times widows would sell their farms to the. The bioweapons. I mean, the, the head of that program in Wisconsin, and they would conduct open air experiments. So I mean, it would, it would help everyone to know what was released, where and when.
- [06:52]
A
Yeah. You spent a lot of time with Willie before his death in 2014 talking about this. I believe in my research. Haven't been able to read the full book yet, but did the best I could to get as much as possible. But I think at one point he said cryptically that he didn't tell you everything about the origins of Lyme disease. And the narrative that the government and media was putting out there is completely contradictory to reality.
- [07:22]
B
Yeah. And yeah, so I did a series of interviews with him. The first interview was for the documentary under our Skin, where he said we were there setting up lights and cameras with Andy Wilson, the very talented director and producer who I tagged along with for the five years it took to get that out. He was setting up lights for about 45 minutes. And all of a sudden there's a boom, boom, boom on the front door of Willie's house. We couldn't get anyone in the government, in the CDC or the NIH to go on camera about Lyme disease, like what it is and why it's so hard to diagnose, treat and cure. It turns out to be a head scientist at the Rocky Mountain lab, which was just like two and a half blocks away from Willie's house. And he says, I've been told to sit in on this interview. And the director was just appalled, like, you can't do that. Willie's retired, He's a private citizen. And it was a very tense, confrontational interchange. And I was afraid the labs would shut us down. But anyways, the scientists left. We went on with the interview. During the interview, Willie said some things that no one in the government had ever said, which is, yeah, we know that Lyme disease can be chronic, affect the nervous system very seriously, and it's worse for kids who get it, who have developing neurological systems. And then we were shutting down the lights. This was a very long interview. And then he. A little sly smile. He says, I didn't tell you everything. So that his interview was like that alone was shocking because it was the first time anyone at NIH had admitted that Lyme could go on to be chronic. And a lot of them still deny that, but it was like a nagging worry of mine. But we had to get the film out we'd been filming for three years and the editing was really involved. But so anyways, after the film, I said, well, I'm done with Lyme disease. I was doing the film when I was recovering, so I was sick half the time. And I told my husband, Paul, I'm done. I'm going to go on with my life. I got a really good job in the Stanford med school writing science stuff. And then two weeks after that, I went to a Texas birthday party. It was my husband's family. I didn't know anybody there. So I was sitting around the kitchen table talking to this other guy who wasn't one of the few people who wasn't part of the family. And he was an old grizzly guy and he was into his cups. And I said, so what did you do before you retired? And he says, I worked for the company. I was CIA black ops. So it was just like of all the gin joints in all the world. And then he went on to talk about, like, the horrible things he did in Vietnam because he had a guilty conscience and his wife had just left him. And then at the very end of these stories that had all of us at the table with wide eyes like dropping decapitated skulls on the Viet Cong war crimes, he said, well, the weirdest thing I'd ever done was drop infected ticks on the Cuban sugarcane workers. It was Operation Mongoose for Colonel Lansdale, who was dirty ops. So all of a sudden, this must be a movie or something. I can't believe this is happening to me because this. There's no way this guy could have known. I just spent five years investigating the tick weaponization program for which there were. There was no public information of us ever doing bioweapons operations on. In foreign nations. So anyways, then I. That's. That's when I said, well, I can't walk away from this story. No one else is going to want to do it. It's too hot to handle. So I did it and I started the research process, which was long. I can get into it, but it might be a diversion. It's in the book. So part of this, the book is me, how I finally extracted all the information and the confirmation of the Cuban tick drop ended up coming out a couple years later in the JFK assassination files, of all places, because that all those operations were part of wanting to dethrone Castro, the communist leader of Cuba.
- [12:30]
A
Okay, now I have many questions.
- [12:32]
B
Okay, fire away.
