RFK Jr. The Defender - January 19, 2024


Bioweapons and Lyme Disease with Kris Newby


Episode Stats

Length

43 minutes

Words per Minute

153.40565

Word Count

6,599

Sentence Count

420

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

11


Summary

Chris Newby is an award-winning medical science writer and senior producer of the documentary, Under Our Skin, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2010 and was a 2010 Oscar semifinalist. Her book, Bitten: The Secret History of Biological Weapons and Lyme Disease, has won three international book awards for journalism and narrative nonfiction. She has two engineering degrees and worked as a science technology writer for Stanford Medical School, for Apple, and for other Silicon Valley companies. And Chris has spent two decades studying Lyme disease after she herself contracted the disease and has spent a lot of time studying the Plum Island Lab. In this episode, we talk about her experience and what she found in her research about Lyme disease and the tick infestation that s spreading across the country. She also shares the story of how she stumbled across Lyme disease, and why she decided to make a documentary about it. This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and produced by Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts and wherever else you get your listening pleasure. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to hearing back from you. Thank you so much for all the support and support of this podcast, and I appreciate you all so much in advance of the next episode. I'll see you next week with a new episode of next week, next week in October on Tuesday, November 5th, by The New York Times July 5th and so on up November 1st, July 7th, etc., etc. , etc., etc. etc. & so on so much so so so be it thank you, etc. in the rest of the thing a good day, etc, etc etc etc, etc etc... etc etc.... etc... Thank you, bye, etc.. x bye, bye < - etc, be sure, etc , etc, a good night, etc) , etc, so be sure ... & so be soque, etc... etc ) (AFFTER -- VOTING CHEER


