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FTR #1136 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
” . . . . if Willy’s claim was true, a crime against humanity had been committed by the U.S. government, and then covered up. . . ” Bitten, p. 103.
Introduction: A recent book about Lyme Disease sets forth credible information that the disease is an outgrowth of U.S. biological warfare research.
Bitten, The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons chronicles the career of Willy Burgdorfer, a Swiss-born expert on tick and flea-borne diseases who spent most of his career researching those areas as a U.S. biological warfare scientist.
Listeners are emphatically encouraged to purchase and read this book, as well as sharing it with others.
Author Kris Newby presents substantive evidence that the disease stems from BW research done by Burgdorfer and associates. (Burgdorfer was the scientist who “discovered” the organism that causes Lyme Disease.)
NB: The material in this broadcast is deliberately overlapped with that in the last program.
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. . . .”
Pivoting to discussion of the politics of Lyme Disease treatment, we note that legal and regulatory rulings have enabled the patenting of living organisms and that has exacerbated the monetizing of Lyme Disease treatment. That monetization, in turn, has adversely affected the quality of care for afflicted patients. As we will see later, Willy Burgdorfer was not the only Lyme Disease researcher to become involved with biological warfare research. ” . . . . All of a sudden, the institutions that were supposed to be protectors of public health became business partners with Big Pharma. The university researchers who had previously shared information on dangerous emerging diseases were now delaying publishing their findings so they could become entrepreneurs and profit from patents through their university technology transfer groups. We essentially lost our system of scientific checks and balances. And this, in turn, has undermined patient trust in the institutions that are supposed to ‘do no harm.’ . . .”
Ms. Newby went up against the “Lyme Disease establishment” in an attempt to find out why the disease was being mis-diagnosed and ineffectively treated. Strikingly, a FOIA suit she filed was stonewalled for five years, before finally yielding the documents she had so long sought.
The “experts” and their agenda was neatly, and alarmingly, summed up by Ms. Newby:
” . . . . The emails revealed a disturbing picture of a nonofficial group of government employees and guidelines authors that had been setting the national Lyme disease research agenda without public oversight or transparency. . . . Bottom line, the guidelines authors regularly convened in government-funded, closed-door meetings with hidden agendas that lined the pockets of academic researchers with significant commercial interests in Lyme disease tests and vaccines. A large percentage of government grants were awarded to the guideline authors and/or researchers in their labs. Part of the group’s stated mission, culled from these FOIA emails, was to run a covert ‘disinformation war’ and a ‘sociopolitical offensive’ to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists who questioned the group’s research and motives. In the FOIA-obtained emails, Lyme patients and their treating physicians were called ‘loonies’ and ‘quacks’ by Lyme guidelines authors and NIH employees. . . .”
Further developing the links between biological warfare research and the Lyme Disease establishment, we review information from FTR #585.
At every turn, Lyme disease research is inextricably linked with biological warfare research. Divided into the “Steere” and “ILADS” camps, the Lyme disease research community is split between the view that the disease is “hard-to-catch, easy-to-cure” and the diametrically opposed view that the disease is very serious and produces long-term neurological disorder. The Steere camp diminishes the significance of the disease and is closely identified with biological warfare research. At the epicenter of Lyme disease research (and the Steere camp) are members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS. EIS personnel are to be found at every bend in the road of Lyme disease research.
The Borrelia genus has long been researched as a biological warfare vector.
” . . . . The Borrelia genus of bacteria, which encompasses the Borrelia burgdorferi species-group (to which Lyme disease is attributed), was studied by the infamous WW2 Japanese biowar Unit 731, who carried out horrific experiments on prisoners in Manchuria, including dissection of live human beings. [iii] Unit 731 also worked on a number of other tick-borne pathogens. . . . . borrelia were known for their ability to adopt different forms under conditions of stress (such as exposure to antibiotics). Shedding their outer wall, (which is the target of penicillin and related drugs), they could ward off attack and continue to exist in the body. . . .”