- [12:34]
A
Well, I guess the order of operations, the question is like, why ticks? What. Why what makes ticks good agents to spread this, these types of diseases? Did they, did they know the long term ramifications of something like line or alpha gall when they were, when they were weaponizing these ticks? And did they understand the potential for them to break containment? Was this truly targeted at the Cuban regime or their even more nefarious sort of intent behind it, making people more broadly affected by the spread of these diseases and therefore more dependent on the system to a certain degree.
- [13:22]
B
So let's start out why. First of all, you have to frame it in history. This was the Cold War. We would do anything to fight the communists. It was an existential threat. And that's where stuff like MK Ultra came about. New, more lethal chemical weapons, which is what I talk about in my next book. But let me just read the Army's description of why they thought chicks were a good idea. So I hold this out. Okay. In 1953, the Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland established a program to study the use of arthropods. Those are ticks, fleas and mosquitoes for spreading anti personnel bioweapons agents. The advantage of arthropods as bioweapons carriers are these. They inject the agent directly into the body so that a mask is no protection to a soldier and they will remain alive for some time, keeping an area constantly dangerous. So what it did was it would disable soldiers and everyone around them and then it would tie up medical resources. And Willie at that time in ticks was mixing multiple diseases. So he specifically was mixing, let's see, Rocky Mountain spotted fever with Colorado tick fever virus. It's not clear if he was able to do that. But if you were to drop something like that in an area that you wanted to eventually invade, there would be no fingerprints on the ticks. It would just be hard to solve crime and then everybody would get sick and that would be easy for ground forces to go in and take over. And oh, by the way, you wouldn't destroy the infrastructure like you would with a bomb, a nuclear bomb. So some people called it bioweapons. Poor man's nuke. I had some arm. I had a report from some army bean counter said tick borne tularemia, which is still on the select agent list, you could kill a person for $1.33.
- [15:49]
A
Pretty cheap.
- [15:53]
B
That's what I mean about we need some sort of bioethical overview if this kind of stuff makes sense. Because okay, you release a bunch of ticks on a enemy city and or area and then, well, what about the soldiers who go in. There's no way to tell the ticks. Okay, you can only buy Soviets.
- [16:14]
A
Yeah, well, you have the chart here too, on your side. I'll pull it up. But going back to the question of could they foresee the expansion and proliferation of these tick populations throughout time? If you're dropping it somewhere, you have the. The Lyme disease numbers over time here in this gif. And as you can see, it's spreading pretty rapidly. And I think that's one thing that is obvious this year specifically, is you have a bunch of people going on hikes and running farms, whatever it may be, and highlighting that the number of ticks that they're encountering is far beyond what they've ever seen historically. And so they're wondering, why is this? Are ticks just naturally invasive species that will have these population explosions if there aren't natural predators in the area that you're dropping them? Is there some accelerated attempt to artificially increase their populations? And I think maybe that gets into the question of these boxes that people are talking about, but is this a Frankenstein that the government has lost control of, I think is what many people are worried about.