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:01.000 Today, we're going to talk about Plum Island, the military laboratory, 257, and the origins of Lyme disease, and the origins of the tick infestation of several tick infestations around our country.
00:00:16.000 And my guest is Chris Newby, who is an award-winning medical science writer and senior producer Of the Lyme Disease documentary, Under Our Skin, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was a 2010 Oscars semifinalist.
00:00:32.000 Her book, Bitten, The Secret History of Biological Weapons and Lyme Disease, has won three international book awards for journalism and narrative nonfiction.
00:00:42.000 She has two engineering degrees and has worked as a science technology writer.
00:00:47.000 For Stanford Medical School, for Apple, and for other Silicon Valley companies.
00:00:53.000 And Chris has spent two decades studying Lyme disease after she herself contracted Lyme disease and has spent a lot of time studying the Plum Island Lab.
00:01:05.000 And so welcome to the show, Chris.
00:01:07.000 Thank you very much.
00:01:08.000 I'm excited about talking to you about this.
00:01:11.000 By the way, there's another terrific book by Michael Carroll, who spent himself a very, very excellent book on the origins of Lyme disease.
00:01:23.000 And on Blum Island and the other diseases that may or may not, but that are likely to have come from Blum Island, including West Nile virus and a bunch of other diseases that are associated with that area around Long Island and Connecticut.
00:01:41.000 So anyway, let's talk about it.
00:01:44.000 Let's talk about your experience and then what you found in your research about Blum Island and about the tick infestation.
00:01:52.000 Yeah, so it started with my family getting Lyme disease, my husband and I, and then it took us a year.
00:01:59.000 What year was that?
00:02:01.000 2002.
00:02:02.000 Massachusetts was number two for Lyme disease.
00:02:05.000 So my husband and I got really sick for a year.
00:02:07.000 It took 10 doctors and $60,000 to finally get a diagnosis, and then it took five to six years to get better.
00:02:15.000 And while I was recovering, I decided to do a documentary on Lyme disease, The Patient Experience and And also the politics and the money that has sort of corrupted the testing and the treatment of the disease.
00:02:31.000 And while the director and I were researching, we filmed for about three and a half years, we realized what a huge epidemic all across the United States it is.
00:02:42.000 And how there was something that was not the same as other diseases.
00:02:46.000 There were things that were suspicious, like The government was trying to hide something about the disease.
00:02:53.000 So we did the documentary.
00:02:55.000 It did really well in the documentary world.
00:02:59.000 And it really was the first documentary that showed the patient experience.
00:03:04.000 Patients being gaslit about their symptoms, telling them it's all in their head, psychosomatic.
00:03:10.000 After that was done, I thought, well, I'm done with Lyme disease.
00:03:13.000 I got this really good science writing job at Stanford.
00:03:17.000 And I said, I'm done.
00:03:18.000 But then two things happened where I just knew I couldn't walk away from the problem.
00:03:22.000 Because there were always rumors after the Michael Carroll book that something was off about Lyme disease.
00:03:28.000 There was rumors of bioweapons, but we couldn't find proof.
00:03:32.000 And it was a no-touch subject.
00:03:35.000 And we would never get funding on our documentary if we did bioweapons.
00:03:39.000 And then two things happened within about a month.
00:03:42.000 And one was that A documentarian filmed Willie Bergdorfer, who was the discoverer of Lyme disease, who admitted on camera that he didn't tell the truth about the discovery, that there was another organism when he investigated the outbreak of sickness, and he was told to cover it up.
00:04:00.000 And then the other thing is, I was at a random family birthday party, and when I was there, a drunk guy who said he was a CIA black ops guy said...
00:04:11.000 He just talked about all the horrible things he did in Vietnam, and then he said the weirdest thing I ever did was drop two boxes of poison ticks, infected ticks, on Cuban sugar cane workers in 1962.
00:04:25.000 Payback for the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
00:04:27.000 So when I heard those two things, it was like a fork in the road.
00:04:30.000 Well, I can either go...
00:04:31.000 I was healthy by then, and I can go back to my old life, or I need to see this to the end, because really it's a crime against humanity.
00:04:40.000 If what he said was true.
00:04:42.000 So that started another five-year project looking into the tick weaponization program that our U.S. government ran during the 50s and 60s.
00:04:53.000 You know, let me just interject some of my own story here, because I spent a lot of my life in Westchester County, New York, and in Millbrook, New York, in Dutchess County, which is two counties north.
