I'm confused by the number of upvotes this article has. It's a mishmash of innuendos and barely-related facts. I thought Lithub was a better website than this.
As far as I can tell, the narrative of this article is "the CIA did some real-world tests of how harmless bacterial spores propagate in a real-world environment; they also did closed-lab tests of how harmful bacterial droplets for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever propagate in a controlled environment among monkeys; a botched chemical weapons experiment ended US offensive chemical and bio warfare research; then a specific researcher had some family troubles, the end." It appears to be structured to imply that an outbreak of tick-born illnesses in Long Island in 1968 is not a coincidence.
Maybe the full book is a different story, but this seems like pretty bad conspiracy theoretic stringing together of tangential things.
Not everything that makes you uncomfortable or embarrassed about your state is a conspiracy theory. Sometimes the state really does commit crimes on its populace, and in this particular case - where there's smoke, there's fire.
The CIA shouldn't be in the medical experiment business. Period. That citizens are willing to let it get away with murder is bad enough.
I agree that the CIA shouldn't be in the medical experiment business. There are good explanations of terrible things the CIA has done. But not every bad thing said about the CIA deserves credence simply by virtue of being a bad thing about the CIA.
They and other agencies are also involved in the psychological experiment business. Historically and probably currently. All the data they've got these days and various means to interact with their subjects is probably pretty wild.
Let me add a pearl to that necklace (TL;DR: Morgellons disease is linked to Lyme disease):
> Exploring the association between Morgellons disease and Lyme disease: identification of Borrelia burgdorferi in Morgellons disease patients
> Morgellons disease (MD) is a complex skin disorder characterized by ulcerating lesions that have protruding or embedded filaments. Many clinicians refer to this condition as delusional parasitosis or delusional infestation and consider the filaments to be introduced textile fibers. In contrast, recent studies indicate that MD is a true somatic illness associated with tickborne infection, that the filaments are keratin and collagen in composition and that they result from proliferation and activation of keratinocytes and fibroblasts in the skin. Previously, spirochetes have been detected in the dermatological specimens from four MD patients, thus providing evidence of an infectious process.
Allow me to place the necklace around your neck now:
> Grossman added Kris Newby, an "excellent science writer connected to Stanford University," wrote a book in 2019 featuring interviews with Willy Burgdorfer, who is credited with the discovery of the microbe causing Lyme disease, and the book exposed that Burgdorfer had earlier "developed bioweapons for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)."
> As a science writer, she was driven to understand why this disease is so misunderstood, and its patients so mistreated. This quest led her to Willy Burgdorfer, the Lyme microbe’s discoverer, who revealed that he had developed bug-borne bioweapons during the Cold War, and believed that the Lyme epidemic was started by a military experiment gone wrong.
This paper several authors with professional backgrounds that should make people skeptical.
* Three authors are from Australian Biologics. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has in the past "instituted proceedings in the Federal Court, Sydney, against Australian Biologics Testing Services Pty Ltd and its director, Ms Janette Burke [third author on this paper!], alleging that representations made in brochures and on Australian Biologics’ website in 2001 and part of 2002 were false, misleading, and deceptive" [1].
* Another author is Peter Mayne. In 2017 the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission prosecuted a complaint against him for "unsatisfactory professional conduct" because he "inappropriately diagnosing [a] patient with Lyme disease" and then, among other things, "[i]nappropriately treated the patient with weekly and then biweekly antibiotic injections for Lyme disease over approximately 30 weeks but failed to investigate or consider the patient might have cancer due to his age and medical history" and finally ordered him "[n]ot to advice [sic], diagnose or treat patients who he believes to have or may have Lyme disease or similar tick-borne disease" [2]
* Another author is Raphael B. Stricker, who the NIH found guilty of scientific misconduct in 1993 [3]
It is a red flag if a scientific field is this dense with people who have been found guilty of this kind of misconduct. Maybe being persecuted by an authority just adds fuel to the conspiracy, but I'm going to leave it at this: this strand of the chronic Lyme cottage industry (and maybe the industry in general) appears to be populated by people who either believe they themselves have chronic Lyme disease, or believe that they can make money off people who do. What it does not seem to have is disinterested third parties who are working on it because it's a meaningful research problem. This is a red flag, too: it suggests that there is something repelling people with reputations to lose, and I think it is the quality of research produced by its adherents.
Look, I believe these people are suffering, and suffering is bad, so I hope they get help, but I am very skeptical that the people claiming to offer help are the right people to do so.
