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Lyme Disease and Biological Warfare, Part 3: The “Swiss Agent”

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COMMENT: In Kris New­by’s book, Bit­ten: The Secret His­to­ry of Lyme Dis­ease and Bio­log­i­cal Weapons, the author presents dis­turb­ing infor­ma­tion indi­cat­ing that Lyme Dis­ease result­ed from bio­log­i­cal war­fare research.

The book fea­tures exten­sive dis­cus­sion of Willy Burgdor­fer, a Swiss-born vet­er­an of the U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­gram and the “dis­cov­er­er” of Bor­re­lia Burgdor­feri–the organ­ism that offi­cial­ly caus­es Lyme Dis­ease.

In pre­vi­ous posts, we not­ed:

  1. The pos­si­bil­i­ty that Rudolf Geigy, Burgdor­fer­’s Swiss aca­d­e­m­ic men­tor, may have engaged in espi­onage for the Third Reich through the I.G. Far­ben espi­onage estab­lish­ment, as well as Geigy’s spec­u­la­tive role as a Project Paper­clip oper­a­tive.
  2. Burgdor­fer­’s con­fes­sion to Tim Grey–an inde­pen­dent filmmaker–that Lyme Dis­ease result­ed from bio­log­i­cal war­fare.
  3. The focus of the U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­gram, and Willy Burgdor­fer­’s research, on genet­ic manip­u­la­tion of microor­gan­isms to make them more path­o­gen­ic and resis­tant to treat­ment.

In this post, we high­light infor­ma­tion about what Willy termed “the Swiss Agent”–a rick­ettsia that was present in the vast major­i­ty of Lyme suf­fer­ers test­ed ear­ly in research into the dis­ease.

Even­tu­al­ly, dis­cus­sion of the pos­si­ble role of Swiss Agent dropped out of dis­cus­sion. The dis­ap­pear­ance of the Swiss Agent from the sci­en­tif­ic ana­lyt­i­cal lit­er­a­ture coin­cid­ed with Willy’s tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions with bio­log­i­cal war­fare research vet­er­ans.

Key points of dis­cus­sion:

