Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #749: Lyme Disease and Biowarfare with Kris Newby
Transcript
- 0:00You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
- 0:10We talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
- 0:13All the central banks going nuts.
- 0:16So it's all acting like safe haven.
- 0:18I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
- 0:25In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
- 0:28I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
- 0:31If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
- 0:36Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me.
- 0:38Hi, Marty. Thanks for inviting me on.
- 0:41Well, I'm very excited to do this.
- 0:42For the audience out there who may not know, sitting down with Chris Newby,
- 0:46who's an award-winning science writer, investigative journalist,
- 0:49and senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary Under Our Skin.
- 0:53She also wrote a book called Bitten,
- 0:55The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons in 2019.
- 1:01You won three awards for that book.
- 1:03But I think most importantly, you're delving into this particular line of investigative
- 1:09reporting started because you and your husband were bitten by ticks at Martha's Vineyard
- 1:14in 2002 and basically went on a wild goose chase to figure out what happened to you.
- 1:22and through that process sort of went bankrupt and went down this rabbit hole.
- 1:29So this is a beat you've been covering for over two decades now at this point.
- 1:33And as I was saying before I hit record, it's a very top of mind for many people here in the U.S.
- 1:42as ticks seem to be exploding in population and diseases like Lyme and alpha-gal begin to pop up all over the place.
- 1:52Yeah, I never I was a tech writer in Silicon Valley and I'm an engineer to engineering degrees.
- 2:00And I never in a million years imagined that I would be on the tick beat for the rest of my life.
- 2:07But what happened to our family was so devastating.
- 2:11And after I figured out what was wrong and we both got back, my husband and I both got back on our feet.
- 2:18I said, I never want this to happen to another family again.
- 2:21So I'm doing everything I can to educate people to get fast treatment.
- 2:29Is that the most important thing, getting on top of it as quickly as possible?
- 2:35Yeah.
- 2:35If you pulled out an engorged tick and went on a couple weeks of doxycycline, you would go on with your life and never think about it again.
- 2:46the main thing about ticks is they can inject you with up to 20 tick-borne diseases some are deadly
- 2:57and the saliva of the tick suppresses your immune system and whatever's in the tick can
- 3:05punk your immune system and if you don't get on it right away you could be sick for the rest of
- 3:12your life. So that's what I've decided to dedicate the rest of my life to is to prevent that.
- 3:19Well, I think before we jump into the more topical questions that are on people's minds
- 3:25as it pertains to AlphaGol, these boxes that people have been talking about and
- 3:29Lyme vaccines that may be hitting the market this summer, I think getting into the backstory
- 3:37and the heat, the heart of Bitten, the book that you wrote about the history of governments
- 3:45experimenting with this and its relation to the Cold War. I think maybe starting there,
- 3:53particularly with Willie Bergdorfer and his story and how he came to discover Lyme disease.
- 4:01Yeah. So Bitten is half my medical memoir. And then the other half is about this Swiss
- 4:07scientist, zoologist who came over here in 1951 to be in the bioweapons program. And his particular
- 4:18role was to weaponize fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes so that we could drop them on our enemies during
- 4:26the Cold War. So this was not known until I sat down with him and got a bunch of his files that
- 4:34had been hidden in his garage. But it's sort of shocking. But I, I believe that a lot of our
- 4:43tick-borne disease problems have been worsened by in part because of those irresponsible government
- 4:50government experiments. And part of what I would like is more ethical oversight with biomedical
- 4:59experiments that the government is conducting.
- 5:04I mean, that's been a big topic this decade, obviously, with gain-of-function research and
- 5:09the theories of that contributing to COVID-19's development and proliferation. And I think
- 5:16I've been privy to the Plum Island theories that have been around for a while. And I think I would
- 5:24agree with you. I would like more transparency and insight into whether or not our government
- 5:30has actively been experimenting with us both on the tick-borne diseases side and the viruses
- 5:39side of things with things like COVID. And it is insane to think that our government could
- 5:44do something like this in a lab, unleash it on the public, either knowingly or unknowingly,
- 5:50intentionally or unintentionally and have it explode to a point where I think this year
- 5:56specifically people are legitimately fearful to go outside to play in the woods because they don't
- 6:01want to get Lyme's disease or alpha gall. Yeah and a lot of people say to me well the tick
- 6:12releases happened 40 50 years ago what does it matter and it does because Willie Bergdorf in his
- 6:18little lab in Rocky Mountain in Hamilton, Montana, the Rocky Mountain Labs run by the NIH,
- 6:28was putting all sorts of horrible diseases in the ticks and the fleas and the mosquitoes. And
- 6:35our current surveillance for how tick diseases are spreading is very flawed.
- 6:41And it would really help researchers and save research dollars to know
- 6:46what diseases were engineered and where were they released? For example, I mean, the first
- 6:52cases of Lyme were in northern Wisconsin. And why did they start there? Well,
- 6:59University of Wisconsin at Madison was doing all sorts of bioweapons experiments. And a lot of
- 7:07Sometimes widows would sell their farms to the bioweapons, I mean, the head of that program in Wisconsin, and they would conduct open-air experiments.
- 7:20So, I mean, it would help everyone to know what was released, where and when.
- 7:27Yeah, well, you spent a lot of time with Willie before his death in 2014 talking about this, I believe, in my research.