00:05:06.000 So I was in the woods in Dutchess County as a 14-year-old boy in 1969 through 1970, almost every day, spending three hours in the woods.
00:05:17.000 I never ran into a deer tick, never saw a deer tick.
00:05:21.000 We saw a lot of wood ticks.
00:05:23.000 I never saw a deer tick.
00:05:25.000 And then I moved to Westchester in 1983 after hiatus in the Hudson, you know, away from the Hudson Valley.
00:05:33.000 And because I trained hawks, I was in the woods almost every day.
00:05:38.000 And I started getting large, finding these deer ticks, which are much smaller, you know, the size of a pinhead, some of them, and even smaller during certain parts of the year.
00:05:48.000 And I remember one time standing in the bathtub naked, Picking deer ticks off myself, I found 29 deer ticks on myself in one batch.
00:05:58.000 I would run into nests of them and they would just be all over me.
00:06:03.000 My son got Lyme disease, Bobby, and his face was paralyzed for almost a year.
00:06:10.000 He had Bell's palsy from the disease.
00:06:13.000 My other kids have almost all gotten Lyme disease, various levels of sickness.
00:06:18.000 I have one child that is chronic Lyme disease now.
00:06:22.000 That is giving him brain fog, you know, among other things, a really intense brain fog.
00:06:29.000 He's a very smart kid, but it's really caused some problems.
00:06:34.000 I got Lyme disease.
00:06:37.000 I test positive for Lyme disease.
00:06:39.000 I got the Lyme disease from one of these ticks early on, and I got the classic target on my forearm, that perfect red circle.
00:06:49.000 And so I knew what it was, and I immediately went and took antibiotics.
00:06:53.000 And as you point out in your book, it's pretty easy to treat the disease if you get it very early on.
00:07:00.000 And I never have gotten sick from Lyme disease.
00:07:02.000 I test positive for it, I'm sure.
00:07:05.000 I've been reinfected numerous times.
00:07:07.000 I don't even know If the Lyme disease, if one exposure to it immunizes you against other exposures, but, you know, I'm lucky that I haven't gotten sick.
00:07:17.000 Almost all of the falconers I grew up with in the Hudson Valley have serious problems now with brain fog and with other symptoms of Lyme disease, you know, including one who has early dementia that I suspect is connected, but, you know, there's no way of knowing.
00:07:36.000 But young people who are even younger than me, but all the guys who aren't my age have problems from it.
00:07:44.000 And I remarked to somebody the other day that it's really ruined going into the woods on the East Coast.
00:07:50.000 You know, I grew up in the woods.
00:07:53.000 And it's now dangerous to go in the woods.
00:07:55.000 You're taking a risk that we never had to take when we were kids.
00:07:59.000 And that it's another thing that keeps us from enjoying the outdoors and keeps us locked inside.
00:08:06.000 And the idea that this may have been is highly likely to have been a military weapon.
00:08:11.000 And we cannot say 100% for sure.
00:08:15.000 But we do know that they were experimenting with ticks there and that the ticks, as you show, are an epidemic because of what happened in Plum Island and the other labs.
00:08:26.000 Deer ticks and other species of ticks, lone star ticks, whatever.
00:08:31.000 We also know they were experimenting with diseases of the kind, like Lyme disease, at that lab and putting them in ticks and then infecting people, testing them with bird vectors.
00:08:45.000 And I've just published a book called Wuhan Cover-Up, which is a very, very comprehensive history of the bioweapons program in this country.
00:08:56.000 And the bioweapons program was brought over here originally as the first project of the CIA, which was called Operation Paperclip.
00:09:05.000 That was the first project in 1947 that the CIA, after its creation, We began smuggling in German bioweapons scientists.
00:09:16.000 Many of them were wanted by the Nuremberg prosecutors, and they were brought over here, a lot of them to Fort Dietrich, but also to Plum Island and other places.
00:09:28.000 And they were brought in from Japan, which had a much, much more comprehensive bioweapons program.
00:09:33.000 They killed 500,000 people during that World War II period, 500,000 Chinese with bioweapons, and they were doing these horrendous experiments, live vivisections of over 3,000 humans.
00:09:47.000 Those scientists were brought over here and put the kind of ethical pall On the U.S. bioweapons, they put their ethical, their elastic ethics became the brand of the U.S. bioweapons program.
00:10:03.000 And they, you know, by 19, they were very successful.
00:10:07.000 By 1969, they had achieved what they boasted was a nuclear equivalence.
00:10:14.000 In other words, they could kill as many people in a nuclear bomb as cheaply.
00:10:18.000 They estimated the cost of killing the entire American population, that they could achieve that for 29 cents per life with the bioweapons that they had in hand in 1969.
00:10:30.000 And then Richard Nixon...
