Interview with Kris Newby

On Lyme Disease, Willy Burgdorfer, Bioweapons, Ticks, Plum Island and much more.

“Unbekoming” recently interviewed me about BITTEN, and I thought I’d share our dialog with my readers:

Reading Bitten was an important moment for me.

It was early in my awakening, and it helped me see the landscape from a new, higher plane.

The scale and history of Empire’s bio-warfare programs.

The merger and blurring between the military, medical and civilian.

The psychopathic readiness to “test” on one’s own, unaware citizens.

The ability to compartmentalize and make huge programs invisible.

The ability to deny, smear and cancel any inconvenience.

I learned plenty from Kris Newby’s book and I’m very grateful that she agreed to this interview with me.

I highly recommend the book, and I especially recommend it for friends and relatives who might be open to considering the notion that their government is an untrustworthy predator.

With thanks to Kris Newby.

1. Kris, can you please tell us about your background and what led you to investigate the origins of Lyme disease?

I’m a curiosity-driven science writer and researcher. I worked as an engineer during the first half of my career, designing phones at Bell Labs and computers in Silicon Valley. Engineering school taught me how to solve messy problems and fearlessly dive into new technical fields, useful skills in analyzing what went wrong with Lyme disease. After my second child was born, I shifted to technical writing and marketing, working under Steve Jobs during his “second coming” at Apple. Through these experiences, I became an accomplished explainer of complex things.

I knew nothing about Lyme disease until my husband and I were bitten by unseen ticks on Martha’s Vineyard in 2002. After we returned home to California, we slid into the abyss of a mysterious illness. On any given day, it felt as if we had chronic fatigue, Alzheimer’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, brain fog, and fibromyalgia. Our doctors were baffled. At one point, we thought we might die, leaving our boys as orphans. Even though Lyme was endemic on Martha’s Vineyard, our doctors refused to test for it because our symptoms didn’t match what was in the medical textbooks. It took us a year, 10 doctors, and $60,000 to finally receive a diagnosis of Lyme disease and babesiosis, a red blood cell infection transmitted by ticks. It took five more years, a mortgage loan, and our sons’ college fund to get us back to health, because the treatments that cure complex tick-borne diseases aren’t covered by medical insurance.

At my low point, I swore that if I survived, I’d do what I could to fix the misinformation about Lyme disease. To that end, I’ve produced an Oscar-shortlisted documentary, wrote a book, worked with a nonprofit that publishes free tick disease medical education classes, and started a newsletter on my Lyme origins research.

2. You spent a significant amount of time researching Willy Burgdorfer's life and work. What was the most surprising thing you discovered about him?

I was surprised that the U.S. National Institutes of Health celebrated Willy Burgdorfer as the heroic discoverer of Lyme disease, despite knowing that he had spent his early career developing bug-borne bioweapons. He stuffed plague in fleas, yellow fever in mosquitoes, and ticks with a host of deadly pathogens, all so that they could be released on our enemies. I wondered if Willy Burgdorfer was like an arsonist-fireman, someone who put out the wildfires of engineered organisms that his lab created. Was the cognitive dissonance of this reality what motivated him to become a whistleblower at the end of his life?

I’m also intrigued with the possibility that Burgdorfer was involved in Cold War espionage. He had a secret Swiss bank account that no one in his family knew about. He had a mistress. He had serious money issues that magically disappeared after attending a Communist-heavy scientific conference in Austria. Before he died, he told me he was repeatedly interviewed by government officials about something serious. He was very worried about being deported and losing his NIH pension.

3. The book points to a link between Lyme disease and biological weapons research. How did you first stumble upon this connection?

Six months into my Lyme/babesiosis treatments, I started work on “Under Our Skin,” a documentary that explained the perverse medical incentives that are fueling the chronic Lyme epidemic. Along the way, the film’s director and I heard rumors that Lyme disease had a bioweapons origin, but we were unable to substantiate them. When the film project was done, I decided to leave Lyme behind. I took a science writing job at Stanford Medical School—then fate intervened.

At a family birthday party, I met an old CIA operative who said he had dropped infected ticks on Cuba during the Cold War. A few weeks later, a filmmaker friend sent me a video interview where Burgdorfer said that whatever he discovered in Lyme, Connecticut, was related to biological agents developed in his lab. With two credible witnesses on the record, I decided to pursue this story. Five years later, I published “Bitten,” the history of the tick weaponization program.

4. You describe several open-air tests of biological agents conducted by the U.S. military. How difficult was it to uncover information about these experiments?

Putting together the whole story was like assembling a 100,000-piece puzzle, because most of the biological program records were destroyed by 1972. To gather evidence, I visited many archives, interviewed participants in the old programs, and reviewed a stash of Burgdorfer’s letters, lab notebooks, and reports that he’d hidden from the NIH archivists when they came calling. This included a trove of documents on his early work with Fort Detrick’s entomological warfare division.