- [17:34]
B
Well, there's multiple components to that question. First of all, Willie did try to get ticks to produce faster so they could just have tick boxes ready to go, but he said he was not able to do that. But. So why are ticks exploding right now? On the face of it, legitimate scientists will say, well, climate change, some places that have bad winters, the ticks, a certain percentage of the ticks would get killed off, and that would keep the population down. Another thing is housing is proliferating into tick habitats, so people are exposed to it more. Then the other thing is that deers are cute and we're more reluctant not to shoot them and kill them. Ticks are where deer are, where ticks overwinter and breed and lay their 3,000 eggs. So that's safe haven for legitimate scientists. I would suggest that the military intervention and tick releases, uncontrolled tick releases are part of the problem. And you could see on that chart in the USA Today has the newer numbers on their chart from the weekend. But somehow Lyme disease started spreading in an aggressive way around the 70s. No one's asking why. There are two things that could be going on there. One is Willie told me when he was sent out to investigate what was happening with the Lyme sickness, he said it wasn't just the Lyme bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferae, named after him. There was another organism that was mixed in the ticks and he suggested it was a Rickettsia like Rocky man and spotted fever, the most dangerous tick borne bacteria in the US it was in the drafts of his original article on the discovery. But somehow between the handwritten draft that I got a copy of and what published in Science magazine, the discussion about a second Rickettsia germ that may or may not have been weaponized, because they were working on that, I have documents on that. He was asked to cover it up. Really the question is, if you name a disease that people get Lyme disease, is it really two different organisms that made people so quick? Could have been a virus too, because they were experimenting with viruses too. So that's one factor. Is was there a military open air experiment there? And can we get records for that? The other thing that happened which is related to Alpha Gal is In the late 60s, this young ambitious bug scientist, Daniel Sonnenschein, who was at Old Dominion College and they wanted to be at real university. So Daniel somehow got some military contracts and started doing tick experiments. Because at that time they were looking for a tick that would survive Russian winters and that they can inject with various things. So he was reporting to the army in the Atomic Energy Commission. And what happened is in this set of experiments, it was in Norfolk, Virginia, near Norfolk, Virginia, which is on the Atlantic Bird Flyway. You can probably pull up a picture of that on my website. And what, what he did was he ordered some pregnant ticks grab the girl Gravitix from Willie at Rocky Mountain Labs. And he had a lot of them and he made them radioactive. He injected the pregnant ticks with a radioactive fluid. So when they laid their 3,000 eggs, all the ticks that were born would be radioactive. Why would he do that? So he could track their spread over months to years. Because the military would need to know if I dropped poison ticks on an enemy, how long it would take to infect this city or whatever it was. So what he did was he went out to a couple swampy lots, marked off meter grids, put a thousand ticks in each grid of the radioactive ticks, and then he'd go out with his lackey students every month, collect the ticks in grid each grid, see how many of the radioactive ticks were there, then he'd go and put them back. And if there were new ticks in the grid, he would paint them with fluorescent paint. And that way he could track them. He also tracked how many of them the bird migrations, because they'd want to know some of the ticks would go on the birds. One of his papers said it would take five days for a tick to go from coastal Virginia up to Long Island, New York, like a year or two after his Virginia experiments. All of a sudden the ticks that he was experimenting with, they were the Lone Star ticks, the ticks that carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the ticks that spread Alpha Gal allergy. Before those experiments, that tick was only native south of the Mason Dixon line. When he put it to the north in Virginia on the bird flyway. All of a sudden these ticks were starting to get established in Long island and all of a sudden there was an outbreak of rocky mounted spotted fever and people were dying. That's the list of radioactive ticks that he released. Those are the only releases that were published. There could be more. So what's wrong with that? He's taking. First of all, Lone Star ticks are very aggressive. And they were the only tick in North America that had eyes on their shoulders. They not only just sense carbon dioxide on a blade of grass like the deer ticks did, but they would actively stalk prey because they could see them and smell them. They swarm and they can just spread more diseases. Then the other thing is they carry spotted fever, the most deadly bacterium tick borne bacterium in the US and then the Alpha Gal. Nobody has a good explanation as to how Alpha Gal all of a sudden started being a real thing. We noticed it in the 80s, so I've never been able to determine if it's part of the bioweapons program or what. But I should explain what Alpha Gal is because I haven't done that yet.
- [25:23]
A
Yeah, please. Because as somebody who loves red meat, it scares the hell out of me.
- [25:28]
B
Yeah, it's horrible. Okay, so in the bite of a lone start tick transmits a protein, Alpha Gal that creates, that starts circulating your blood. It's an allergen and it creates a condition where every time you eat red meat you get an allergic reaction. But it's not like a wasp sting. You'll wake up two, six hours later in the middle of the night and you might be vomiting nauseous hives, you might even go into anaphylactic shock. It isn't just a one time deal. Usually it happens on the second bite of a Lone Star tick. It can be a lifelong allergy. I don't think it'll be that way forever. But right now it's just people are waking up to it. Like what? And it takes people a long time to get Diagnosed. Okay, so then let's say you get diagnosed with alpha Gal allergy. It's almost impossible to avoid meat products right now. They're in the gelatin capsules in your vitamins or your medications. All of a sudden you have to tell your pharmacy, I can't have any medications with a bovine based capsule. Or let's say you go to your Jersey subs and say, I want a turkey sandwich because bird meat doesn't seem to be that bad. You have to tell them, okay, do not cut the turkey where you cut the ham or the beef sandwich. Some people are so allergic they can't even go to a Texas barbecue without having respiratory issues. So serious and not much money is being spent on research about what to do.
