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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.
Listeners and readers are emphatically encouraged to read and purchase Ms. Newby’s book.
In previous posts, we noted:
- 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.
- Burgdorfer’s confession to Tim Grey–an independent filmmaker–that Lyme Disease resulted from biological warfare.
- 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.
- Information regarding 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.
In this post, we present discussion of Ms. Newby’s expose of the institutionally and financially incestuous relationship between bureaucratic and corporate entities that both regulate, and profit from, Lyme Disease. Key “experts” involved with diagnosing and treating the affliction run interference for the status quo.
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. ” . . . . 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.’ . . .”
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 were 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. . . .”
1. 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. ” . . . . 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. . . .
2. Ms. Newby went up against the “Lyme Disease establishment” in an attempt to find out why the disease was being misdiagnosed 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. . . .”
. . . . 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. . . .
Looking Back from 1984
Discussion
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