- 7:36uh haven't been able to read the full book yet but did the best i could to get as much as possible
- 7:42but i think at one point you say he said cryptically that he didn't tell you everything
- 7:45about the origins of lyme disease and uh the the narrative that the government and
- 7:52media was putting out there is completely contradictory to it's a reality
- 7:56yeah and yeah so i did a series of interviews with him the first interview was for the
- 8:05documentary under our skin where he said we were we were there setting up lights and cameras with
- 8:10Andy Wilson the very talented director and producer who I tagged along with for the five years it took
- 8:18to get that out and he was setting up lights for about 45 minutes and all of a sudden there's a
- 8:24boom boom boom on the front door of Willie's house we couldn't get anyone in the government
- 8:29and the CDC or the NIH to go on camera about Lyme disease, like what it is and why it's so hard to
- 8:35diagnose, treat and cure. And it turns out to be a head scientist at the Rocky Mountain Lab,
- 8:44which was just like two and a half blocks away from Willie's house. And he says, I've been told
- 8:48to sit in on this interview. And the director was just appalled. Like, you can't do that.
- 8:55Willie's retired. He's a private citizen. And it was a very tense, confrontational interchange.
- 9:04And I was afraid the labs would shut us down. But anyways, the scientists left. We went on with the
- 9:11interview. And during the interview, Willie said some things that no one in the government had ever
- 9:16said, which is, yeah, we know that Lyme disease can be chronic, affect the nervous system very
- 9:23seriously and it's worse for kids who get it who have developing neurological systems and then we
- 9:31were shutting down the lights this was a very long interview and then he had a little sly smile he
- 9:36said i didn't tell you everything so that his interview was like that that alone was shocking
- 9:44because it was the first time anyone at nih had admitted admitted that Lyme could be go on to be
- 9:50chronic and a lot of them still deny that. But it was like a nagging worry of mine, but we had to
- 10:02get the film out. We'd been filming for three years and the editing was really involved. But
- 10:09so anyways, after the film, I said, well, I'm done with Lyme disease. I was doing the film when I was
- 10:17recovering. So I was sick half the time. And I told my husband, Paul, I'm done. I'm going to,
- 10:26I'm going to go on with my life. I got a really good job. I'm in the Stanford Med School writing
- 10:31science stuff. And then two weeks after that, I went to a Texas birthday party. It was my husband's
- 10:42family. I didn't know anybody there. So I was sitting around the kitchen table, uh, talking to
- 10:48this other guy who wasn't one of the few people who wasn't part of the family. And he was an old
- 10:52grizzly guy and he was into his cups. Uh, and I said, so what did you do before you retired?
- 10:59And he says, I worked for the company. I was CIA black ops. So it was just like,
- 11:07of all the gin joints in all the world. And then he went on to talk about like
- 11:11the horrible things he did in Vietnam because he had a guilty conscience and his wife had just left
- 11:17him. And then at the very end of this, these stories that had all of us at the table with
- 11:24wide eyes, like dropping decapitated skulls on the Viet Cong, war crimes. He said, well,
- 11:35the weirdest thing I'd ever done was drop infected ticks on the Cuban sugar cane workers
- 11:42for it was operation mongoose or Colonel Lansdale, who was dirty ops. So all of a sudden,
- 11:56this must be a movie or something. I can't believe this is happening to me because this,
- 12:01there's no way this guy could have known. I just spent five years investigating the TIC weaponization
- 12:08program for which there were, there was no public information of us ever doing bioweapons
- 12:15operations on, in foreign nations. So anyways, then I, that's, that's when I said, well, I can't
- 12:24walk away from this story. No one else is going to want to do it. It's too hot to handle. So
- 12:30I did it and I started the research process which was long I can get into it but it might be a
- 12:38diversion it's in the book so part of this of the book is me how I finally extracted all the
- 12:44information and the confirmation of the Cuban tick drop ended up coming out a couple years later
- 12:51in the JFK assassination files of all places because that all those operations were part of
- 13:00wanting to dethrone Castro, the communist leader of Cuba.
- 13:06Okay, now I have many questions.
- 13:08Okay, fire away.
- 13:10Well, I guess the order of operations, the question is like, why ticks?
- 13:15What makes ticks good agents to spread this, these types of diseases?
- 13:21Did they know the long-term ramifications of something like Lyme or AlphaGol
- 13:28when they were weaponizing these ticks,
- 13:31and did they understand the potential for them to break containment?
- 13:37Was this truly targeted at the Cuban regime over there,
- 13:41even more nefarious sort of intent behind it,
- 13:46making people more broadly affected by the spread of these diseases
- 13:53and therefore more dependent on the system to a certain degree?
- 13:58So let's start out why. First of all, you have to frame it in history. This was the Cold War. We would do anything to fight the communists. It was an existential threat.
- 14:10and that's where stuff like MKUltra came about
- 14:17new more lethal chemical weapons
- 14:21which is what I talk about in my next book
- 14:23but let me just read the army's description
- 14:26of why they thought ticks were a good idea
- 14:28so I pulled this out
- 14:31okay
- 14:32in 1953 the biological warfare laboratories
- 14:39at Fort Detrick, Maryland, established a program to study the use of arthropods.
- 14:44Those are ticks, fleas, and mosquitoes for spreading anti-personnel bioweapons agents.
- 14:50The advantage of arthropods as bioweapons carriers are these.
- 14:54They inject the agent directly into the body so that a mask is no protection to a soldier
- 15:00and they will remain alive for some time, keeping an area constantly dangerous.