- [27:31]
A
Yeah, I've heard acupuncture works or SAAT as we've been talking about it. More people have been responding with that. And that's like to your point, I think you sort of hedge like this could be a lifelong allergen, but you don't think that'll be the way that'll be the case forever. And that's like we've been covering this for a few months now as it's becoming more prominent. And that's like one of the first responses we'll get is the, well, actually you can treat this. And it's like, well, actually we shouldn't have to treat this. Is this really a government bioweapons program that broke containment and is having a very drastic negative effect on hundreds of thousands of Americans now at this point? And if so, are these people going to be held accountable and what does it say about our government and what they'll do to their own populace and maybe if we're being generous, what they'll do to to our enemies that that can break containment and begin to affect the populace. It's insane that we have a government that is actively doing things like this in the sphere of bioweapons and biologic biological warfare. And like I said, I think Covid becoming clear to me at least that the nih, the Wuhan Lab and Fort Dietrich experimentation with gain of function, that they're obviously doing this stuff. And I think it is sensible to question number one, why? And number two, how do we make them stop if we can?
- [29:10]
B
I know there has been some positive movement under Kennedy to get the gain of function experimentation under control, but there's just so much money in it right now, I don't know if they'll win. What I did with Lyme disease to try and figure out why it's such a disaster zone for people trying to get diagnosed and treated. It's because first of all, ticks are intricately tied to the bioweapons program now and the tick borne diseases. A lot of those research grants require a security clearance. If you're a smart researcher in arthropods or tick borne diseases, you'll get a security clearance and then all of a sudden that's a competitive advantage to other researchers who, they're in an obscure field and they might not be able to get funding, but if you have a security clearance, less competition for those grants. And you're also like a tick tapping into the very, very large biosecurity budget. That's why the whole Wuhan lab people and university, the state, the North Carolina University are fighting it because man, that was easy money.
- [30:37]
A
Well, I mean you highlighted this as one of the things to talk about, the money printing machine. How do you realign incentives to make sure this isn't the case? Because it seems like it's a case of oh, I can produce not only career, I can de risk career risk by working in this very niche, but considered highly important field by the government and they will throw insane amounts of money at it. It's, it's to your point, it's hard to get people to, to actively work towards making so, making it so their, their career isn't as stable as they thought it was previously.
- [31:21]
B
Right, right, yeah. And because of the security clearance requirement, I feel like the tick borne diseases don't have the a team of researchers with bright ideas and a deeper knowledge of genetics and genetic manipulation. The old researchers have circled their wagons around Lyme disease. You look at a new fellowship student, they just got their PhD and they need to work under someone in a lab. Well, the security clearance could take a year, maybe more. Now some of those tick borne pathogens are bio level three, especially the rickettsy. They can't risk their career on just twiddling their thumbs for a year before they get clearances. That's why we have a lot of really, really old people. What I did was I went through the last 20 years of grants at the NIH under Fauci. I found out that a huge percentage of the Lyme disease and tick borne disease grants went to internal NIH projects. So those are people who aren't necessarily eager to sequence these germs and say oh yeah, NIH at that time during the cold war, we were trying to solve tick borne diseases, make people healthier, but we were also trying to Create germs of mass destruction. That would be career suicide in NIH to take all that money that Congress said we needed to spend on breakthroughs for Lyme disease. Same with the people at the universities. They don't want to do that anyways because NIH is where they get all their funding.