  1. ” . . . . I would engage the sci­en­tif­ic part of his brain in answer­ing my two ques­tions: why the Lyme dis­cov­ery files were miss­ing from the Nation­al Archives, and why images of the organ­ism labeled ‘Swiss Agent’ were locat­ed in the archive fold­ers in the time-frame where one would expect the Lyme spiro­chete pic­tures to be. . . .”
  2. ” . . . . He told me that in late 1979, he had test­ed ‘over one hun­dred ticks’ from Shel­ter Island, locat­ed about twen­ty miles from the Lyme out­break, and all but two had an uniden­ti­fied rick­ettsial species inside. It looked like Rick­ettsia mon­tana (now called Rick­ettsia mon­ta­nen­sis) under a micro­scope, a non-dis­ease-caus­ing cousin of the dead­ly Rick­ettsia rick­et­sii, but it was a dif­fer­ent species. . . .”
  3. ” . . . .‘You say they’re not look­ing for it any­more?’ I asked. ‘They prob­a­bly paid peo­ple off,’ he said. ‘There are folks up there who have a way to enable that.’ . . .”
  4. ” . . . . Next, I showed Willy an unla­beled image of a microbe and asked him what it was. ‘That is a Swiss Agent,’ said Willy. I asked him a series of ques­tions on this microbe and he recit­ed what seemed like well-rehearsed lines: the Swiss Agent is a Rick­ettsia mon­tana-like organ­ism found in the Euro­pean sheep tick, Ixodes Rici­nus, and it doesn’t cause dis­ease in humans. . . .”
  5. ” . . . . Then I asked him why he brought sam­ples of it from Switzer­land back to his lab. He replied with the response that he often used when he seemed to know the answer but wasn’t going to divulge it: ‘Ques­tion mark.’. . .”
  6. ” . . . . The real ‘smok­ing gun,’ though, was Willy’s hand­writ­ten lab notes on the patient blood tests from the dis­ease out­break in Con­necti­cut. These tests showed the proof-of-pres­ence of what I named ‘Swiss Agent USA,’ the mys­tery rick­ettsia present in most of the patients from the orig­i­nal Lyme out­break, a fact that was nev­er dis­closed in jour­nal arti­cles. It didn’t take a PhD in micro­bi­ol­o­gy to see that almost all the patient blood had react­ed strong­ly to an anti­gen test for a Euro­pean rick­ettsia that Willy had called the Swiss Agent. . . .”
  7. ” . . . . In March, he wrote to Ander­son and Steere again: ‘Most spec­i­mens, with a few excep­tions, react­ed only against anti­gens pre­pared from the Swiss Agent.’ In short, the dis­ease clus­ters in Con­necti­cut and Long Island seemed to have been caused by Swiss Agent USA. Then, in April, the Swiss Agent USA rick­ettsia van­ished. It was nev­er again men­tioned in talks, let­ters, inter­views, or jour­nal arti­cles. . . .  There is, with­out a doubt, some­thing sus­pi­cious about the sud­den dis­ap­pear­ance of the Swiss Agent USA from all cor­re­spon­dence. . . .”
  8. The dis­ap­pear­ance of the Swiss Agent USA from the lit­er­a­ture on Lyme Dis­ease cor­re­spond­ed with an impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion that Willy had: ” . . . . It was in the begin­ning of 1980—two years before the first Lyme spiro­chetes were found—that the Swiss Agent USA dis­ap­peared. This about-face coin­cid­ed with a series of dis­cus­sions Willy had with old bioweapons devel­op­ers on the Rick­ettsial Com­mis­sion of the Armed Forces Epi­demi­o­log­i­cal Board, as record­ed in his per­son­al phone log. These sci­en­tists were most cer­tain­ly famil­iar with the secret his­to­ry of inca­pac­i­tat­ing rick­ettsial and viral agent test­ing, and they may have dis­cussed with Willy the pos­si­bil­i­ty of there hav­ing been an undis­closed field test in the Long Island region. . . .”
  9. Round­worms sim­i­lar to organ­isms stud­ied by Willy at the Naval Research Unit in Cairo turned up in some of the ticks: ” . . . . That’s when Willy found par­a­sitic round­worm lar­vae in the main body cav­i­ty of two of the ticks. They were sim­i­lar to the deer worms he’d found in ticks on his 1978 trip to Switzer­land, and sim­i­lar to the round­worms that he, Sonen­shine, and the Naval Research Unit in Cairo had worked with for a project explor­ing the ‘rel­a­tive­ly new field of endo-par­a­sitic trans­mis­sion of dis­ease agents.’ In these exper­i­ments, mul­ti­ple dis­ease agents were put inside mos­qui­to-borne round­worms, accord­ing to an NIH research report from 1961. . . .”
  10. Numer­i­cal­ly, it appears that the Swiss Agent rick­ettsias out­num­bered the spiro­chetes that ulti­mate­ly were tabbed as the causative agent for Lyme Dis­ease: ” . . . . When Willy dis­sect­ed 124 more Shel­ter Island deer ticks, 98 per­cent had the new rick­ettsias in them and only 60 per­cent car­ried the new spiro­chetes. Willy thought that either microbe might be caus­ing Lyme dis­ease, but, for unknown rea­sons, this alter­na­tive the­o­ry fell into a black hole. . . .”

1. We begin dis­cus­sion and analy­sis of the mys­te­ri­ous “Swiss Agent” and its appar­ent cousin “Swiss Agent USA.”

  1. ” . . . . I would engage the sci­en­tif­ic part of his brain in answer­ing my two ques­tions: why the Lyme dis­cov­ery files were miss­ing from the Nation­al Archives, and why images of the organ­ism labeled ‘Swiss Agent’ were locat­ed in the archive fold­ers in the time-frame where one would expect the Lyme spiro­chete pic­tures to be. . . .”
  2. ” . . . . He told me that in late 1979, he had test­ed ‘over one hun­dred ticks’ from Shel­ter Island, locat­ed about twen­ty miles from the Lyme out­break, and all but two had an uniden­ti­fied rick­ettsial species inside. It looked like Rick­ettsia mon­tana (now called Rick­ettsia mon­ta­nen­sis) under a micro­scope, a non-dis­ease-caus­ing cousin of the dead­ly Rick­ettsia rick­et­sii, but it was a dif­fer­ent species. . . .”
  3. ” . . . .‘You say they’re not look­ing for it any­more?’ I asked. ‘They prob­a­bly paid peo­ple off,’ he said. ‘There are folks up there who have a way to enable that.’ . . .”
  4. ” . . . . Next, I showed Willy an unla­beled image of a microbe and asked him what it was. ‘That is a Swiss Agent,’ said Willy. I asked him a series of ques­tions on this microbe and he recit­ed what seemed like well-rehearsed lines: the Swiss Agent is a Rick­ettsia mon­tana-like organ­ism found in the Euro­pean sheep tick, Ixodes Rici­nus, and it doesn’t cause dis­ease in humans. . . .”
  5. ” . . . . Then I asked him why he brought sam­ples of it from Switzer­land back to his lab. He replied with the response that he often used when he seemed to know the answer but wasn’t going to divulge it: ‘Ques­tion mark.’. . .”