- 15:06So what it did was it would disable soldiers and everyone around them, and then it would tie up medical resources.
- 15:18And Willie, at that time, in ticks, was mixing multiple diseases.
- 15:23So he specifically was mixing, let's see, Rocky Mountain spotted fever with Colorado tick fever virus.
- 15:30So it not clear if he was able to do that but if you were to drop something like that in an area that you wanted to eventually invade there would be no fingerprints on the ticks
- 15:43It would just be a hard to solve crime.
- 15:49And then everybody would get sick and then it would be easy for ground forces to go in and take over.
- 15:54And oh, by the way, you wouldn't destroy the infrastructure like you would with a bomb, a nuclear bomb.
- 16:02So some people called it bioweapons, poor man's nuke.
- 16:06I had some I had a report from some army bean counter said tick borne tularemia, which is still on the select agent list.
- 16:16You could. Kill a person for a dollar thirty three.
- 16:24Pretty cheap.
- 16:27I know.
- 16:29That's what I mean about we need some sort of bioethical overview if this kind of stuff makes sense.
- 16:36Because, okay, you release a bunch of ticks on an enemy city or area, and then, well, what about the soldiers who go in?
- 16:45There's no way to tell the ticks, okay, you can only bite Soviets.
- 16:50Yeah.
- 16:51Well, and that, I mean, you have the chart here, too.
- 16:53on your site, I'll pull it up.
- 16:55But like, going back to the question of like,
- 16:58could they foresee the expansion and proliferation
- 17:01of these tick populations throughout time?
- 17:03Like if you're dropping it somewhere,
- 17:07you have the Lyme disease numbers over time here.
- 17:13In this GIF, and as you can see, it's spreading pretty rapidly.
- 17:16And I think that's one thing that is obvious this year,
- 17:20specifically as you have a bunch of people going on hikes
- 17:23and running farms, whatever it may be,
- 17:25and highlighting that the number of ticks that they're encountering
- 17:28is far beyond what they've ever seen historically.
- 17:33And so they're wondering, why is this?
- 17:35Are ticks just naturally invasive species
- 17:39that will have these population explosions
- 17:44if there aren't natural predators in the area that you're dropping them?
- 17:48Is there some accelerated attempt to artificially increase their populations?
- 17:57And I think maybe that gets into the question of these boxes that people are talking about.
- 18:02But is this a Frankenstein that the government has lost control of?
- 18:06I think it's what many people are worried about.
- 18:10Well, there's multiple components to that question.
- 18:13First of all, Willie did try to get ticks to produce faster so they could just have tick boxes ready to go.
- 18:24But he said he was not able to do that.
- 18:29But so why are ticks exploding right now?
- 18:33Now, on the face of it, legitimate scientists will say, well, climate change, some places that have bad winters, a certain percentage of the ticks would get killed off.
- 18:49And that would keep the population down.
- 18:53Another thing is housing is proliferating into tick habitats, so people are exposed to it more.
- 19:00then the other thing is that
- 19:06deers are cute and we're
- 19:10we're less we're more reluctant not to shoot them and kill them
- 19:14and then ticks are where deer are where ticks over winter
- 19:20and breed and lay their 3,000 eggs
- 19:24so that's that's safe haven for legitimate
- 19:29scientists, I would suggest that the military intervention in tick releases, uncontrolled
- 19:39tick releases, are part of the problem.
- 19:42And you could see on that chart, and the USA Today has the newer numbers on their chart
- 19:48from the weekend, but somehow Lyme disease started spreading in an aggressive way.
- 19:59around the 70s. And no one's asking why. So there are two things that could be going on there.
- 20:09One is Willie told me when he was sent out to investigate what was happening with the Lyme
- 20:16sickness, he said it wasn't just the Lyme bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi named after him. There was
- 20:24another organism that was mixed in the ticks. And he suggested it was a rickettsia, like Rocky
- 20:32Man had spotted fever, the most dangerous tick-borne bacteria in the U.S. And it was in the
- 20:41drafts of his original article on the discovery. But somehow between the handwritten draft that I
- 20:48got a copy of and what published in Science Magazine, the discussion about a second rickettsia
- 20:57germ that may or may not have been weaponized because they were working on that. I have documents
- 21:02on that. He was asked to cover it up. So really the question is, you know, if you name a disease
- 21:09that people get, Lyme disease, is it really two different organisms that made people so quick?
- 21:16could have been a virus too because they were experimenting with viruses too.
- 21:21So that's one factor is, was there a military open air experiment there?
- 21:29And can we get records for that?
- 21:32The other thing that happened, which is related to AlphaGal, is in the late 60s,
- 21:38this young, ambitious bug scientist, Daniel Sonenschein, who was at Old Dominion College,
- 21:47and they wanted to be at a real university. So Daniel somehow got some military contracts
- 21:53and started doing tick experiments, because at that time, they were looking for
- 21:57a tick that would survive Russian winters and that they can inject with various things. So he was
- 22:05reporting to the army and the atomic energy commission and what happened is in this
- 22:11set of experiments it was in norfolk virginia near norfolk virginia which is on the atlantic
- 22:16bird flyway you can probably pull up a picture of that uh on my website and what what he did was
- 22:28he ordered some pregnant ticks, they're called gravid ticks from Willie at Rocky Mountain Labs.