- [33:10]
A
Yeah, it seems like Fauci and NIH are at the core of the problems here. The moral hazard that exists in the realm of medical research and bioweapons.
- [33:22]
B
Right. And when Lyme was discovered and when Fauci moved into the number two spot at niaid, that's the infectious diseases group in nih, that's when the laws changed and the Bayh Dole act passed. So that all of a sudden scientists and the universities and the agencies like CDC and NIH could make discoveries and then they could become business partners with pharma. When Lyme disease happened, all these guys looked, I call them the carpet baggers. They looked at the microscope, at this spirochete, and they patented the proteins on the surface. Then they could team up with pharma and say, if anybody uses this genetic sequence of proteins on the surface of this bacteria that in a vaccine or a test kit, I get a cut of the profits. So immediately pharma teamed up with these researchers and they realized, well, the vaccines are annual moneymakers. People have to go in to get a Lyme vaccine every month or every year versus the cure, which is just at the time I started my film, it was $10 of doxycycline covered by insurance. So it's like, no, we're going to do the vaccine. And so they had to bolster the myth that two pills of doxy cure the disease and then they'd go on and have chronic diseases and oh, then we could sell more vaccines and we could sell the anti inflammatory drugs and the antidepressants to treat the symptoms of chronically Lyme. Then meantime, people at the CDC or the nih, they could get a cut from all these drugs and vaccines. They could more than double their salary, their government salary. But from a scientific point of view, they corrupted the foundational science. Because pharma could say, oh, that discovery you made on Lyme disease that might cure people, that's intellectual property. And that secret. And so then scientists weren't going to conferences and sick sharing information because most initial discoveries are wrong in science. And then it takes multiple brains to get it back on track and add value to the discoveries.
- [36:02]
A
Yeah, I mean, as it pertains to the vaccine, we're getting The. Is this the first Lyme vaccine that's coming out this summer from. From Pfizer?
- [36:11]
B
No, it's third.
- [36:13]
A
Third.
- [36:15]
B
There were two other vaccines around 1990, and a lot of scientists were on contract with the vaccine manufacturer, so there's some belief that they weren't telling the truth about what they understood about the disease. And I don't want to get in it here, but read Pam Weintraub's book, Cure Unknown, and she was there in the vaccine hearings and she has the receipts for who was paid off. So that's the best book to read on that.
- [36:46]
A
Okay, we'll bring it back to the tick boxes. I'm sure you've seen the video.
- [36:51]
B
Yeah, of course. My email boxes are flooded. My text with, oh, my gosh, someone's dropping boxes of ticks on Missouri farmers lots. And of course I feel bad because I might be responsible for those rumors in some part, but I followed up, so I traced it to the original rumor, which was from. From a holistic doctor. I don't know what that means. From Iowa. And her name is Sarah Outlaw. And I called her and she goes, well, yeah, actually, that report of a tick box on a farm was secondhand from a colleague from Missouri, and she said she heard it from an Amish farmer. So there's only one box secondhand. So that's where that rumor came from. And she was surprised that she got about a million hits. She's also health and wellness influencer. And so I was going, oh, my gosh, I want to do this side research project to see if this is true or not. But luckily, a senior reporter at Snopes, a fact checking group, his name is Jordan Lyles. He went and called about 100 Missouri officials, and no one in Missouri has heard about this rumor from the farmers that might report it or whatever. So I think Jordan, I talked with him briefly this weekend and he said no new news. And we called hundreds of officials. This has not been confirmed. That said, I would say that dropping ticks on the farms would. There's rumors that Pfizer did it to sell their vaccines. My point of view is the tick problem in the US Is already completely out of control because of the factors I mentioned earlier. And it's just now we're waking up how big the problem is because the range of the ticks is slowly increasing from ground zero, which was Lyme, Connecticut and Long Island.
- [39:21]
A
Well, how do you. To that point, regardless if the government or some big pharma company is dropping ticks, I think to your point it's been spreading slowly but surely over time. How do you combat it? How do you slow the growth or decrease the tick populations? Do we just need to have guinea fowl and chickens roaming across grasslands in the affected areas for a number of years? Is this a reversible problem or is this something that we're going to have to live with in perpetuity?