Fine, one more thing. Willie Burgdorfer died in 2014, five years before Newby's book came out. He was 89 and died of complications from Parkinson's disease. The numbers for Parkinson's disease, dementia, and old age may, depending on the dates when Newby talked to him, make his testimony somewhat less than ironclad.
In this thread, the argument that chronic Lyme's disease does not exist, seems to repeat itself. It may very well be that chronic Lyme's disease does not exist, but the arguments that claim this still appear to miss some key points.
The argument that chronic Lyme's disease does not exist relies on the existence of a reliable test for Lyme's disease. The article questions the existence of such a test. If the tests are not reliable, any research that uses the tests to deduce that chronic Lyme's disease does not exist, is not reliable either.
There are researchers that believe in the existence of the chronic Lyme's disease. They have some arguments on why it is difficult to test, eradicate and even understand Lyme's disease.
First argument is that Lyme's disease is actually an amalgam of several diseases that work synergetically, such as borreliosis, babesiosis and bartonella. If you are cure one, the others take over, and make the body more suspective for the re-emergence of the cured disease.
Second argument is that apparently the side effects of the diseases are not actually caused by the disease itself, but poisons released during the die-off of the disease. This is called Herxheimer reaction. So, more you are able to cure, the worse you feel, initially. That is why it is difficult to recognize what is helpful in curing the disease and what is harmful.
Third argument is that borreliosis has been observed (by microscope) to change form, and "hide" within other micro-organisms and blood cells. Spiral form is only one of the forms. Perhaps antibiotics can only cure some of the forms?
Not saying that I believe in the conspiracy theory, but can't the disease exist naturally while also being the subject of bioweapon research? The only way to know would be to figure out more precisely what kind of research was being done on the Lyme bacteria... I'm not sure if there are signatures one can look for which indicate that some strain is certainly a wild mutation and not from concerted research (similar to how archeologists distinguish which sharp rocks are ancient human tools and which ones are just coincidentally sharp rocks).
> while also being the subject of bioweapon research?
It can, Anthrax is a classic example, occurring naturally, the bio weapons part of the military will want to know how to make it more potent, in case "the enemy" develops the same or similar potent strain of bio weapon. Thats the justification part for this development which is probably labelled as "proof of concept" in much the same way a variety of drugs will be tested against a variety of bacteria or virus for medical research, in case its found in the wild.
Man has been selectively breeding stuff for hundreds of years, animals like pedigree dogs, cats, livestock, plants, why wouldn't the military of any country despite international agreements find ways to get around those agreements.
Just look at the US nuclear stockpile, the US didn't proliferate new weapons, they merely upgraded the existing nukes and upgrading wasn't in any agreement.
And if we were to have a perfectly encapsulated bubble of safety, how much would the population levels increase by more than we currently see with todays accidents?
Survival of the fittest has evolved to include modern day living.
When thinking about the ever lasting lightbulb, if man stopped developing light bulbs of sorts, would we have got to have created the led light bulb as quickly?
So conspiracy theories do exist, because we hear them, but they serve many purposes in society, they can smooth over events, they can be educational, they can be used to draw certain types of people out into the open who arguably have health complaints or a drug problem of sorts, which could be worded as a chemical imbalance.
Take covid, it funnelled money into drug companies, AI's were developed to speed up the making of vaccines which have now started to apply to other viruses, at the same time, the planet was given a rest from our daily activities, insect numbers started to rise, police were able to catch up with criminals that they have been trying to track down for ages, in fact the excuses for catching a lot of criminals was one of the covid successes that hasnt been discussed much, we all got forced into working remotely to get used to not having to commute, bosses and managers had to deal with that loss of instant dictatorship and fire fighting and start to plan more. There's a whole host of reasons for covid to have been released on this planet which is why I say it was a biological weapon if it wasn't people having panic attacks and a sudden rise of pseudomonas in the lungs like cystic fibrosis sufferers experience due to a sudden influx of iron in their diet, perhaps caused by eating more meat and thus iron during lockdown.
So CT's do exist, but what is its purpose is probably a better question to ask.
Lyme's incubation is long and impact on infected people uncertain, which makes it useless as a bioweapon. The sciencedirect article effectively dismantles the innuendo about Lyme as a bioweapon.
The fact that it exists in the wild means its a perfect vector for covert experimentation as its natural presence provides the cover of plausible deniability needed for all governments to perform biological experiments on their citizens...
The arguments presented there make very little sense.
