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[5]COMMENT: In Kris Newby’s book, Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons [6], 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:
- The possibility [7] 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.
- Burgdorfer’s confession [8] to Tim Grey–an independent filmmaker–that Lyme Disease resulted from biological warfare.
- The focus [9] 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:
- ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- ” . . . .‘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.’. . .”
- ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- 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. . . .”
- 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. . . .”
- 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.”
- ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- ” . . . .‘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.’. . .”
. . . . 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. . . .”
. . . . 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. . . .”
. . . . 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.
. . . . 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.
- 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. . . .”
- 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. . . .”
- 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. . . .”
. . . . 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. . . .