- [39:55]
B
Well, climate change is part of the problem, but my best friend just bought a farm in Wisconsin. And because the government hasn't acknowledged that it's really a countrywide problem now and we need to think big, use AI for strategies. It's up to the individuals. Now. There's bait boxes, so you buy boxes with anti tickets medicine and for mice and it's got nice warm nesting box for the mice and then they get this anti tick medicine on them when they go in it. You can collect ticks on your yard with these CO2 boxes. You can make your own or I don't know if anyone buys them. I sort of suspect that maybe this tick box rumor started from the CO2 collection boxes. But dry ice, put dry ice and they go in there because they're attracted to the CO2 that your body emits or any mammal and then guinea fowl or chickens that helps you build a perimeter around your lawn where there's no leaf litter for the ticks to collect. And then in the big tick season you probably spray some chemical to keep them away. So that's, that's all I know about. But there are better websites online that have advice from people that have to deal with it every day. I moved to Utah. There are not many ticks here.
- [41:31]
A
Well that, I mean it's. Again, I think this goes back to government accountability too. Like what are your hopes in terms of, of that? I saw there was a GAO announcement that they're going to look into it. I think earlier today that came out or maybe yesterday. It does look like enough people are making enough noise that the government's saying okay, looks like we got to look into this. Do you think it's a national emergency that demands a federal government investigation in response in action?
- [42:08]
B
The good news, a first step was taken this year because Chris Smith of New Jersey, a congressman from New Jersey, after five years of trying, finally got an amendment in the DoD budget that says they have to declassify all this tick borne weapons program info. So what was released where? So that's the first step and that a GAA GAO Government Accounting Office report needs to be released in about a year and a Half. So that's the first step. That said, it could be like the Epstein files. You might get five pages with blackouts on them, but that's the first step. We have RFK Jr in office whose whole family has been affected drastically by Lyme disease. I mean, he has places up in that hot zone. He goes to Martha's Vineyard a lot. That's where my husband and I were bitten. In Martha's Vineyard in Nantucket, you get Lyme and this other really horrible disease. It's a parasite called babesiosis. It's a red blood cell parasite. So when you get those two together, it's hard to cure. So that's the first step. I don't know. I don't know. I mean I've been in it 20 years and I thought we would have made more progress. But at this point in time I am optimistic that things will get better.
- [43:49]
A
What was the most radicalizing thing about doing this research over the last 20 years?
- [43:59]
B
I never would have imagined that they had done these things. Even Daniel Sonnenschein who released the radioactive ticks, who has no moral boundaries. He just laughed when I said, well, did you get any approval for these open air tick experiments? He just laughed and says, I got a city permit. I could never get this approved nowadays. He just laughed it off. Okay, what was the most surprising? Well, first of all, if you've gone through six years of being really, really sick from a disease that the medical establishment and the government are in denial, it was very dark and depressing to go through the research. I turned that depression into action. So wow, I can get over this depression if I just help other people. The main advice I have is take every tick bite seriously. Don't get gaslit by a doctor that says wait and see, that's what happened to us. And then a year later we're almost incurable because of the two tick borne diseases. I would say send the ticks that you pull out in to have them screened for all the worst tick borne diseases. It's like might, it might be free through your public health department or it might be 75 or $100. But that is cheaper and faster than a human test. The human tests aren't very good right now mostly. And it takes their antibody tests which, from COVID you know, it takes a while for antibodies to develop when you get a disease. So you have to wait three weeks before the human tests work. But tick tests, they're mostly DNA based fast couple days. So that's what I would say.
- [45:58]
A
That's good. To know. I mean, you said, get the gentleman's name. That he was really unabashed and how egregious he was. But I think he wrote in the book that Willie did have. Did have some regrets in terms of what he worked on and what he contributed to.