The U.S. records management system is completely broken, with over-classification on the front end and the overuse of “national security” to deny legitimate document requests. I’ve had to think outside-of-the-box to obtain historical documents. For example, to verify that the CIA dropped infected ticks on Cuban sugarcane workers, I sifted through thousands of newly released JFK assassination files. To connect the dots on the Army-funded releases of radioactive Lone Star ticks on the US Atlantic bird flyway, I interviewed old tick researchers who participated in the program and dug up the Army funding contracts.

5. The "Swiss Agent" plays a significant role in your book. Can you explain what it is and why it's important to the Lyme disease story?

Burgdorfer was told to investigate the Lyme outbreak after the Yale team and local health officials hit a wall. What Burgdorfer found was that almost all the ground-zero patient blood samples and ticks harbored an unidentified rickettsial bacteria that tested negative to all known rickettsiae, including those classified as bioweapons. (The U.S. military worked on weaponizing the Rocky Mountain spotted fever rickettsia.) Then, in the middle of this high priority investigation, Burgdorfer flew to Switzerland’s French-German border to collect 4,000 ticks. The cover story was that he was saving Swiss goat herders from Q fever. Then, lo and behold, there he found a very, very similar rickettsia to the U.S. species which he nicknamed “the Swiss Agent.” The mysterious rickettsia in the U.S. reacted strongly to Swiss Agent tests, indicating that they might be the same organism. He quickly staked a discovery claim for the European species, which was renamed “Rickettsia helvetica,” but the U.S. species disappeared. Burgdorfer told me that some unnamed authority asked him to hide its presence.

This means that we don’t really know if the Lyme bacterium is the sole cause of the strange illness that struck this area in the late 1960s. And I believe that this “lie of omission” has corrupted Lyme research and treatments for decades. Could an unknown weaponized rickettsia or virus be a player in the chronic Lyme problem? Is this why the CDC and the NIH are so insistent that chronic Lyme disease doesn’t exist, because someone with a security clearance knows that the illness is caused by a secret weaponized germ? And was Burgdorfer given full credit for this team discovery in exchange for his silence? These are still unanswered questions.

When I pressed Burgdorfer for more details on what started the outbreak, he would only say, “Accidents happen” and “Sometimes experiments don’t turn out as planned.”

But to be clear, I didn’t find hard evidence that the Lyme bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, was weaponized — but it is possible. A recent study found that the Borrelia burgdorferi genome had a “mysterious” and “tumultuous” evolutionary history, which might suggest it was genetically manipulated in the recent past. Also, note that Otzi the iceman, who died in 3105 BC, did not have Lyme disease, contrary to the popular press; Lawrence Livermore Labs recently published an analysis that refutes the original paper.

6. Your book touches on the complex politics surrounding Lyme disease research and treatment. What are some of the key issues at play?

Lyme was discovered during three tectonic shifts in medicine, all of which harmed patients. Most significantly, the Bayh-Dole Act was passed in the same year as Burgdorfer’s “discovery.” It allowed the NIH, the CDC, and university researchers to receive Pharma royalties if their discoveries were used in vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments. All of a sudden, our scientists became business partners with Pharma, and patient needs took a back seat. The cure for Lyme disease is an early dose of inexpensive, off-patent antibiotics. No money in that. The real money was in selling annual vaccines and blockbuster drugs for chronic symptoms.

And in the 1980s, medical insurers began intervening in physician decision-making to increase profits. In one court document, an insurance executive admitted that chronic Lyme was their #2 most expensive disease behind HIV/AIDS. The insurer said that one strategy for reducing costs was to ally itself with the academics who deny the existence of chronic Lyme. Next, Big Pharma began to provide backdoor funding to medical societies that wrote medical guidelines that pushed their vaccines and blockbuster drugs, rather recommending off-patent treatments. This situation isn’t unique to Lyme disease; Long COVID and ME/CFS sufferers have been harmed by these Pharma strategies, too.

7. You mention the challenges faced by chronic Lyme disease patients. How has your personal experience with Lyme influenced your perspective on this issue?

We were lucky to have been diagnosed inside of a year. It takes most Lyme patients three or more years to be diagnosed. Seventy percent aren’t diagnosed until they’re in the late stages of the disease. (MyLymeData)

I’ve been trying to fix the Lyme problem for 20 years now, and I don’t see the situation improving much. You wouldn’t believe how many tragic Lyme stories I hear every week. We still have almost 500,000 new cases a year, and we don’t have a diagnostic test that is reliable in the first month. The recommended early-stage Lyme treatments fail 20 to 30% of time. I recently analysed 11 years of NIH Lyme research funding and found that only 2.5% of the budget went to developing better treatment protocols. What’s more, the money isn’t going to an A-team of researchers:15.5% of Lyme research funding from 2013 to 2023 went to a dozen retirement-age NIH employees who are currently 68 to 79 years old.

8. You spent time at the National Archives researching Willy Burgdorfer’s papers. What was that experience like, and what key information did you uncover?