Note that Unit 731 personnel and their files were put to work for the United States after World War II, much like the Project Paperclip scientists from Germany.
1. We begin with 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 in section 6, 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. . . .
6. Pivoting to discussion of the politics of Lyme Disease treatment, we note that legal and regulatory rulings have enabled the patenting of living organisms and that has exacerbated the monetizing of Lyme Disease treatment. That monetization, in turn, has adversely affected the quality of care for afflicted patients. As we will see later, Willy Burgdorfer was not the only Lyme Disease researcher to become involved with biological warfare research. ” . . . . All of a sudden, the institutions that were supposed to be protectors of public health became business partners with Big Pharma. The university researchers who had previously shared information on dangerous emerging diseases were now delaying publishing their findings so they could become entrepreneurs and profit from patents through their university technology transfer groups. We essentially lost our system of scientific checks and balances. And this, in turn, has undermined patient trust in the institutions that are supposed to ‘do no harm.’ . . .”
. . . . Thinking back on my research for the Lyme documentary Under Our Skin, I concluded that there was much more money at stake with Lyme Disease. It was the first major new disease discovered after the Bayh-Dole Act and the Diamond v. Chakrabarty Supreme Court decision made it possible for the NIH, the CDC, and universities to patent and profit from “ownership” of live organisms. When the causative organism behind Lyme disease was announced, something akin to the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 began, as scientists within these institutions began furiously filing patents on the surface proteins and DNA of the Lyme spirochete, hoping to profit from future vaccines and diagnostic tests that used these markers–for example, an NIH employee who patents a bacterial surface protein used in a commercial test kit or a vaccine could receive up to $150,000 in royalty payments a year, an amount that might double his or her annual salary. All of a sudden, the institutions that were supposed to be protectors of public health became business partners with Big Pharma. The university researchers who had previously shared information on dangerous emerging diseases were now delaying publishing their findings so they could become entrepreneurs and profit from patents through their university technology transfer groups. We essentially lost our system of scientific checks and balances. And this, in turn, has undermined patient trust in the institutions that are supposed to “do no harm.”
With Lyme disease, there’s no profit incentive for proactively treating someone with a few weeks of inexpensive, off-patent antibiotics. It’s the patentable vaccines and mandatory tests-before-treatment that bring in the steady revenues year after year. . . .
7. Ms. Newby went up against the “Lyme Disease establishment” in an attempt to find out why the disease was being mis-diagnosed and ineffectively treated. Strikingly, a FOIA suit she filed was stonewalled, before finally yielding the documents she had so long sought.
The “experts” and their agenda was neatly, and alarmingly, summed up by Ms. Newby:
” . . . . The emails revealed a disturbing picture of a nonofficial group of government employees and guidelines authors that had been setting the national Lyme disease research agenda without public oversight or transparency. . . . Bottom line, the guidelines authors regularly convened in government-funded, closed-door meetings with hidden agendas that lined the pockets of academic researchers with significant commercial interests in Lyme disease tests and vaccines. A large percentage of government grants were awarded to the guideline authors and/or researchers in their labs. Part of the group’s stated mission, culled from these FOIA emails, was to run a covert ‘disinformation war’ and a ‘sociopolitical offensive’ to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists who questioned the group’s research and motives. In the FOIA-obtained emails, Lyme patients and their treating physicians were called ‘loonies’ and ‘quacks’ by Lyme guidelines authors and NIH employees. . . .”
. . . . In the IDSA [Infectious Diseases Society of America] guidelines, chronic Lyme isn’t classified as an ongoing, persistent infection; it’s considered either an autoimmune syndrome (in which a body’s immune system attacks itself) or a psychological condition caused by “the aches and pains of daily living” or “prior traumatic psychological events.” These guidelines were often used by medical insurers to deny treatment, and many of its authors are paid consulting fees to testify as expert witnesses in these insurance cases. In some states, the guideline recommendations take on the force of law, so that Lyme physicians who practice outside them are at risk of losing their medical licenses.