Bit­ten: The Secret His­to­ry of Lyme Dis­ease and Bio­log­i­cal Weapons by Kris New­by; Harper­Collins [HC]; Copy­right 2019 by Kris New­by; ISBN 9780062896728; pp. 114–115.

. . . . I would engage the sci­en­tif­ic part of his brain in answer­ing my two ques­tions: why the Lyme dis­cov­ery files were miss­ing from the Nation­al Archives, and why images of the organ­ism labeled “Swiss Agent” were locat­ed in the archive fold­ers in the time-frame where one would expect the Lyme spiro­chete pic­tures to be. Could this mys­te­ri­ous Swiss Agent, which was nev­er men­tioned in any pub­li­ca­tions asso­ci­at­ed with the Lyme out­break, also be a bio­log­i­cal weapon?

After a few warm-up ques­tions, I start­ed ask­ing specifics about the ticks and the patient blood sam­ples col­lect­ed around the time of the dis­cov­ery. He told me that in late 1979, he had test­ed “over one hun­dred ticks” from Shel­ter Island, locat­ed about twen­ty miles from the Lyme out­break, and all but two had an uniden­ti­fied rick­ettsial species inside. It looked like Rick­ettsia mon­tana (now called Rick­ettsia mon­ta­nen­sis) under a micro­scope, a non-dis­ease-caus­ing cousin of the dead­ly Rick­ettsia rick­et­sii, but it was a dif­fer­ent species. He said that a sim­i­lar rick­ettsia had also been found in the lone star ticks, and that there was quite a bit of “excite­ment” over that dis­cov­ery.

I kept ask­ing Willy about the mys­tery rick­ettsia, but his answers were gar­bled, and all I could glean from him was that he had stopped inves­ti­gat­ing it for rea­sons unknown.

“You say they’re not look­ing for it any­more?” I asked.

“They prob­a­bly paid peo­ple off,” he said. “There are folks up there who have a way to enable that.”

Next, I showed Willy an unla­beled image of a microbe and asked him what it was.

“That is a Swiss Agent,” said Willy.

I asked him a series of ques­tions on this microbe and he recit­ed what seemed like well-rehearsed lines: the Swiss Agent is a Rick­ettsia mon­tana-like organ­ism found in the Euro­pean sheep tick, Ixodes Rici­nus, and it doesn’t cause dis­ease in humans.

Then I asked him why he brought sam­ples of it from Switzer­land back to his lab.

He replied with the response that he often used when he seemed to know the answer but wasn’t going to divulge it: “Ques­tion mark.”. . .

2. Sup­ple­ment­ing dis­cus­sion of the Swiss Agent is what Ms. New­by called “The real ‘smok­ing gun’ . . .Willy’s hand­writ­ten lab notes on the patient blood tests from the dis­ease out­break in Con­necti­cut. . . .”

” . . . . The real ‘smok­ing gun,’ though, was Willy’s hand­writ­ten lab notes on the patient blood tests from the dis­ease out­break in Con­necti­cut. These tests showed the proof-of-pres­ence of what I named ‘Swiss Agent USA,’ the mys­tery rick­ettsia present in most of the patients from the orig­i­nal Lyme out­break, a fact that was nev­er dis­closed in jour­nal arti­cles. It didn’t take a PhD in micro­bi­ol­o­gy to see that almost all the patient blood had react­ed strong­ly to an anti­gen test for a Euro­pean rick­ettsia that Willy had called the Swiss Agent. . . .”

Bit­ten: The Secret His­to­ry of Lyme Dis­ease and Bio­log­i­cal Weapons by Kris New­by; Harper­Collins [HC]; Copy­right 2019 by Kris New­by; ISBN 9780062896728; pp. 130–131.