1) Lyme existed before
> So decades before Lyme was identified – and before military scientists could have altered or weaponized it – the bacterium that causes it was living in the wild.
Of course it was, regardless of whether the conspiracy theory is correct. If it was a bioweapon, do you think they were engineering a fully synthetic bacterial genome de novo? In the '60s and '70s, decades before the first publicly known successes with fully synthetic genomes in the 2000s?
It would be far more reasonable to assume they were working from a reference species, selectively breeding, maybe inducing mutations or engaging in some rudimentary gene editing (although the latter seems unlikely).
2) The genetic distribution doesn't support the conspiracy theory
> Population genetics research on Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterial agent of Lyme disease, suggest that the northeastern, Midwestern and Californian bacteria are separated by geographical barriers that prevent these populations from mixing.
> Had there been a lab strain, particularly one engineered to be more transmissible, that escaped within the last 50 years, there would be greater genetic similarity between these three geographic populations. There is no evidence for a recent single source – such as a release from a lab – for Lyme disease spirochetes.
Keeping in mind the counterargument to point 1) above, this argument is wild. If we assume that a weaponized form of Borrelia burgdorferi was created from a wild specimen, we would absolutely expect specific variants to only exist in certain regions, particularly the region in which the conspiracy theories allege an outbreak of the weaponized form occurred. The paper the author references here even notes that the worst strains were not found in California [0]:
> Eight of the most common ospC genotypes in the northeastern United States, including genotypes I and K that are associated with disseminated human infections, were absent in Mendocino County nymphs.
This all seems very consistent with the most likely scenario if there was in fact an effort to weaponize the bacteria and it was released in the northeast.
3) Lyme isn't a good bioweapon
> One of the most important characteristics of a biowarfare agent is its ability to quickly disable target soldiers.
Unless the goal is to softly neutralize Communist sympathizers, unfriendly foreign leaders, and left wing politicians. This thesis is in fact wholly refuted by the fact that the CIA plotted to use tuberculosis as a bioweapon to neutralize Fidel Castro in the '60s [1].
> Lyme disease does make some people very sick but many have just a flu-like illness that their immune system fends off.
Again, consistent with the theory that there is a weaponized strain in the wild alongside less harmful natural strains.
Final note: none of this is really evidence *for* the conspiracy theory, but those arguments against all seem totally specious.
> It would be far more reasonable to assume they were working from a reference species
Not if the species was unknown to science. What would they reference?
> Again, consistent with the theory that there is a weaponized strain in the wild alongside less harmful natural strains.
Well, where is this weaponized strain? It’s not as though variability in the impact of a bacterial disease is a sign of bio-weaponization.
> This thesis is in fact wholly refuted by the fact that the CIA plotted to use tuberculosis as a bioweapon to neutralize Fidel Castro in the '60s
You must have read the footnote you cite… so you know the plan was to use a gifted scuba equipment as a delivery mechanism as a kind of soft assassination attempt on a specific individual. Is there really any argument that this plot (which was not executed) suggests anything about their general bio weapon approach? The reality is, Lyme isn’t a good bioweapon… it’s slow, weak and easily treated with cheap and common antibiotics.
> but those arguments against all seem totally specious,
Frankly, I don’t think you’ve really addressed them.
>the condition was named Lyme disease. A conspiracy theory spread like a fever: that the researchers at Plum Island had engineered a new sickness, one that now afflicts more than 30,000 Americans per year.
> Why would a PhD from MIT start debugging her family’s health ... Learn how we went from debilitating chronic Lyme Disease to radiant health. No practitioners were able to help us, so we had to figure it out on our own. Many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, this website summarizes everything we learned along the way. The quest for a Lyme disease cure led us to health better than we have ever had before we contracted Lyme.
About halfway down the page is this video [0] in which she appears to "debug" by holding a box full of bottles of supplements, and remove them selectively until she finds the one that makes her stronger. Is this for real? Am I missing a key detail, or is this family batshit insane?
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture has repeated it several times since the book came out: no one has ever worked on Lyme disease on Plum Island. Eric Traub himself never conducted any research there. He simply visited the site! He wasn't a tick specialist, but a foot-and-mouth disease specialist. Pressed by an Associated Press journalist, Michael C. Carroll admitted back in 2004 that he had "no direct evidence "2 of his claims.
The strongest argument in support of this thesis is in fact a simple geographical coincidence. Lyme, the small Connecticut town that gave its name to the disease, is located in Connecticut, a few dozen kilometers from Plum Island, as the crow flies. It was here, in 1975, that researchers drew up a summary of what they called "Lyme arthritis". They had observed an unusual recrudescence of oligoarthritis in children, and attributed it to tick-borne bacteria of the Borrelia genus.