00:10:32.000 He surprised everybody and did one of the greatest things in his career, which is he went to Fort Detrick and he announced the closure, the unilateral termination of U.S. bioweapons programs.
00:10:43.000 He saw that this was a poor man's nuclear bomb because they were publishing how to do it, essentially manuals that were then passed around the world, and anybody could achieve nuclear equivalency on a busman's budget.
00:10:58.000 And Nixon recognized that we had a monopoly on I mean, how many times do we want to be able to kill the world over?
00:11:16.000 You know, I mean, like, why stockpile that many weapons?
00:11:19.000 Chemical, too.
00:11:21.000 And then just to finish the story, during the anthrax attacks in 2001, Which came one week after 9-11, and Congress was trying to pass the Patriot Act, which is very controversial.
00:11:36.000 It's changed the nature of American democracy.
00:11:38.000 The two senators who were objecting to a Dashiell and Leahy during that period received anthrax powder in their mail, and they closed down Congress.
00:11:48.000 They ended up killing a lot of people, and the Patriot Act passed immediately.
00:11:54.000 And the anthrax was blamed on Saddam Hussein, and we went to war.
00:11:58.000 And we now know, because the FBI told us, that the anthrax actually was Ames anthrax that came from a U.S. bioweapons lab.
00:12:08.000 They blamed Fort Detrick.
00:12:09.000 And so it was not a foreign attack on our country, as we were told.
00:12:14.000 And the Patriot Act passed, and the Patriot Act had a passage in it that said, although This act does not overrule or retract the Geneva Convention or the Bioweapons Charter, which Nixon got everybody to sign in 1973, ended bioweapons globally.
00:12:30.000 And the Patriot Act had a hidden provision in it that said, even though this isn't retracting the bioweapons, Nixon's bioweapons charter, we are now giving immunity to any federal official who violates those laws and who develops bioweapons and researches them.
00:12:47.000 And they The Pentagon did not want to do the research itself because it was scared.
00:12:54.000 You know, it is a hanging offense.
00:12:56.000 They weren't sure they were going to get full immunity from the Patriot Act.
00:12:59.000 They began funneling money to Anthony Fauci in NIH. And as you know, bioweapons research and vaccine research are the same track.
00:13:10.000 So you can say it's vaccine research when you're actually developing, doing gain-of-function studies for bioweapons.
00:13:17.000 And that in 2014, three of those bugs made high-profile escapes from those U.S. bioweapons labs that Fauci had started.
00:13:28.000 And they got national attention, the escapes.
00:13:31.000 And 300 scientists wrote Letters to President Obama asking him to shut down anti-Fauci studies, saying he is going to cause a global pandemic.
00:13:43.000 And President Obama ordered a moratorium on all those 18 studies by Fauci, but Fauci didn't stop them.
00:13:50.000 Instead, he moved the bulk of his science, the worst studies, to the Wuhan lab offshore, where he could continue doing this science.
00:13:57.000 And it was funded not just by him, but most of the funding came from USAID, which is CIA money.
00:14:05.000 What I do in my book is I trace a straight line from Operation Paperclip from the Nazi and Japanese bioweapons scientists all the way up to the Wuhan lab and the escape there.
00:14:19.000 You can tell when you're reading your book that you were thinking about the links between COVID-19 and, you know, what happened to Lyme disease.
00:14:28.000 But we do know that Operation Paperclip scientists were working at Plum Island.
00:14:35.000 And they were working at Dietrich.
00:14:37.000 Willie Bergdorfer, the Lyme discoverer, said...
00:14:40.000 I worked with some of the paperclip Germans.
00:14:43.000 They were very nice fellows.
00:14:45.000 That's what he said.
00:14:46.000 Of course.
00:14:47.000 They were picking their brains.
00:14:49.000 Yeah, we were exploiting them.
00:14:53.000 So tell us what you know about what happened at Plum Island and the links with the tick infestations.
00:15:01.000 Well, what I did was I looked at the stake in the ground where NIH and the CDC said, 1981, we discovered Lyme disease.
00:15:09.000 It's just this one organism.
00:15:11.000 It doesn't help people know.
00:15:13.000 It was Willie Bergdorfer who identified the...
00:15:15.000 The organism, yeah.
00:15:17.000 And Yale had been investigating this scary new outbreak of kids getting swollen knees and lots of sick people for 10 years, and they didn't make any progress.
00:15:26.000 They called in Willie Bergdorfer from Rocky Mountain Lab.
00:15:29.000 He was a Swiss-German doctor.
00:15:32.000 A scientist who was brought over in 1951.
00:15:34.000 He was our leading tick expert.
00:15:36.000 So he was called in.
00:15:38.000 He was actually investigating a bunch of people dying of rocky man and spotted fever on Long Island.
00:15:43.000 And then he started looking at You know, how did it get to Long Island from the Rocky Mountains?