- 22:36And he had a lot of them and he made them radioactive. He injected the pregnant ticks
- 22:43with a radioactive fluid. So when they laid their 3000 eggs, all the ticks that were born would be
- 22:48radioactive. Why would he do that? So he could track their spread over months to years because
- 22:54the military would need to know if I dropped poison ticks on an enemy, how long it would
- 23:00take to infect this city or whatever it was.
- 23:04So what he did was he went out to a couple swampy lots, marked off meter grids, put a
- 23:11thousand ticks in each grid of the radioactive ticks, and then he'd go out with his lackey
- 23:17students every month, collect the ticks in each grid, see how many of the radioactive
- 23:23ticks were there.
- 23:24then he'd go and put them back. If there were new ticks in the grid, he would paint them with
- 23:29fluorescent paint, and that way he could track them. He also tracked how many of them, the bird
- 23:37migrations, because they'd want to know some of the ticks would go on the birds. And what one of
- 23:43his papers said is it would take five days for a tick to go from coastal Virginia up to Long Island,
- 23:52New York. So like a year or two after his Virginia experiments, all of a sudden, the ticks that he
- 24:01was experimenting with, they were the Lone Star ticks, the sticks, the ticks that carry Rocky
- 24:08Mountain spotted fever, the ticks that spread alpha-gal allergy. Before those experiments,
- 24:15that tick was only native south of the Mason-Dixon line.
- 24:20When he put it to the north in Virginia on the bird flyway,
- 24:25all of a sudden these ticks were starting to get established in Long Island.
- 24:31And all of a sudden there was an outbreak of Rocky Mountain spotted fever
- 24:35and people were dying.
- 24:39Yeah, that's the list of radioactive ticks that he released.
- 24:43And those are the only releases that were published. There could be more. So what's wrong with that? He's taking, first of all, Lone Star Ticks are very aggressive. And they were the only tick in North America that had eyes on their shoulders.
- 25:04So they not only just sense carbon dioxide on a blade of grass like the deer ticks did, but they would actively stalk prey because they could sort of see them and smell them.
- 25:18And so they swarm and they can just spread more diseases.
- 25:25Then the other thing is they carry spotted fever, the most deadly bacterium, tick-borne bacterium in the U.S.
- 25:31and then the Alpha Gal.
- 25:34And nobody has a good explanation as to how Alpha Gal all of a sudden started being a real thing.
- 25:45We noticed it in the 80s.
- 25:47So I've never been able to determine if it's part of the bioweapons program or what.
- 25:53But I should explain what Alpha Gal is because I haven't done that yet.
- 25:57yeah please because as somebody who loves red meat it scares the hell out of me
- 26:03yeah it's horrible okay so in the bite of a lone star tick uh transmits a protein alpha gal
- 26:15that creates that starts circulating in your blood it's an allergen and it creates a condition where
- 26:23every time you eat red meat, you get an allergic reaction.
- 26:29But it's not like a wasp sting.
- 26:31You'll wake up two to six hours later in the middle of the night,
- 26:35and you might be vomiting, nauseous, hives.
- 26:40You might even go into anaphylactic shock.
- 26:44And it isn't just a one-time deal.
- 26:48Usually it happens on the second bite of a lone star tick.
- 26:52It can be a lifelong allergy.
- 26:57I don't think it'll be that way forever, but right now it's just people are waking up to it like, what?
- 27:04And it takes people a long time to get diagnosed.
- 27:09Okay, so then let's say you get diagnosed with alpha-gal allergy.
- 27:16It's almost impossible to avoid meat products right now.
- 27:20they're in the gelatin capsules in your vitamins or your medications all of a sudden you have to
- 27:25tell your pharmacy I can't have any medications with a bovine based
- 27:30capsule or let's say you go to your jersey subs and say I want a turkey sandwich because bird
- 27:40meat doesn't seem to be that bad you have to tell them okay do not cut the turkey where you cut
- 27:46the ham or the beef sandwich.
- 27:50Some people are so allergic, they can't even go to a Texas barbecue without having respiratory issues.
- 27:58So, serious.
- 28:02And not much money is being spent on research about what to do.
- 28:07Yeah, I've heard acupuncture works, or S-A-A-T.
- 28:11As we've been talking about it, more people have been responding with that.
- 28:14And that's like, to your point, I think you sort of had just like, this could be a lifelong
- 28:20allergen, but you don't think that'll be the way it'll be the case forever.
- 28:25And that's like, we've been covering this for, for a few months now.
- 28:30That's just becoming more prominent.
- 28:31And that's like one of the first responses we'll get is the, well, actually you can treat
- 28:36this.
- 28:37And it's like, well, actually we shouldn't have to treat this.
- 28:39Like, is this really a a government bioweapons program that broke containment and is having a.
- 28:49Very drastic negative effect on hundreds of thousands of Americans now at this point, and if so, are these people going to be held accountable?
- 28:57And what does it say about our government and what they'll do to their own populace?
- 29:02And maybe for being generous, what they'll do to to our enemies that that can break containment and begin to affect the populace.
- 29:12It's insane that we have a government that is actively doing things like this in the sphere of bioweapons and biological warfare.
- 29:22Like I said, I think COVID is becoming clear to me, at least, that the NIH, the Wuhan lab, and Fort Dietrich experimentation with gain-of-function, they're obviously doing this stuff.
- 29:35And I think it is sensible to question, number one, why, and number two, how do we make them stop if we can?
- 29:44I know there have there has been some positive movement under Kennedy to get the gain of function experimentation under control.