In fact, these researchers were not the first to observe what was to become Lyme disease. Other outbreaks were scattered across Europe and North America, thousands of miles from Plum Island."
If one has good evidence of the sort of thesis hinted at, one should state it straightforwardly and present the evidence for it perspicuously, rather than darkly hinting as the first section does, which style rather suggests the evidence to follow is weak and only convincing through obfuscation.
While not a great book, there were two elements I found compelling 1) a heat map of Lyme prevalence can basically be drawn with plum island at the center, 2) the us government did bio weapons tests, using ticks as a disease vector, on ways of killing an enemy’s livestock supply (and hence crippling their food supply).
Readit News
As far as I can tell, the narrative of this article is "the CIA did some real-world tests of how harmless bacterial spores propagate in a real-world environment; they also did closed-lab tests of how harmful bacterial droplets for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever propagate in a controlled environment among monkeys; a botched chemical weapons experiment ended US offensive chemical and bio warfare research; then a specific researcher had some family troubles, the end." It appears to be structured to imply that an outbreak of tick-born illnesses in Long Island in 1968 is not a coincidence.
Maybe the full book is a different story, but this seems like pretty bad conspiracy theoretic stringing together of tangential things.
The CIA shouldn't be in the medical experiment business. Period. That citizens are willing to let it get away with murder is bad enough.
This is a great thought-stopping cliche to prevent people from realizing they've bought into some dumb ideas.
"I can't be wrong, all of the people saying so are just ignorant hyper-patriots!"
Dead Comment
> Exploring the association between Morgellons disease and Lyme disease: identification of Borrelia burgdorferi in Morgellons disease patients
> Morgellons disease (MD) is a complex skin disorder characterized by ulcerating lesions that have protruding or embedded filaments. Many clinicians refer to this condition as delusional parasitosis or delusional infestation and consider the filaments to be introduced textile fibers. In contrast, recent studies indicate that MD is a true somatic illness associated with tickborne infection, that the filaments are keratin and collagen in composition and that they result from proliferation and activation of keratinocytes and fibroblasts in the skin. Previously, spirochetes have been detected in the dermatological specimens from four MD patients, thus providing evidence of an infectious process.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5072536/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25879673/
Allow me to place the necklace around your neck now:
> Grossman added Kris Newby, an "excellent science writer connected to Stanford University," wrote a book in 2019 featuring interviews with Willy Burgdorfer, who is credited with the discovery of the microbe causing Lyme disease, and the book exposed that Burgdorfer had earlier "developed bioweapons for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)."
http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/25/c_1310146419.htm
The book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitten-History-Disease-Biological-Wea...
> As a science writer, she was driven to understand why this disease is so misunderstood, and its patients so mistreated. This quest led her to Willy Burgdorfer, the Lyme microbe’s discoverer, who revealed that he had developed bug-borne bioweapons during the Cold War, and believed that the Lyme epidemic was started by a military experiment gone wrong.
> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25879673/
This paper several authors with professional backgrounds that should make people skeptical.
* Three authors are from Australian Biologics. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has in the past "instituted proceedings in the Federal Court, Sydney, against Australian Biologics Testing Services Pty Ltd and its director, Ms Janette Burke [third author on this paper!], alleging that representations made in brochures and on Australian Biologics’ website in 2001 and part of 2002 were false, misleading, and deceptive" [1].
* Another author is Peter Mayne. In 2017 the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission prosecuted a complaint against him for "unsatisfactory professional conduct" because he "inappropriately diagnosing [a] patient with Lyme disease" and then, among other things, "[i]nappropriately treated the patient with weekly and then biweekly antibiotic injections for Lyme disease over approximately 30 weeks but failed to investigate or consider the patient might have cancer due to his age and medical history" and finally ordered him "[n]ot to advice [sic], diagnose or treat patients who he believes to have or may have Lyme disease or similar tick-borne disease" [2]
* Another author is Raphael B. Stricker, who the NIH found guilty of scientific misconduct in 1993 [3]
It is a red flag if a scientific field is this dense with people who have been found guilty of this kind of misconduct. Maybe being persecuted by an authority just adds fuel to the conspiracy, but I'm going to leave it at this: this strand of the chronic Lyme cottage industry (and maybe the industry in general) appears to be populated by people who either believe they themselves have chronic Lyme disease, or believe that they can make money off people who do. What it does not seem to have is disinterested third parties who are working on it because it's a meaningful research problem. This is a red flag, too: it suggests that there is something repelling people with reputations to lose, and I think it is the quality of research produced by its adherents.