. . . . For two days, we dug through box­es of Willy’s lab note­book slides, research report, and a tat­tered brown file fold­er labeled “Det­rick 1954–56.” The fold­er was stuffed with fad­ed car­bon copies of let­ters doc­u­ment­ing Willy’s bioweapons work infect­ing fleas, mos­qui­toes, and ticks with lethal agents. There were reports on his plague-laden flea exper­i­ments, and they con­firmed what Willy had told me in our last (2013) inter­view. Let­ters and reports detailed his efforts to infect mos­qui­toes to deliv­er lethal dos­es of the “Trinidad Agent,” a dead­ly strain of yel­low fever virus extract­ed from the liv­er of a deceased per­son. Lin­dorf had also found some deposit slips from two dif­fer­ent Swiss bank accounts, tucked into a stack of unre­lat­ed doc­u­ments.

The real “smok­ing gun,” though, was Willy’s hand­writ­ten lab notes on the patient blood tests from the dis­ease out­break in Con­necti­cut. These tests showed the proof-of-pres­ence of what I named “Swiss Agent USA,” the mys­tery rick­ettsia present in most of the patients from the orig­i­nal Lyme out­break, a fact that was nev­er dis­closed in jour­nal arti­cles. It didn’t take a PhD in micro­bi­ol­o­gy to see that almost all the patient blood had react­ed strong­ly to an anti­gen test for a Euro­pean rick­ettsia that Willy had called the Swiss Agent. Even more sur­pris­ing, all this work was done in 1978, about two years before Willy, the lead author, pub­lished the arti­cle report­ing that a spiro­chete was the only cause of Lyme dis­ease. . . .

3. Despite the “smok­ing gun” described above, the dis­cus­sion of the “Swiss Agent” as a pos­si­ble cause of Lyme dis­ease, dis­cus­sion of it dropped pre­cip­i­tous­ly from the lit­er­a­ture and research.

” . . . . In March, he wrote to Ander­son and Steere again: ‘Most spec­i­mens, with a few excep­tions, react­ed only against anti­gens pre­pared from the Swiss Agent.’ In short, the dis­ease clus­ters in Con­necti­cut and Long Island seemed to have been caused by Swiss Agent USA. Then, in April, the Swiss Agent USA rick­ettsia van­ished. It was nev­er again men­tioned in talks, let­ters, inter­views, or jour­nal arti­cles. . . .  There is, with­out a doubt, some­thing sus­pi­cious about the sud­den dis­ap­pear­ance of the Swiss Agent USA from all cor­re­spon­dence. . . .”

Bit­ten: The Secret His­to­ry of Lyme Dis­ease and Bio­log­i­cal Weapons by Kris New­by; Harper­Collins [HC]; Copy­right 2019 by Kris New­by; ISBN 9780062896728; pp. 201–202.

. . . . On Jan­u­ary 3 [1980], Willy wrote to [Swiss pro­fes­sor Andre] Aeschli­mann about test­ing he’d done on the Lyme arthri­tis patients: “I have done some pre­lim­i­nary serol­o­gy with sera from patients and have found very strong reac­tions against the ‘Swiss Agent.’” In Feb­ru­ary, his phone log read, “Steere patient sera test­ed again: Still very pos­i­tive for Swiss Agent.” In March, he wrote to Ander­son and Steere again: “Most spec­i­mens, with a few excep­tions, react­ed only against anti­gens pre­pared from the Swiss Agent.” In short, the dis­ease clus­ters in Con­necti­cut and Long Island seemed to have been caused by Swiss Agent USA.

Then, in April, the Swiss Agent USA rick­ettsia van­ished. It was nev­er again men­tioned in talks, let­ters, inter­views, or jour­nal arti­cles. . . .

. . . . There is, with­out a doubt, some­thing sus­pi­cious about the sud­den dis­ap­pear­ance of the Swiss Agent USA from all cor­re­spon­dence. None of the liv­ing researchers involved in the Swiss Agent dis­cov­ery seem to recall or know why exact­ly it fell off the radar. Its absence from the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture is equiv­a­lent to the miss­ing eigh­teen and a half min­utes from Nixon’s White House tapes. And it leaves us with the impor­tant ques­tion: Why? . . . .

4. In addi­tion to the fact that the Lyme Dis­ease out­break occurred ear­li­er than is thought to have hap­pened, Ms. New­by fur­ther devel­oped the path of inquiry lead­ing in the direc­tion of the Swiss Agent as a fac­tor in the devel­op­ment of the ail­ment.