- 29:58But there's just so much money in it right now.
- 30:02I I don't know if they'll win.
- 30:05And like what I did with Lyme disease to try and figure out why it's such a disaster zone for people trying to get diagnosed and treated.
- 30:16It's because, first of all, ticks are intricately tied to the bioweapons program now and the tick-borne diseases.
- 30:25So a lot of those research grants require a security clearance.
- 30:29So if you're a smart researcher in arthropods or tick-borne diseases, you'll get a security clearance.
- 30:37And then all of a sudden, that's a competitive advantage to other researchers who, you know, they're in an obscure field and they might not be able to get funding.
- 30:49But if you have a security clearance, less competition for those grants.
- 30:52And you're also like a tick tapping into the very, very large biosecurity budget.
- 31:00You know, that's why the whole Wuhan lab people and university, the state, the North Carolina
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- 32:37Well, I mean, you highlighted this as one of the things to talk about, the money printing machine.
- 32:42Thank you.
- 32:43How do you realign incentives to make sure this isn't the case?
- 32:48Because it seems like it's a case of, oh, I can produce not only career, I can de-risk career risk by working in this very, very niche, but considered highly important field by the government.
- 33:02And they will throw insane amounts of money at it.
- 33:05But to your point, it's hard to get people to actively work towards making it so their career isn't as stable as they thought it was previously.
- 33:21Right, right.
- 33:21Yeah. And because of the securities clearance requirement, I feel like the tick-borne diseases don't have the A team of researchers with bright ideas and a deeper knowledge of genetics and genetic manipulation.
- 33:39so the old researchers have circled their wagons around lyme disease you look at a new
- 33:47fellowship student they just got their phd and they need to work under someone in a lab
- 33:51well the security clearance could take a year maybe more now some of those tick-borne pathogens
- 34:00are bio level three especially the rickettsians so they they can't risk their career on
- 34:07just twiddling their thumbs for a year before they get clearances.
- 34:12So that's why we have a lot of really, really old people.
- 34:14So what I did was I went through the last 20 years of grants at the NIH under Fauci.
- 34:21And I found out that a huge percentage of the Lyme disease and tick-borne disease grants
- 34:26went to internal NIH projects.
- 34:30So those are people who aren't necessarily eager to sequence these germs and say, oh, yeah, NIH at that time during the Cold War, we were trying to solve tick-borne diseases, make people healthier.
- 34:47But we were also trying to create germs of mass destruction.
- 34:51So that would be career suicide in NIH to take all that money that Congress said we needed to spend on breakthroughs for Lyme disease.
- 35:00So and same with the people at the universities.
- 35:03They don't want to do that anyways, because NIH is where they get all their funding.
- 35:10Yeah, it seems like Fauci and NIH are at the core of the problems here, the moral hazard that exists in the realm of medical research and bioweapons.
- 35:20Right. And when Lyme was discovered and when Fauci moved into the number two spot at NIAID, that's the infectious diseases group in NIH, that's when the laws changed and the Bayh-Dole Act passed so that all of a sudden scientists and the universities and the agencies like CDC and NIH could make discoveries and then they could become business partners with pharma.
- 35:48so when Lyme disease happened
- 35:52all these guys looked
- 35:54I call them the carpetbaggers
- 35:56they looked at the microscope
- 35:57at this spirochete
- 35:58and they patented the proteins
- 36:00on the surface
- 36:01and then they could team up with pharma
- 36:04and say if anybody uses
- 36:06this genetic sequence of proteins
- 36:10on the surface of this bacteria
- 36:12then in a vaccine or a test kit
- 36:14I get a cut of the profits
- 36:16so immediately pharma teamed up with these researchers and they realized well the vaccines
- 36:25are annual money makers you have to people have to go in to get a Lyme vaccine every month or every
- 36:31year versus the cure which is just at the time I started my film it was ten dollars of doxycycline
- 36:39covered by insurance.
- 36:43So it's like, no, we're going to do the vaccine.
- 36:47And so they had to bolster the myth that two pills of doxy cure the disease,
- 36:57and then they'd go on and have chronic diseases.
- 36:59And, oh, then we could sell more vaccines,
- 37:01and we could sell the anti-inflammatory drugs and the antidepressants
- 37:06to treat the symptoms of chronic Lyme.
- 37:11And then meantime, people at the CDC or the NIH,
- 37:15they could get a cut from all these drugs and vaccines.
- 37:20And so they could more than double their salary,
- 37:24their government salary.
- 37:26But from a scientific point of view,
- 37:29they corrupted the foundational science
- 37:33because
- 37:35pharma could say
- 37:37oh that discovery you made on Lyme disease
- 37:39that might cure people
- 37:40that's intellectual property and that's
- 37:43secret
- 37:43and so then scientists
- 37:47weren't going to conferences and sharing information
- 37:49because
- 37:50most initial discoveries
- 37:53are wrong in science and then it takes
- 37:55multiple brains
- 37:57to get it back on track and
- 37:59add value to the discoveries
- 38:01yeah
- 38:02I mean, as it pertains to the vaccine, we're getting the, is this the first Lyme vaccine that's coming out this summer from Pfizer?
- 38:11No, it's the third.
- 38:13Third?
- 38:13There were two other vaccines around 1990, and a lot of scientists were on contract with the vaccine manufacturers.
- 38:24So there was some belief that they weren't telling the truth about what they understood about the disease.