Look, I believe these people are suffering, and suffering is bad, so I hope they get help, but I am very skeptical that the people claiming to offer help are the right people to do so.
Fine, one more thing. Willie Burgdorfer died in 2014, five years before Newby's book came out. He was 89 and died of complications from Parkinson's disease. The numbers for Parkinson's disease, dementia, and old age may, depending on the dates when Newby talked to him, make his testimony somewhat less than ironclad.
[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-institutes-procee...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230329100814/https://www.hccc....
[3] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/not93-177.h...
The argument that chronic Lyme's disease does not exist relies on the existence of a reliable test for Lyme's disease. The article questions the existence of such a test. If the tests are not reliable, any research that uses the tests to deduce that chronic Lyme's disease does not exist, is not reliable either.
There are researchers that believe in the existence of the chronic Lyme's disease. They have some arguments on why it is difficult to test, eradicate and even understand Lyme's disease.
First argument is that Lyme's disease is actually an amalgam of several diseases that work synergetically, such as borreliosis, babesiosis and bartonella. If you are cure one, the others take over, and make the body more suspective for the re-emergence of the cured disease.
Second argument is that apparently the side effects of the diseases are not actually caused by the disease itself, but poisons released during the die-off of the disease. This is called Herxheimer reaction. So, more you are able to cure, the worse you feel, initially. That is why it is difficult to recognize what is helpful in curing the disease and what is harmful.
Third argument is that borreliosis has been observed (by microscope) to change form, and "hide" within other micro-organisms and blood cells. Spiral form is only one of the forms. Perhaps antibiotics can only cure some of the forms?
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/congress-is-investigating-wheth...
It can, Anthrax is a classic example, occurring naturally, the bio weapons part of the military will want to know how to make it more potent, in case "the enemy" develops the same or similar potent strain of bio weapon. Thats the justification part for this development which is probably labelled as "proof of concept" in much the same way a variety of drugs will be tested against a variety of bacteria or virus for medical research, in case its found in the wild.
Man has been selectively breeding stuff for hundreds of years, animals like pedigree dogs, cats, livestock, plants, why wouldn't the military of any country despite international agreements find ways to get around those agreements.
Just look at the US nuclear stockpile, the US didn't proliferate new weapons, they merely upgraded the existing nukes and upgrading wasn't in any agreement.
And if we were to have a perfectly encapsulated bubble of safety, how much would the population levels increase by more than we currently see with todays accidents?
Survival of the fittest has evolved to include modern day living.
When thinking about the ever lasting lightbulb, if man stopped developing light bulbs of sorts, would we have got to have created the led light bulb as quickly?
So conspiracy theories do exist, because we hear them, but they serve many purposes in society, they can smooth over events, they can be educational, they can be used to draw certain types of people out into the open who arguably have health complaints or a drug problem of sorts, which could be worded as a chemical imbalance.
Take covid, it funnelled money into drug companies, AI's were developed to speed up the making of vaccines which have now started to apply to other viruses, at the same time, the planet was given a rest from our daily activities, insect numbers started to rise, police were able to catch up with criminals that they have been trying to track down for ages, in fact the excuses for catching a lot of criminals was one of the covid successes that hasnt been discussed much, we all got forced into working remotely to get used to not having to commute, bosses and managers had to deal with that loss of instant dictatorship and fire fighting and start to plan more. There's a whole host of reasons for covid to have been released on this planet which is why I say it was a biological weapon if it wasn't people having panic attacks and a sudden rise of pseudomonas in the lungs like cystic fibrosis sufferers experience due to a sudden influx of iron in their diet, perhaps caused by eating more meat and thus iron during lockdown.
So CT's do exist, but what is its purpose is probably a better question to ask.
1) Lyme existed before
> So decades before Lyme was identified – and before military scientists could have altered or weaponized it – the bacterium that causes it was living in the wild.
Of course it was, regardless of whether the conspiracy theory is correct. If it was a bioweapon, do you think they were engineering a fully synthetic bacterial genome de novo? In the '60s and '70s, decades before the first publicly known successes with fully synthetic genomes in the 2000s?
It would be far more reasonable to assume they were working from a reference species, selectively breeding, maybe inducing mutations or engaging in some rudimentary gene editing (although the latter seems unlikely).