The protestors were angry because, as part of a 2008 antitrust settlement brought by Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal (now a senator), the IDSA guidelines were supposed to appoint an expert panel without biases or conflicts to do a re-review of the guidelines. In the settlement press release, Blumenthal had written, “My office uncovered undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists. The IDSA’s guideline panel improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising serious questions about whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science.”
In response, the IDSA leadership selected a review panel of doctors and scientists, and they determined that “No changes or revisions to the 2006 Lyme guidelines are necessary at this time.”
Lorraine Johnson, JD, MBA, the chief executive officer of LymeDisease.org, and a champion of the IDSA antitrust suit, maintains that the review panel was stacked with like-minded cronies of the original guidelines’ authors and was therefore biased. She cites the recent article by research quality expert and Stanford professor John Ioannidis, MD, DSc, who recommends that “Professional societies should consider disentangling their specialists from guidelines and disease definitions and listen to what more impartial stakeholders think about their practices.”
Today, in 2019, these controversial guidelines and disputed tests are still influencing Lyme patient care.
People often ask me why the IDSA and CDC would support the problematic two-tier Lyme test. During my documentary research, I tried to get an answer to this question with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that solicited emails between three CDC employees and the IDSA guidelines authors. For five years the CDC strung me along with frivolous denials, unexplained delays, and false promises. In essence, the delays became an illegal, off-the-books FOIA denial. Some delays were attributed to understaffing, year-end deadlines, and CDC personnel out for vacation. At one point, my unanswered calls were blamed on a phone “dead zone” in the CDC’s new FOIA office. After the Lyme documentary Under Our Skin was released, I decided to double-down on my efforts to dislodge the FOIA request. My congressperson sent several letters to the CDC. The director of the documentary wrote a letter to President Obama. The FOIA ombudsman in the Office of Government Information Services repeatedly pressured the CDC to fulfill my request. I published blog posts about my plight and enlisted the support of a number of organizations dedicated to ensuring government transparency. Finally, the CDC sent three-thousand-plus FOIA pages, and I then understood its motivation for having delayed their release.
The emails revealed a disturbing picture of a nonofficial group of government employees and guidelines authors that had been setting the national Lyme disease research agenda without public oversight or transparency. Investigative journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer of the Poughkeepsie Journal was given access to these emails, and on May 20, 2013. She published an expose on this group’s abuse of power.
Bottom line, the guidelines authors regularly convened in government-funded, closed-door meetings with hidden agendas that lined the pockets of academic researchers with significant commercial interests in Lyme disease tests and vaccines. A large percentage of government grants were awarded to the guideline authors and/or researchers in their labs.
Part of the group’s stated mission, culled from these FOIA emails, was to run a covert “disinformation war” and a “sociopolitical offensive” to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists who questioned the group’s research and motives. In the FOIA-obtained emails, Lyme patients and their treating physicians were called “loonies” and “quacks’ by Lyme guidelines authors and NIH employees.
Because my FOIA request ended up taking five years to process, Under Our Skin had been made and released without answering an important question: Were the government officials responsible for managing Lyme disease health policy being inappropriately influenced by outside commercial interests?
Through my FOIA request, I found that a majority of the authors of the 2006 IDSA Lyme diagnosis and treatment guidelines held direct or indirect commercial interests related to Lyme disease. By defining the disease and endorsing tests or vaccines for which they were patent holders, they and their institutions made more money.
Yet, now Willy’s confession had added another potential dimension to the story, another reason for the CDC to be undercounting Lyme cases—maybe government officials knew that something else, a pathogen in addition to Borrelia, possibly a bio-weapon, was causing the problems, and they wanted to keep a lid on it. . . .
8. Further developing the links between biological warfare research and the Lyme Disease establishment, we review information from FTR #585.