- [46:20]
B
Yeah. And I'm from a military family. My dad was a Navy pilot who brought the first gallons or drums of Agent Orange to Vietnam. So I think at some deep level, I'm wondering, how can all the people in the military organization not think about the bigger implications? They're just following orders. So if we look at Willie, that's the interesting thing about what I learned about him for the book. Bitten. He was a very smart, ambitious Swiss researcher who had a chance to come over to America. He was excited. He went to this Rocky Mountain lab. He got his own assistant. He never would have gotten that kind of freedom in Switzerland. And then he realized what he had to do. He went up to Canada and saw all these nerve agent and biological experiments up there. And then he took what he learned there and brought them to his lab. And that's where he started doing the horrible experiments he was doing. So he was with the program. But as he got older, just like we all do, we realize we look at the bigger picture. He was stuffing plague in fleas. This is the disease that wiped out a huge percentage of the population of Europe. Several times he would come home to his new kids and he couldn't help thinking, what am I doing? And then at a certain point in his 40s, he would go to conferences in Europe and he would think he could move back to Europe. But no. All his best work was classified because it was about killing people. He was stuck. Like someone who might join the CIA or the Mafia. You can't put that on your resume. It's hard to get a new job, so he's stuck there. But then the tipping point was when he. Well, did he discover Lyme disease? That's a complicated question. But when he got the credit for discovering Lyme disease, he was working night and day to bolster the evidence and learn more about it on the weekends. The techs weren't in there to clean the infected rabbit cages, so he said infected urine splashed in his eyes and he got Lyme disease. And he had multiple bullseye rashes down the side. I have pictures of that. And then he believes that caused Parkinson's in him, that he suffered a few years later. And he had to go on workers comp. I have his workers comp documentation where he shows the rashes and everything, and had to take time off. So then he realized how bad. Oh, there it is. How. How bad the disease is. And that's when he started talking to Lyme advocates and journalists. And I was just one of several people he talked to.
- [49:31]
A
Yeah, you see. Yeah, he became affected by the disease that he helped potentially create and spread. And. Yeah, it's insane that humans can do this stuff. What is it about? It reminds me of like the Stanford. What is it? The Stanford prison experiment, where an authority figure tells you to hurt another human because you've got clearance to do so. You'll just do it. And how that level of psychosis reaches critical parts of our government and is weaponized against the populace. I mean, maybe originally the intent was to weaponize against enemies, but I think we find that a lot of that research typically ends up being focused on the population at large at some point down the road anyway, too. What is the government even for? Are they here to help us? Is a question I am constantly asking myself.
- [50:37]
B
Well, I spent a lot of time thinking about that for my second book, which is about nerve agents. And it's the Nazi prison guard question. Like, how did well meaning Germans all of a sudden become Nazi prison guards? Oh, here's a bar of soap. Come into the shower. And the same thing at Dugway proving grounds. And the nerve agents, they were very isolated in a compound in the desert, and their work was so secretive, they couldn't share it with their family or friends or the people at church. You know, if you said, oh, I. I put a drop of nerve agent in a goat today, you know, your neighbors would go, what? You know, and you would respond to it. But they're in this happy circle and they're just given lists of experiments to do every day. Same with Willie. And you're in a bubble, and to me, it's like slow acting novocaine. You all of a sudden don't feel about the 10,000 guinea pigs that died. You're not thinking about life.
- [51:56]
A
Just think about the results of the experiments that you're told around.
- [51:59]
B
Right.
- [52:01]
A
You have it in your notes here. There's a specific call out for people going to the Hamptons this summer to be aware of the ticks there. Why the Hamptons?