2) The genetic distribution doesn't support the conspiracy theory
> Population genetics research on Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterial agent of Lyme disease, suggest that the northeastern, Midwestern and Californian bacteria are separated by geographical barriers that prevent these populations from mixing.
> Had there been a lab strain, particularly one engineered to be more transmissible, that escaped within the last 50 years, there would be greater genetic similarity between these three geographic populations. There is no evidence for a recent single source – such as a release from a lab – for Lyme disease spirochetes.
Keeping in mind the counterargument to point 1) above, this argument is wild. If we assume that a weaponized form of Borrelia burgdorferi was created from a wild specimen, we would absolutely expect specific variants to only exist in certain regions, particularly the region in which the conspiracy theories allege an outbreak of the weaponized form occurred. The paper the author references here even notes that the worst strains were not found in California [0]:
> Eight of the most common ospC genotypes in the northeastern United States, including genotypes I and K that are associated with disseminated human infections, were absent in Mendocino County nymphs.
This all seems very consistent with the most likely scenario if there was in fact an effort to weaponize the bacteria and it was released in the northeast.
3) Lyme isn't a good bioweapon
> One of the most important characteristics of a biowarfare agent is its ability to quickly disable target soldiers.
Unless the goal is to softly neutralize Communist sympathizers, unfriendly foreign leaders, and left wing politicians. This thesis is in fact wholly refuted by the fact that the CIA plotted to use tuberculosis as a bioweapon to neutralize Fidel Castro in the '60s [1].
> Lyme disease does make some people very sick but many have just a flu-like illness that their immune system fends off.
Again, consistent with the theory that there is a weaponized strain in the wild alongside less harmful natural strains.
Final note: none of this is really evidence *for* the conspiracy theory, but those arguments against all seem totally specious.
[0]: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/AEM.01704-09
[1]: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/21523-document-09 (footnote on page 137)
Not if the species was unknown to science. What would they reference?
> Again, consistent with the theory that there is a weaponized strain in the wild alongside less harmful natural strains.
Well, where is this weaponized strain? It’s not as though variability in the impact of a bacterial disease is a sign of bio-weaponization.
> This thesis is in fact wholly refuted by the fact that the CIA plotted to use tuberculosis as a bioweapon to neutralize Fidel Castro in the '60s
You must have read the footnote you cite… so you know the plan was to use a gifted scuba equipment as a delivery mechanism as a kind of soft assassination attempt on a specific individual. Is there really any argument that this plot (which was not executed) suggests anything about their general bio weapon approach? The reality is, Lyme isn’t a good bioweapon… it’s slow, weak and easily treated with cheap and common antibiotics.
> but those arguments against all seem totally specious,
Frankly, I don’t think you’ve really addressed them.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2019/07/did-us-invent-lym...
> Why would a PhD from MIT start debugging her family’s health ... Learn how we went from debilitating chronic Lyme Disease to radiant health. No practitioners were able to help us, so we had to figure it out on our own. Many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, this website summarizes everything we learned along the way. The quest for a Lyme disease cure led us to health better than we have ever had before we contracted Lyme.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOmKCYba_oE
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture has repeated it several times since the book came out: no one has ever worked on Lyme disease on Plum Island. Eric Traub himself never conducted any research there. He simply visited the site! He wasn't a tick specialist, but a foot-and-mouth disease specialist. Pressed by an Associated Press journalist, Michael C. Carroll admitted back in 2004 that he had "no direct evidence "2 of his claims.
The strongest argument in support of this thesis is in fact a simple geographical coincidence. Lyme, the small Connecticut town that gave its name to the disease, is located in Connecticut, a few dozen kilometers from Plum Island, as the crow flies. It was here, in 1975, that researchers drew up a summary of what they called "Lyme arthritis". They had observed an unusual recrudescence of oligoarthritis in children, and attributed it to tick-borne bacteria of the Borrelia genus.
In fact, these researchers were not the first to observe what was to become Lyme disease. Other outbreaks were scattered across Europe and North America, thousands of miles from Plum Island."
https://www.afis.org/Maladie-de-Lyme-L-Obs-a-retrouve-le-cou...
Disappointing to see many fall for it. "Do your own research", but for real, please.
While not a great book, there were two elements I found compelling 1) a heat map of Lyme prevalence can basically be drawn with plum island at the center, 2) the us government did bio weapons tests, using ticks as a disease vector, on ways of killing an enemy’s livestock supply (and hence crippling their food supply).