- 38:30And I don't want to get in it here.
- 38:32But read Pam Weintraub's book, Cure Unknown.
- 38:37And she was there in the vaccine hearings.
- 38:40And she has the receipts for who was paid off.
- 38:43So that's the best book to read on that.
- 38:46Okay.
- 38:47Well, bring it back to the tick boxes.
- 38:49I'm sure you've seen the video.
- 38:50Yeah.
- 38:52Of course, my email boxes are flooded.
- 38:55my text with, oh my gosh, someone's dropping boxes of ticks on Missouri farmers' lots.
- 39:05And of course, I feel bad because I might be responsible for those rumors in some part.
- 39:12But I followed up.
- 39:14So I trace it to the original rumor, which was from a holistic doctor.
- 39:22I don't know what that means.
- 39:23from Iowa and her name is Sarah Outlaw. And I called her and she goes, well, yeah, actually
- 39:31that report of a tick box on a farm was secondhand from a colleague from Missouri.
- 39:40And she said she heard it from an Amish farmer. So there's only one box secondhand. So that's where
- 39:48that rumor came from. And she was surprised that she got about a million hits. She's also a health
- 39:56and wellness influencer. So, and so I was going, oh my gosh, I want to do this side research
- 40:06project to see if this is true or not. But luckily, a senior reporter at Snopes,
- 40:12a fact-checking group. His name is Jordan Lyles. He went and called about 100 Missouri officials,
- 40:20and no one in Missouri has heard about this rumor from the farmers that might report it or whatever.
- 40:28So I think Jordan, I talked with him briefly this weekend, and he said,
- 40:34no new news, and we called hundreds of officials. This has not been confirmed.
- 40:40So that said, I would say that dropping ticks on the farms would.
- 40:49I mean, there's rumors that, oh, Pfizer did it to sell their vaccines.
- 40:53My point of view is the tick problem in the U.S. is already completely out of control because of these.
- 41:01The factors I mentioned early, and it's just now we're waking up how big the problem is because.
- 41:08because the range of the ticks is slowly increasing from ground zero,
- 41:16which was Lyme, Connecticut, and Long Island.
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- 43:37Well, how do you, to that point, I mean, regardless if the government or some big pharma company is dropping ticks, I think to your point, it's been spreading slowly but surely.
- 43:48Over time, how do you combat it?
- 43:51How do you slow the growth or decrease the tick populations?
- 43:54Do we just need to have guinea fowl and chickens roaming across grasslands and the affected areas for a number of years?
- 44:04Is this a reversible problem or is this something that we're going to have to live with in perpetuity?
- 44:11Well, climate change is part of the problem, but my best friend just bought a farm in Wisconsin.
- 44:18And, you know, because the government hasn't acknowledged that it's really a countrywide problem now and we need to think big, use AI for strategies, it's up to the individuals now.
- 44:32So, I mean, the thing, there's bait boxes. So you buy boxes with anti-tick medicine for mice.
- 44:42And, you know, it's got a nice warm nesting box for the mice.
- 44:46And then they get this anti-tick medicine on them when they go in it.
- 44:51There are, you can collect ticks on your yard with these CO2 boxes.
- 44:57You can make your own or I don't know if anyone buys them.
- 44:59I sort of suspect that maybe this tick box rumor started from the CO2 collection boxes.
- 45:05but dry ice put dry ice and they can go in there because they're attracted to the co2 that your body
- 45:11emits or any mammal and then guinea fowl or chickens uh that helps you build a perimeter
- 45:22around your lawn where there's no leaf litter for the ticks to collect and then you know in
- 45:29in the big tick season, you probably spray some chemical to keep them away. So that's,
- 45:36that's all I know about, but there are better websites online that have advice from people
- 45:41that have to deal with it every day. I moved to Utah. There are not many ticks here.
- 45:47Well, that, um, I mean, it's, again, I think this goes back to government accountability too.
- 45:54What are your hopes in terms of that?
- 45:58I saw there was a GAO announcement that they're going to look into it, I think earlier today.
- 46:03That came out, or maybe yesterday.
- 46:05It does look like enough people are making enough noise and the government is saying,
- 46:09okay, it looks like we've got to look into this.
- 46:13Do you think it's a national emergency that demands a federal government investigation and response in action?
- 46:21the good news a first step was taken this year because chris smith of new jersey a congressman
- 46:30from new jersey after five years of trying finally got an amendment in the dod budget
- 46:36that says they have to declassify all this tick-borne weapons program info so what was released
- 46:45where So that the first step And that a GAO Government Accounting Office report needs to be released in about a year and a half
- 46:56So that's the first step. That said, it could be like the Epstein files.
- 47:03We might get five pages of blackouts on them. But that's the first step.
- 47:10We have RFK Jr. in office whose whole family has been affected drastically by Lyme disease.
- 47:21I mean, he has places up in that hot zone.
- 47:26He goes to Martha's Vineyard a lot.
- 47:28That's where my husband and I were bitten.
- 47:31Martha's Vineyard in Nantucket, you get Lyme and this other really horrible disease.
- 47:37It's a parasite called babesiosis.
- 47:40It's a red blood cell parasite.
- 47:42So when you get those two together, it's hard to cure.
- 47:45So that's a first step.
- 47:49I don't know.
- 47:52I don't know.
- 47:53I mean, I've been in it 20 years, and I thought we would have made more progress.
- 47:59But at this point in time, I am optimistic that things will get better.