Bit­ten: The Secret His­to­ry of Lyme Dis­ease and Bio­log­i­cal Weapons by Kris New­by; Harper­Collins [HC]; Copy­right 2019 by Kris New­by; ISBN 9780062896728; pp. 218–220.

. . . . Toward the end of my inves­ti­ga­tion, I reex­am­ined the his­to­ry of Lyme dis­ease through the eyes of an arson inves­ti­ga­tor, stand­ing knee-deep in the ash­es of the bioweapons pro­gram. The first thing I noticed was that the out­break began ear­li­er than most peo­ple real­ized, in the late 1960s, when the mil­i­tary was con­duct­ing many open-air tests of aerosolized bac­te­ria and aggres­sive lone star ticks. . . .

. . . . Willy’s inves­ti­ga­tion was inter­rupt­ed by his Swiss tick-col­lect­ing trip in 1978, and upon his return, he began ana­lyz­ing Jorge Benach’s Long Island ticks. That’s when he rec­og­nized that there was some­thing dif­fer­ent about the rick­ettsias he was see­ing. Under a micro­scope, they looked like spot­ted fever rick­ettsias, but they didn’t show up on the stan­dard tests and they didn’t always cause the expect­ed pin­prick rash­es. These rick­ettsias caused a spot-free spot­ted fever.

Why did Willy go on an NIH-fund­ed Swiss sab­bat­i­cal in the mid­dle of the U.S. rick­ettsial out­break? And why did the new­ly dis­cov­ered Long Island rick­ettsia test pos­i­tive to the Euro­pean Swiss Agent tests? Answer unknown.

Based on his let­ters to Steere, Benach, and oth­ers, in 1979, Willy seemed con­vinced that a new rick­ettsia could be a causative agent of “Lyme dis­ease.” The pos­si­bil­i­ty was reflect­ed in a project report from the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases (NIAID) for the peri­od end­ing Sep­tem­ber 30, 1979: “Only R. rick­ettsii has thus far been eti­o­log­i­cal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with human ill­ness, and indi­ca­tions are that the oth­er three are avir­u­lent for man (as well as for exper­i­men­tal ani­mals), although tan­ta­liz­ing evi­dence based on sero­log­ic respons­es in res­i­dents from Long Island and Cal­i­for­nia sug­gests that inap­par­ent or missed infec­tion may some­times occur. . . .”

There was noth­ing in the offi­cial NIH progress reports of 1979 and 1980 about the Long Island and Con­necti­cut blood sam­ples test­ing pos­i­tive for Euro­pean Swiss Agent anti­gens. And in the 1979 report, Willy wrote, “The ‘Swiss Agent’ is path­o­gen­ic to mead­ow voles, chick embryos, and sev­er­al lines of tis­sue cul­ture cells, but not for guinea pigs,” a find­ing that con­tra­dict­ed lat­er claims that it was harm­less. . . .

5. The pos­si­bil­i­ty that either rick­ettsias and/or new­ly dis­cov­ered spiro­chetes might be caus­ing Lyme Dis­ease also fell into what Ms. New­by called “a black hole.” Recall that, as dis­cussed pre­vi­ous­ly, Willy’s bio­log­i­cal war­fare research was involved with the simul­ta­ne­ous infec­tion of ticks with both viral and bac­te­r­i­al agents, tak­ing advan­tage of the virus’s abil­i­ty to mutate the genes of bac­te­ria.