- [52:12]
B
Well, that's. Well, it's just the same as Martha's Vineyard in Nantucket. It's a hot spot. And none of the real estate or tourism boards want you to know how bad it is. What do I think about that? I think that if you don't Go out in nature, they win. We're part of nature. We're healthier when we're outside in the sunlight watching birds, fishing or whatever. And you need to go out into nature, but just take precautions. Use some sort of repellent on your clothing. Wash your clothes after you go outside, because that's how I think my husband and I got it. We did tick checks, but we re wore our beach clothes the second day and they were hanging out there, I think. And so tick checks, repellent. Just be aware. And then, like I said, you pull out an engorged tick. Oh, my gosh. Treat it seriously. It could ruin your life. Just get some doxycycline. Not two pills. There has to be more than two pills. That's a flawed study. And then you'll never think about it
- [53:34]
A
again until you get bit again. Well, thank you for coming on. I'm sure you're extremely busy right now. That your beat is top of mind for many people in the United States. Any other things we should make the audience aware of before we wrap up here? Any other pressing calls to action or details that we didn't get to that people should be aware of?
- [54:07]
B
Well, if you want to read more about the whole TIC weaponization program, it's on my substack. So it's just search Chris Newby on substack. It's free, unless you want to do a donation. And then for my next book on chemical weapons, that's a good way to hear about it. You can't order it yet, but it's. It's the same mode. It's narrative nonfiction and exploring the history of nerve agents and the people involved in the program and why these weapons of mass destruction keep perpetuating and are never in control. I mean, the people have no oversight, really.
- [54:46]
A
I think it'd be important to have oversight for bioweapons and nerve agents that could drastically change the course of individuals lives and human history if applied in certain ways.
- [55:00]
B
Yeah.
- [55:02]
A
Awesome. Well, we're going to link to all this in the show notes. Chris, really appreciate you again for taking the time for doing this research and for banging the drum for many years, even though people may not have always been listening. But I think considering everything going on as it pertains to the explosion of tick populations here in the United States, they're definitely listening and eager to learn more. So I think the fact that you've been focused on this for more than 20 years is great for society, this audience, because they get to learn from somebody who's Done all the hard work already.
- [55:42]
B
Well, thank you so much for the invite and keep your babies safe.
- [55:48]
A
We'll try. We'll try. It's stressful, I'm not gonna lie.
- [55:50]
B
Like, it was. I think last year it was number one and tick bites and they. They actually Pennsylvania has a really good ticks screening program. And you can send in your ticks for free and then whatever's in them will be used for research, which is a great thing.
- [56:08]
A
Okay, so you can just mail. Do you mail them or you drop them off somewhere?
- [56:12]
B
You mail them. You just put them in a little plastic baggie with a wet paper towel. I think it's Straussberg University. It's that they're the ones that have a rocking, awesome tick research program.
- [56:25]
A
All right, good. It's good to know. My home state is. Is on top of things. Even though the. The tech population, the deer population here is massive, so.
- [56:33]
B
Yeah, I know. Give them more hunting permits.
- [56:38]
A
That's what we. I mean, we're right outside of Philadelphia. I mean, there's deer all throughout our neighborhood.
- [56:43]
B
Yeah, same here. Yeah.
- [56:47]
A
Awesome. Well, thank you. Who knows, maybe we can do this again at some point in the future. Maybe when you release your next book, we can talk about nerve agents and the government research that's got into that.
- [57:01]
B
Yeah. Happy topics. I love the research though. It's really fun going to old archives and I hang out with a lot of 80 year old ex military people. What fun.
- [57:16]
A
Actually does sound like a lot of fun.
- [57:19]
B
Yeah, I mean like next time you're in airport, sit next to an 80 year old and say, tell me your story. It's great.
- [57:29]
A
Were you in the CIA working on. Working on tick bombs by any chance?
- [57:34]
B
Says, I didn't work for the CIA. It was the company.
- [57:41]
A
Maybe I'll do that. I'm gonna. I'm gonna be in an airport tomorrow, so maybe I'll. Maybe I'll try to find the. The 80 year old sitting by himself.
- [57:48]
B
Yeah. They'll wear navy or army merch. They'll be the first ones in line because they get on first.
- [57:55]
A
It's good to know. All right, Chris, thank you again. This has been awesome and peace and love freaks.