At every turn, Lyme disease research is inextricably linked with biological warfare research. Divided into the “Steere” and “ILADS” camps, the Lyme disease research community is split between the view that the disease is “hard-to-catch, easy-to-cure” and the diametrically opposed view that the disease is very serious and produces long-term neurological disorder. The Steere camp diminishes the significance of the disease and is closely identified with biological warfare research. At the epicenter of Lyme disease research (and the Steere camp) are members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS. EIS personnel are to be found at every bend in the road of Lyme disease research.
The Borrelia genus has long been researched as a biological warfare vector. Note that Unit 731 personnel and their files were put to work for the United States after World War II, much like the Project Paperclip scientists from Germany.
“History of Lyme disease as a Bioweapon: Lyme is a Biowarfare Issue” by Elena Cook.
. . . The Borrelia genus of bacteria, which encompasses the Borrelia burgdorferi species-group (to which Lyme disease is attributed), was studied by the infamous WW2 Japanese biowar Unit 731, who carried out horrific experiments on prisoners in Manchuria, including dissection of live human beings. [iii] Unit 731 also worked on a number of other tick-borne pathogens. After the war, the butchers of Unit 731 were shielded from prosecution by the US authorities, who wanted their expertise for the Cold War. [iv] The US government also protected and recruited German Nazi bioweaponeers under the aegis of the top-secret Operation Paperclip. . . .
9. The Borrelia genus is well suited to biological warfare research.
“History of Lyme disease as a Bioweapon: Lyme is a Biowarfare Issue” by Elena Cook.
. . . borrelia were known for their ability to adopt different forms under conditions of stress (such as exposure to antibiotics). Shedding their outer wall, (which is the target of penicillin and related drugs), they could ward off attack and continue to exist in the body. Lyme disease is not usually fatal, and it is sometimes argued that, with rapidly lethal agents like smallpox and plague available, an army would have no interest in it. However, what is important to understand here is that incapacitating or ‘non-lethal’ bioweapons are a major part of biowarfare R&D [vi], and have been for decades. . . . Military strategists understand that disabling an enemy’s soldiers can sometimes cause more damage than killing them, as large amount of resources are then tied up in caring for the casualties. An efficient incapacitating weapon dispersed over a civilian population could destroy a country’s economy and infrastructure without firing a shot. People would either be too sick to work, or too busy looking after those who were. . . .
10. Research into Lyme disease has been dominated by personnel from the Epidemic Intelligence Service, whose members are the premier biological warfare experts in the country. The EIS personnel make up the Steere Camp. EIS personnel administered Lyme disease research from the beginning:
“History of Lyme disease as a Bioweapon: Lyme is a Biowarfare Issue” by Elena Cook.
. . . When Polly Murray made her now-famous call to the Connecticut health department to report the strange epidemic among children and adults in her town, her initial reception was lukewarm. However, some weeks later, she got an unexpected call from a Dr David Snydman, of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), who was very interested. He arranged for fellow EIS officer Dr Allen Steere to get involved. By the time Mrs. Murray turned up for her appointment at Yale, the doctor she had expected to see had been relegated to the role of an onlooker. Allen Steere had taken charge – and his views were to shape the course of Lyme medicine for the next thirty years, up till today. [x] . . .
11. More about the EIS and its importance to the international biological warfare research community:
“History of Lyme disease as a Bioweapon: Lyme is a Biowarfare Issue” by Elena Cook.
. . . . The EIS is an elite, quasi-military unit of Infectious Disease experts set up in the 1950’s to develop an [allegedly] offensive biowarfare capability. Despite the banning of offensive biowar in the 1970’s, the crack troops of the EIS continue to exist, ostensibly for non-offensive research into ‘emerging disease’ threats, a blanket phrase covering both bioweapon attacks and natural epidemics at the same time. Graduates of the EIS training program are sent in to occupy strategic positions in the US health infrastructure, taking leadership at federal and state health agencies, in academia, industry and the media. The organization also extends its influence abroad, training officers for public health agencies in Britain, France, the Netherlands etc. [xi] [xii] . . .