  1. The dis­ap­pear­ance of the Swiss Agent USA from the lit­er­a­ture on Lyme Dis­ease cor­re­spond­ed with an impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion that Willy had: ” . . . . It was in the begin­ning of 1980—two years before the first Lyme spiro­chetes were found—that the Swiss Agent USA dis­ap­peared. This about-face coin­cid­ed with a series of dis­cus­sions Willy had with old bioweapons devel­op­ers on the Rick­ettsial Com­mis­sion of the Armed Forces Epi­demi­o­log­i­cal Board, as record­ed in his per­son­al phone log. These sci­en­tists were most cer­tain­ly famil­iar with the secret his­to­ry of inca­pac­i­tat­ing rick­ettsial and viral agent test­ing, and they may have dis­cussed with Willy the pos­si­bil­i­ty of there hav­ing been an undis­closed field test in the Long Island region. . . .”
  2. Round­worms sim­i­lar to organ­isms stud­ied by Willy at the Naval Research Unit in Cairo turned up in some of the ticks: ” . . . . That’s when Willy found par­a­sitic round­worm lar­vae in the main body cav­i­ty of two of the ticks. They were sim­i­lar to the deer worms he’d found in ticks on his 1978 trip to Switzer­land, and sim­i­lar to the round­worms that he, Sonen­shine, and the Naval Research Unit in Cairo had worked with for a project explor­ing the ‘rel­a­tive­ly new field of endo-par­a­sitic trans­mis­sion of dis­ease agents.’ In these exper­i­ments, mul­ti­ple dis­ease agents were put inside mos­qui­to-borne round­worms, accord­ing to an NIH research report from 1961. . . .”
  3. Numer­i­cal­ly, it appears that the Swiss Agent rick­ettsias out­num­bered the spiro­chetes that ulti­mate­ly were tabbed as the causative agent for Lyme Dis­ease: ” . . . . When Willy dis­sect­ed 124 more Shel­ter Island deer ticks, 98 per­cent had the new rick­ettsias in them and only 60 per­cent car­ried the new spiro­chetes. Willy thought that either microbe might be caus­ing Lyme dis­ease, but, for unknown rea­sons, this alter­na­tive the­o­ry fell into a black hole. . . .”

Bit­ten: The Secret His­to­ry of Lyme Dis­ease and Bio­log­i­cal Weapons by Kris New­by; Harper­Collins [HC]; Copy­right 2019 by Kris New­by; ISBN 9780062896728; pp. 220–223.

. . . . It was in the begin­ning of 1980—two years before the first Lyme spiro­chetes were found—that the Swiss Agent USA dis­ap­peared. This about-face coin­cid­ed with a series of dis­cus­sions Willy had with old bioweapons devel­op­ers on the Rick­ettsial Com­mis­sion of the Armed Forces Epi­demi­o­log­i­cal Board, as record­ed in his per­son­al phone log. These sci­en­tists were most cer­tain­ly famil­iar with the secret his­to­ry of inca­pac­i­tat­ing rick­ettsial and viral agent test­ing, and they may have dis­cussed with Willy the pos­si­bil­i­ty of there hav­ing been an undis­closed field test in the Long Island region.

His on-the-record time­line of the Lyme spiro­chete dis­cov­ery didn’t start until Octo­ber 1981, when Jorge Benach [also with a bio­log­i­cal war­fare research CV—D.E.] sent a new batch of Shel­ter Island deer ticks to him. That’s when Willy found par­a­sitic round­worm lar­vae in the main body cav­i­ty of two of the ticks. They were sim­i­lar to the deer worms he’d found in ticks on his 1978 trip to Switzer­land, and sim­i­lar to the round­worms that he, Sonen­shine, and the Naval Research Unit in Cairo had worked with for a project explor­ing the “rel­a­tive­ly new field of endo-par­a­sitic trans­mis­sion of dis­ease agents.” In these exper­i­ments, mul­ti­ple dis­ease agents were put inside mos­qui­to-borne round­worms, accord­ing to an NIH research report from 1961.

When Willy dis­sect­ed 124 more Shel­ter Island deer ticks, 98 per­cent had the new rick­ettsias in them and only 60 per­cent car­ried the new spiro­chetes. Willy thought that either microbe might be caus­ing Lyme dis­ease, but, for unknown rea­sons, this alter­na­tive the­o­ry fell into a black hole. . . .

. . . . Omit­ting the Swiss Agent USA find­ings from the Lyme dis­cov­ery arti­cles rep­re­sent­ed a seri­ous breach of sci­en­tif­ic ethics on Willy’s part. Willy was the lead researcher and he was the one who pos­sessed direct knowl­edge of the test results show­ing rick­ettsias resem­bling the Swiss Agent. At this ear­ly stage of research, Willy should have men­tioned all poten­tial pathogens.

Did Willy feel guilty about going along with a cov­er-up of a bio­log­i­cal weapons release? Was he wor­ried about vio­lat­ing his secre­cy oath? My instincts say that he knew when and where the agents got out but was afraid to tell me the details.

And final­ly, was there a dark­er secret Willy felt guilty about? There was his claim that he’d twice been ques­tioned by the feds about miss­ing bio­log­i­cal agents. . . .

Discussion

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