00:15:48.000 But also, there was a cluster at that time of kids who were getting rheumatoid arthritis, swollen knees, fevers, all of these other issues.
00:15:57.000 A very, very, very strong cluster in Lyme, Connecticut, which is right across the water from Plum Island.
00:16:05.000 Yeah, it's just a few miles.
00:16:08.000 Easy trip for a bird.
00:16:09.000 A deer can swim across that channel, too.
00:16:12.000 Yeah.
00:16:13.000 So the story from NIH is the spirochete was causing all the illness.
00:16:18.000 Game over.
00:16:18.000 You can cure it with two weeks of doxycycline.
00:16:21.000 With the information that it was a bioweapon, I started looking backwards in time.
00:16:25.000 And what I realized in the late 60s, three freaky new tick-borne diseases showed up.
00:16:31.000 Just within like 10 miles of Lyme, Connecticut, Long Island, and Massachusetts, Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard.
00:16:39.000 You know, if you draw a circle of 10 miles around there, really suspicious for pretty much three novel pathogens to show up.
00:16:47.000 There was a really deadly Rocky Mountain spotted fever, where they had usually only had like one case a year.
00:16:56.000 All of a sudden there were hundreds and people were dying.
00:16:59.000 Rocky Mountain spotted fever is the most deadly tick-borne disease in the U.S. And then there was babesiosis, a second in man case, which is a cattle parasite.
00:17:11.000 And one thing you should know is Plum Island was the headquarters for anti-animal bioweapons.
00:17:17.000 And so they studied hoof and mouth disease mostly, bird plague, and probably babesiosis.
00:17:27.000 Anthrax as well, which is...
00:17:30.000 It's like our go-to bioweapon at the time.
00:17:33.000 And then the other thing was the Lyme arthritis, which is what Alan Steer at Yale named it.
00:17:38.000 He was a very ambitious young rheumatologist, and he saw the disease only as a knee disease since he's a rheumatologist.
00:17:46.000 And that sort of set the course for the research course for the disease off because...
00:17:52.000 As we know now, Lyme disease is primarily a neurological disease that can enter your bloodstream and go into your brain or all your joints within 48 hours.
00:18:02.000 So that was unusual.
00:18:04.000 And if you look at the guidebook for is it natural or unnatural outbreak, certainly three new diseases in a little area just in a couple of years is suspicious.
00:18:15.000 So then I started asking why.
00:18:17.000 And there were just some shocking things I learned.
00:18:21.000 First of all, the Lyme discover, when he said there's something suspicious about this outbreak, and he wouldn't give all the details, he was a reluctant whistleblower, but he did this discovery at age 56, and all his fame was staked on this discovery.
00:18:38.000 And for him to admit later in life, when he actually had Lyme disease, that I was lying, I hid something, it carries a lot of weight.
00:18:46.000 You know, why would someone destroy their reputation like that?
00:18:50.000 So after a few interviews, I looked at the National Archives, all his lab notebooks.
00:18:55.000 Then he gave some of his lab notes to, he wanted to put it in the BYU archive, and I got an early look at that.
00:19:02.000 Those are his original lab notebooks, his handwritten draft of his science discovery article, where it talked about this other pathogen, which was a cousin of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
00:19:15.000 It's known from the scientific literature that they're weaponizing the This organism, which is officially called a rickettsial, they were, at that time, freeze-drying it, aerosolizing it, and their plans were to spray it on the enemy as a very lethal thing.
00:19:32.000 So that was pretty shocking.
00:19:35.000 And at that time, they were doing crude...
00:19:37.000 Willie Bergdorfer was doing crude gain-of-function experiments with ticks.
00:19:41.000 Inside of ticks, he would mix bacteria and viruses to see which ticks...
00:19:48.000 Could transmit that because normally a tick has a disease that takes eons to adapt to that tick.
00:19:56.000 And then over time, a population develops immunity.
00:20:00.000 But when you do gain a function on a tick and a new organism that may have been from a different area, it's going to be more virulent.
00:20:07.000 You're going to see the massive illness that we saw in the 70s with these things.
00:20:13.000 So then I kept on digging and also Willie...
00:20:17.000 Worked on putting plague in fleas so we could drop that on the enemies and deadly Trinidad fever virus in mosquitoes.
00:20:25.000 And this is the kind of mosquito, it's tropical, it usually is in the south or in the tropics.
00:20:32.000 It's the mosquito that spreads Zika and Dengue.
00:20:35.000 And so we were, to test it, they were dropping these non-native mosquitoes.
00:20:40.000 On the poor Black communities of Georgia.
00:20:42.000 But I would say, in the context of what happened in Lyme disease, I thought the most shocking experiment was an Army-funded and Atomic Energy Commission experiment that was done out of Old Dominion University by a scientist called Sonenschein.