- 48:04what was the most radicalizing thing about doing this research over over the last 20 years
- 48:11uh i never would have imagined that they had done these things even daniel sun and shine who
- 48:20released the radioactive ticks who has no moral boundaries he just laughed when it when i said
- 48:28well did you get any approval for these open-air tick experiments he just laughed and says oh i got
- 48:33a city permit, I could never get this approved nowadays. So he just laughed it off.
- 48:40Okay, what was the most surprising? Well, first of all, if you've gone through six years of being
- 48:47really, really sick from a disease that the medical establishment and the government are in denial,
- 48:55it was very dark and depressing to go through the research.
- 48:59um i turn that depression into action so wow i can feel i can get over this depression if i just
- 49:09help other people and and you know the main advice i have is take every tick bite seriously
- 49:16don't get gaslit by a doctor that says wait and see that's what happened to us and then
- 49:21you know a year later we're almost incurable because of the two tick-borne diseases and um
- 49:28And I would say send the ticks that you pull out in to have them screened for all the worst tick-borne diseases.
- 49:38It might be free through your public health department or it might be $75 or $100, but that is cheaper and faster than a human test.
- 49:48The human tests aren't very good right now, mostly.
- 49:51and it take their antibody tests which from covid you know it takes a while for antibodies to develop
- 49:59when you get a disease so you have to wait three weeks before the human tests work but
- 50:05tick tick tests they're mostly dna based fast a couple days so that's what i would say um
- 50:14that's good to know i mean you said um you got the gentleman's name that he he was really unabashed
- 50:20and how egregious he was.
- 50:24But I think you wrote in the book that Willie did have some regrets
- 50:29in terms of what he worked on and what he contributed to.
- 50:35Yeah, and I'm from a military family.
- 50:39My dad was a Navy pilot who brought the first gallons
- 50:44or drums of Agent Orange to Vietnam.
- 50:46So I think at some deep level, I'm wondering, like, how can all the people in the military organization not think about the bigger implications?
- 50:59They're just following orders.
- 51:00So if we look at Willie, that's the interesting thing about what I learned about him for the book Bitten.
- 51:07And he was a very smart, ambitious Swiss researcher who had a chance to come over to America.
- 51:17He was excited. He went to this Rocky Mountain lab. He got his own assistant.
- 51:23He never would have gotten that kind of freedom in Switzerland.
- 51:29And then he realized what he had to do.
- 51:32He went up to Canada and saw all these nerve agent and biological experiments up there.
- 51:39And then he took what he learned there and brought them to his lab.
- 51:41And that's where he started doing the horrible experiments he was doing.
- 51:45So he was with the program.
- 51:48But as he got older, just like we all do, we realize we look at the bigger picture.
- 51:55Like he was stuffing plague in fleas.
- 51:59This is the disease that wiped out a huge percentage of the population of Europe several times.
- 52:05And he would come home to his new kids and he couldn't help thinking, what am I doing?
- 52:12But and then at a certain point, you know, in his 40s, he would go to conferences in Europe and he would think he could move back to Europe.
- 52:21But no, all his best work was classified because it was about killing people.
- 52:26So he was stuck, you know, like someone who might join the CIA or the mafia.
- 52:32You can't put that on your resume.
- 52:34You know, there's it's hard to get a new job.
- 52:37So he's stuck there.
- 52:39But then the tipping point was when he just well, did he discover Lyme disease?
- 52:45That's that's a complicated question.
- 52:48But when he got the credit for discovering Lyme disease, he he was working night and day to bolster the evidence and learn more about it.
- 52:58And on the weekends, the techs weren't in there to clean the infected rabbit cages.
- 53:04So he said infected urine splashed in his eyes and he got Lyme disease and he had multiple bullseye rashes down the side.
- 53:13I have pictures of that. And then.
- 53:18He believes that caused Parkinson's in him, that he suffered a few years later.
- 53:23And he had to go on workers' comp.
- 53:25I have his workers' comp documentation where he shows the rashes and everything and had to take time off.
- 53:32So then he realized how bad, oh, there it is, how bad the disease is.
- 53:38And that's when he started talking to Lyme advocates and journalists.
- 53:43And I was just one of several people he talked to.
- 53:45yeah you see yeah he became affected by the disease that he helped potentially create and
- 53:55spread and yeah it's insane that humans can do this stuff what is it about uh it reminds me of
- 54:03like the stanford what is the stanford prison experiment or like when an authority figure
- 54:10tells you to hurt another human because because you've got clearance to do so you'll just do it
- 54:15and how that level of psychosis like reaches critical parts of our government and is weaponized
- 54:25against the populace. I mean, maybe originally the intent was to weaponize against enemies, but
- 54:32I think we find that a lot of that, that research typically ends up being, being focused on
- 54:39on the population at large at some point down the road anyway too so yeah so what is what is
- 54:45the government even for are they here to help us is the question i am constantly asking myself
- 54:51well i've i spent a lot of time thinking about that for my second book which is about nerve agents
- 54:58and it's the nazi prison guard question like how how did well-meaning germans
- 55:08all of a sudden become Nazi prison guards.
- 55:11Oh, here's a bar of soap.
- 55:13Come into the shower.
- 55:14And the same thing at Dugway Proving Grounds and the nerve agents.
- 55:21They were very isolated in a compound in the desert,
- 55:24and their work was so secretive they couldn't share it with their family
- 55:30or friends or the people at church.