. . . . In fact a high proportion of Steere camp Lyme experts are involved with the EIS. Given that the EIS is a small, elite force, (in 2001 the CDC revealed there were less than 2500 EIS officers in existence since the unit was first created in 1951 [xiii]), it seems incredible that so many of America’s top Infectious Disease experts would devote their careers to what they themselves claim is a ‘hard-to-catch, easily-cured’ disease. . . .
12. Two of the people with whom Burgdorfer worked in the early phases of Lyme research (Jorge Benach and Alan Barbour) were also BW [biological warfare] specialists.
“History of Lyme disease as a Bioweapon: Lyme is a Biowarfare Issue” by Elena Cook.
. . . The microbe was accidentally found by biowarfare scientist Willy Burgdorfer and was subsequently named for him. [Emphasis added.] Burgdorfer has championed the Lyme patients’ movement and is not suspected of any wrongdoing. However it is not impossible that he was unwittingly caught up in a chain of events that were not as random as they might have seemed. [Burgdorfer was a Swiss scientist who had been recruited by the US Public Health Service in the 1950’s. He was highly experienced with both ticks and borrelia, but after being told that the government was not interested in funding work with the latter, he switched to work with Rickettsia and other pathogens. [xiv] In 1981, Burgdorfer was sent a batch of deer ticks by a team studying Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever on the East Coast.
In charge of the team was one Dr Jorge Benach. [xv] Benach subsequently spent much of his career as a Steere camp Lyme researcher. In 2004 he was chosen as recipient for a $3 million biowarfare research grant. [xvi] [Emphasis added.] Cutting open some of Benach’ ticks, Burgdorfer noticed microfilaria (microscopic worm young). This was a subject he had been studying recently, only these microfilaria were different. They were exceptionally large, large enough to be seen with the naked eye.[xvii] His curiosity naturally piqued, he opened up several more ticks. There he was surprised to find the spiral-shaped germs of borrelia. Cultivation is necessary in order to isolate bacteria for study, so that diagnostic tests, vaccines or cures can be developed. Borrelia are very difficult to grow in culture.
However, by ‘lucky coincidence’, another scientist had recently joined the lab where he worked, and had apparently been involved in an amazing breakthrough in this area. So naturally Burgdorfer handed the infected ticks over to him. [xviii] That scientist was Dr. Alan Barbour, an officer, like Steere and Snydman, of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, with a background in work on anthrax, one of the most terrifying biowarfare agents known. [xix] [Emphasis added.] . . .
13. Setting the template for future Lyme research, EIS researcher Alan Barbour’s work on borrelia determined the nature of subsequent Lyme disease testing. Barbour has gone on to the top position in a biological warfare research facility at the University of California at Irvine, where he is working with another “Steerite,” Jonas Bunikis.
“History of Lyme disease as a Bioweapon: Lyme is a Biowarfare Issue” by Elena Cook.
. . . EIS man Barbour therefore became the first to isolate the prototype organism on which all subsequent Lyme disease blood tests would be based. [xx] This is very significant, as a huge body of evidence [xxi] indicates the unreliability of these tests, which are routinely used to rule out the disease. Additionally, all DNA detection of the Lyme agent in ticks and animals is ultimately based, directly or indirectly, on the genetic profile of the strain first isolated by Barbour.
Shortly after Barbour’s discovery, other species and strains of the Lyme-causing bacteria were isolated, especially in Europe. They were all classified based on their resemblance to Barbour’s organism, and have been grouped into a category called Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato or ‘Bbsl’ for short. . . . In 2005 Barbour, who spent much of his career studying the ‘hard-to-catch, easy-to-cure’ Lyme disease, was placed in charge of the multi-million dollar new biowarfare mega-complex based at University of California at Irvine (UCI). [xxiv] Barbour is joined there by his close colleague and fellow Steerite Jonas Bunikis, author of recent papers calling for a restrictive approach to Lyme diagnosis. [Emphasis added.] . . .
Discussion
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