A Short Review of BITTEN
by Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, Professor of Health Policy at Stanford Medicine
I just finished @krisnewby’s BITTEN, which tells the history of the U.S. government’s secret program in the 1950s and 1960s to weaponize ticks to deliver deadly bacteria to incapacitate unsuspecting populations.
Newby, a talented journalist and science writer, structures her history around a biography of Willy Burgdorfer, the Swiss-American scientist who discovered Borrelia burgdorferi, a spirochetal bacterium often found in Lyme disease patients.
It’s an incredible, infuriating, well-written book worth your time.
A few lessons:
1. The mid-20th century U.S. biomedical research establishment was psychopathic, whole-heartedly embracing reckless, deadly investigations in the name of developing vaccines and bioweapons.
2. It is possible (and perhaps likely, though not proven) that the emergence and spread of Lyme disease may have been caused by this research program, which included large open-air testing of intentionally infected ticks on U.S. soil.
3. The bioweapons program used combinations of viruses and bacteria infecting the same tick to hide the body’s immune response to infection from detection by standard medical tests.
4. Lyme disease and related syndromes are likely caused by more than just Borrelia burgdorferi. Newby makes a circumstantial case for a shadowy rickettsia bacteria that Willy Burgdorfer studied, which he called the “Swiss agent.”
5. The financial interests of biomedical researchers and testing companies peddling faulty tests — alongside their control over the official pronouncements and policy of the National Institute of Health and the Infectious Disease Society of America — have frozen in place a diagnostic doctrine that has led to countless Lyme disease patients misdiagnosed and gaslit about the symptoms they are suffering.
Closing thought: Similar tendencies in biomedical research and medical establishments are still extant and may help explain many things about the COVID pandemic. History does not repeat, but it rhymes.
For more from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on health policy, infectious diseases, COVID, health economics, and scientific freedom, watch his podcast “Illusion of Consensus” or follow him on Twitter @DrJBhattacharya.
Thank you. Along with “Bitten” which I read as soon as it was published, your comments help this person who has had Chronic Lyme for 39 years. Same old same old made up stories about that.
Growing up in the woods surrounding the Fish Hatcheries my Father ran in Idaho in late 40’s and early to mid-50’s my family was well aware of wood ticks. I thought my Father such a hero when he took them off us We never became sick.
It was 1985 and hiking in Prince William Forrest Va. one day before I worked a Pan Am flight the next day to Frankfurt Germany . While relaxing in the tub in my hotel I noticed what I mistook for a new mole on my abdomen . I slid my finger over it and lo’ and behold, legs moved. This tick was the size of a sesame seed. I was grown up, brave now and my Father was in Idaho…. I burned the tick in the sink( yes, hotels still had candles and matches in the rooms).
During the next year I moved from Va. to San Fran. Ca. During that year little, bizarre issues came up physically. I had various treatments for flu like pains in joints, flu like many times. Until in 1987 I could not get up from my bed. Called Pan Am and said” I think I am dying”. It took two years and an article in a medical journal written by a nurse practitioner writing about having experienced a bolt of lightning flashing through her brain. That had happened to me while driving to work the 6 months prior. She had Lyme disease. That bolted and jolted my memory and I told my doctor, Dr.Jeffry Anderson who was in Corte Madera that I had Lyme disease.
He had been treating me for CFIDs, chronic fatigue immune deficiency.
I then began a very long journey ….. treatments from Ca.to Ny, to Ct.,to Va.
I am now going to a very fine clinic in Mexico. I am 78 years old. Waiting waiting for our government to tell the truth, or for insurance corporations to tell the truth, or for doctors across America to gain some factual knowledge and not blame the patience.
Thank you for bringing “Bitten” out of moth balls…..where the crooks want it kept.
Sincerely,
Can you do anything to educate your colleagues at Stanford? They misdiagnosed me, said I should be aware of Post-Polio Syndrome‼️
After 50+ years of gaslighting by the medical community a Naturopath figured my symptoms out in 2 hours 🤯