- 55:34You know, if you said, oh, I put a drop of nerve agent in a goat today,
- 55:38you know your neighbors would go what and you know and you would respond to it but they're in
- 55:44this happy circle and they're just given lists of experiments to do every day same with willie and
- 55:50you you're in a a bubble and to me it's like slow acting novocaine you all of a sudden don't feel
- 56:00about the 10,000 guinea pigs that died.
- 56:07You're not thinking about life.
- 56:12Interesting about the results of the experiments that you're talking about.
- 56:15Right.
- 56:16You have it in your notes here.
- 56:19There's a specific call out for people going to the Hamptons this summer
- 56:23to be aware of the ticks there.
- 56:25Why the Hamptons?
- 56:26well that that's uh well it's just the same as martha's vineyard in nantucket it's a hot spot
- 56:35and none of the real estate or tourism boards want you to know how bad it is
- 56:40um what do i think about that i think that
- 56:47uh if you don't go out in nature they win we're part of nature we're healthier
- 56:56when we're outside in the sunlight watching birds fishing or whatever and you need to go out into
- 57:04nature but just take precautions use some sort of repellent on your clothing wash your clothes
- 57:12after you go outside because that's how I think my husband and I got it we did tick checks but
- 57:17we rewore our beach clothes the second day and they were hanging out there
- 57:21I think. And so two checks, repellent. Just be aware. And then, like I said, you pull out an
- 57:34engorged tick. Oh, my gosh. Treat it seriously. It could ruin your life. Just get some doxycycline,
- 57:42not two pills. It has to be more than two pills. That's a flawed study. And then you'll never
- 57:49think about it again. Yeah. Until you get bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, thank you for coming
- 57:58on. I'm sure you're extremely busy right now that your beat is a top of mind for many people
- 58:04in the United States. Um, any other things we should make the audience aware of before,
- 58:11before we wrap up here, any, any other pressing calls to action or, or details that we,
- 58:17didn't get to that people should be aware of.
- 58:23Well, if you want to read more about the whole TIC weaponization program,
- 58:27it's on my Substack.
- 58:29So it's just search Chris Nubi on Substack.
- 58:32It's free unless you want to do a donation.
- 58:34And then for my next book on chemical weapons,
- 58:37that's a good way to hear about it.
- 58:38You can't order it yet, but it's the same mode.
- 58:43It's narrative nonfiction and exploring.
- 58:47the history of nerve agents and the people involved in the program and why
- 58:52these weapons of mass destruction keep perpetuating and are never in control.
- 58:58I mean, people have no oversight, really.
- 59:01Yeah.
- 59:02I think it'd be important to have oversight for bioweapons and nerve agents
- 59:07that could drastically change the course of individuals' lives and human history
- 59:13if applied in certain ways.
- 59:16Yeah.
- 59:17Yeah.
- 59:17Awesome. Well, we're going to link to all this in the show notes. Chris, really appreciate you again for taking the time for doing this research and for banging the drum for many years, even though people may not have always been listening.
- 59:33But I think considering everything going on as it pertains to the explosion of tick populations here in the United States, they're definitely listening and eager to learn more.
- 59:43So I think the fact that you've been focused on this for more than 20 years is great for society, this audience, because they get to learn from somebody who's done all the hard work already.
- 59:58Well, thank you so much for the invite and keep your babies safe.
- 1:00:03We'll try. We'll try. It's stressful. I think last year it was number one in tick bites.
- 1:00:13Pennsylvania has a really good ticks screening program and you can send in your ticks for free.
- 1:00:19And then whatever's in them will be used for research, which is a great thing.
- 1:00:25So you can just mail them or you drop them off somewhere?
- 1:00:28You mail them. You just put them in a little plastic baggie with a wet paper towel.
- 1:00:32I think it's Strasburg University.
- 1:00:36It's that.
- 1:00:36They're the ones that have a rock and awesome tick research program.
- 1:00:41All right, good.
- 1:00:42It's good to know.
- 1:00:42My home state is on top of things.
- 1:00:45Even though the tick population, the deer population here is massive.
- 1:00:49Yeah, I know.
- 1:00:51Give them more hunting permits.
- 1:00:54That's what we, I mean, we're right outside of Philadelphia.
- 1:00:57I mean, there's deer all throughout our neighborhood.
- 1:00:59Yeah, same here.
- 1:01:02awesome well thank you um who knows maybe we can do this again at some point in the future
- 1:01:09maybe when you release your next book we can talk about uh nerve agents and the the government
- 1:01:14research that's got into that yeah happy topics no i i love the research though it's really fun
- 1:01:22going to old archives and uh i hang out with a lot of 80 year old ex-military people
- 1:01:29what fun actually does sound like a lot of fun
- 1:01:34yeah i mean like next time you're in an airport sit next to an 80 year old and say tell me your
- 1:01:43story it's great were you in the cia working on uh working on tick bombs by any chance
- 1:01:49he says i didn't work for the cia it was the company
- 1:01:54maybe i'll do that i'm gonna i'm gonna be in the airport tomorrow so maybe i'll uh
- 1:02:00maybe i'll try to find the uh the 80 year old sitting by himself yeah they'll wear
- 1:02:05navy or army merch they'll be the first ones in line because they get on first
- 1:02:09it's good to know all right chris thank you again this has been awesome party
- 1:02:15and uh peace and love freaks
- 1:02:24Thank you.