I love the National Archives in Maryland. It is truly a monument to freedom of information. Their wonderful archivists have always tried their best to find the documents that I’m seeking. (Note to Congress: Please give them more money for this important work.)

The most notable finding in the archive’s “Willy Burgdorfer Papers” was what was missing: There wasn’t much on his Lyme discovery. Instead, in the timeframe of the discovery, there were many references to the mysterious Swiss Agent. This is what prompted a visit to see Burgdorfer in Montana. During this interview, he wouldn’t talk about Swiss Agent, but he told me about his military work mass producing and weaponizing fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes. About a year later, I was able to review the Lyme and Swiss Agent discovery materials that he’d hidden in a second garage, right before they were submitted to a university archive.

9. The book touches on the history of biological weapons development during the Cold War. How do you think this history has shaped modern medical research?

There were many advances that came out of the biological weapons program. The field of immunology made great strides as scientists explored better ways to kill humans, animals, and crops. Researchers pioneered new techniques in genetic engineering and vaccine development. And after quite a few tragic lab accidents, administrators developed new protocols for lab safety that are widely used today.

But what if these vast resources had been focused on curing dangerous diseases rather than creating them? The U.S. military-industrial complex has become a black hole, sucking in personnel, blank-check budgets, and the best scientific minds. Without oversight, we’ve become a perpetual war machine. It begs the question, is there a way to dismantle this machinery before more planet-killing weapons are released into the world? Because, as weapons technologies outstrip our ability to control them, there might not be a second chance.

10. You describe several instances of scientists potentially hiding or altering information. How did you approach verifying these sensitive claims?

I start by interviewing program participants in person or on the phone, several times if possible. I can usually tell if they’re trying to hide something. Burgdorfer was good at changing the subject when I asked him something sensitive. For example, when I asked him about his bioweapons development, he’d start talking about how he ran the Kiwanis Club pancake breakfast or coached a youth soccer team. Most of these octogenarians took their post-World War II “oath of secrecy” very seriously. Tick researchers such as Jim Oliver and Daniel Sonenshine refused to answer my questions, because they knew that talking to the press could have grave consequences. Burgdorfer was hired into the Biological Weapons program in 1951, about two years before bioweapons scientist Frank Olsen “accidently” fell out of a tall building, shortly after he expressed doubts about the program’s human victims. In the end, most of these scientists take their secrets to the grave, so I’m left with searching for documents.

11. The book suggests that multiple pathogens might be involved in what we call Lyme disease. How might this change our approach to diagnosis and treatment?

We need an all-in-one blood test that detects the most prevalent tick-borne diseases, similar to the COVID-RSV-flu panel that is now available. We need to fund studies that create symptom profiles for mixed infections. This has never been done, since most of the research dollars go to studying mice, not humans. We need to develop standardized, insurance-covered treatment protocols for these disease combos, so that the frontline physicians who treat these messy infections don’t lose their medical licenses for doing the right thing — curing patients.

12. You discuss the rapid spread of tick-borne diseases. What factors do you think are contributing to this expansion?

Global warming is allowing more ticks to survive through the winter. In some northern regions, tick bites are now a year-round risk. Tick ecosystems are being fragmented by human housing, driving up human-tick interactions. I suspect that the mass importation of “pandemic puppies” from foreign sources may have introduced more non-native tick diseases to the U.S.

13. The book raises questions about the reliability of current Lyme disease tests. What do you think needs to change in how we diagnose Lyme?

More reliable testing needs to be fast-tracked by the FDA. We created COVID-19 screening tests in a year; why can’t we do that with the tick diseases? We need to update the CDC website and medical textbooks to reflect the real-life symptom profiles of mixed tick-borne diseases.

The CDC’s flawed Lyme disease tracking and policies should be overhauled. The agency pretty much ignores evidence supporting fetal and sexual transmission. They should recommend that engorged ticks be sent to a lab for pathogen screening, since tick testing is faster, more reliable, and cheaper than the human antibody tests. Someone asked the CDC why they recommend against tick testing, and they said, “Because it wouldn’t be fair to underserved [i.e., poor] populations.” So rather than pushing for better human testing and free tick testing, they want everyone to get sick?

14. You mention the potential involvement of Plum Island in the Lyme disease story. What evidence supports this connection?

The mouth of the Connecticut River, ground zero of the outbreak, is about 12 miles as the crow flies from Plum Island’s anti-animal biological weapons lab. Plum Island had a tick-hatchery, safety lapses, and, according to “Lab 251” interviews, open-air testing with biological agents. A notorious Nazi bioweapons developer, Erich Traub, helped set up this “anti-animal” program after WWII. I couldn’t find direct evidence that the outbreak came from Plum Island, but it’s possible.

15. For readers who want to stay informed about your work and these issues, what's the best way for them to stay connected?

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/krisnewby

The “Bitten” website: www.krisnewby.com

The “Under Our Skin” documentary on the conflicts in Lyme disease.

Free medical education classes on tick-borne diseases.

For more posts from Unbekoming, go here.