00:20:59.000 And what he did was, the military wanted a tick that was very hardy, that could survive Siberian winters or whatever, And they picked the Lone Star tick, which was normally way to the south, below the Mason-Dixon line, Texas.
00:21:17.000 The thing about that tick is it's a stalker, really aggressive, swarming.
00:21:22.000 It has, unlike deer ticks, it has rudimentary eyes, so it can track its prey.
00:21:28.000 And what's really horrible about this tick is it carries these Rickettsia is the Rocky Man and spotted fever.
00:21:35.000 So anyways, back up.
00:21:36.000 The experiments he did on coastal Virginia, that's on the Atlantic Bird Flyway, was he got a bunch of ticks from Willie Bergdorf in Montana, and he'd get the pregnant ticks, so they had 2,000 to 4,000 eggs inside of them, and he would inject the ticks with a radioactive isotope so that all the baby ticks who hatched out would be radioactive for life.
00:22:00.000 He set up several grids in the swampy areas of Virginia, and he would put a thousand ticks in each square.
00:22:07.000 And over the months to years, he would take a Geiger counter out to see how far the ticks creeped.
00:22:13.000 And then he also did bird studies to see how long it would take.
00:22:16.000 It takes five days for a tick to go from coastal Virginia up to Long Island, where the outbreak of spotted fever was.
00:22:23.000 So it's not proved cause and effect, but he ended his experiments in 69, and 72 is when the horrible outbreak of spotted fever, which is carried by Lone Star ticks, not the deer tick, killed a lot of people, and that's why Willie went out.
00:22:39.000 So it's just so irresponsible, and I interviewed that scientist, and I said, well...
00:22:44.000 Did you have to get any kind of permitting for this releasing radioactive ticks?
00:22:49.000 Which radioactive ticks, I mean, could cause mutations in whatever germs are in them.
00:22:54.000 And certainly there could be some exotic spirochetes from Africa that accidentally got shipped to him from the lab in Montana, because that has happened before.
00:23:04.000 I have documentation on that.
00:23:06.000 Anyway, as a scientist, when I say, well, what about those uncontrolled experiments?
00:23:10.000 And he goes, He just laughed and said, I only had to get a permit from the city of Newport News.
00:23:15.000 He said, I never could have done that today.
00:23:18.000 And later that researcher tested drugs and vaccines for animals and his lab was shut down for cruelty to animals and safety lapses.
00:23:28.000 So what I'm saying is these kind of experiments, in the interest of beating the Soviets, had no guardrails on them.
00:23:38.000 And I certainly believe that part of the problem in Lyme, Connecticut was this release of the ticks.
00:23:45.000 Now, the other thing that I'm looking into now are that Plum Island was doing illegal animal waste dumps on mainland Connecticut.
00:23:55.000 They were previously dumping animal waste in Long Island Sound.
00:24:00.000 I think that'd be okay.
00:24:02.000 And then in 72, the EPA came along and said, you can't do that anymore.
00:24:07.000 There are reports of that happening, but that's not proven yet.
00:24:10.000 But that certainly would explain how babesiosis came about.
00:24:14.000 Let me go back there.
00:24:16.000 But by animal waste, you mean not fecal material, but dead animals?
00:24:21.000 Both.
00:24:22.000 Okay.
00:24:23.000 And so, speaking of animal cruelty, how do they raise the ticks?
00:24:29.000 You need a live, you need like a live substrate in order to feed them blood, right?
00:24:37.000 Well, I don't know about the mass production.
00:24:40.000 Willy Bergdorfer worked on mass producing both mosquitoes and ticks.
00:24:43.000 They would have guinea pigs and rabbits and they would have these little cages that would go around the ears or on the bellies.
00:24:52.000 And so they would feed on rodents that way.
00:24:56.000 Yeah.
00:24:57.000 So I don't know about mass producing, but I know I have pictures in my book of that with mice.
00:25:03.000 Yeah, I've seen them where they have a kind of a cage on the animal's head, other parts of its body, so that if the insect bites them, they can't scratch it and hurt the insect.
00:25:18.000 It keeps sort of a cage of insects attached maybe surgically or with straps to that little animal.
00:25:27.000 So the insect is free to feed on the animal anytime without, you know, fear of being squatted with a tail or scratched off and killed.
00:25:36.000 As I say, the entire enterprise requires a lot of ethical, I would say, bankruptcy, and that the Operation Paperclip people who had done a lot of human experimentation were very, very comfortable experimenting on animals.
00:25:55.000 What about West Nile virus?
00:25:59.000 Did you run across that in your research?
00:26:02.000 No, I stuck with the tick vector mostly in all the experiments on ticks.
00:26:10.000 I mean, the CIA pilot study on Cuban sugar cane workers was Operation Mongoose, and I talked to the guy who dropped the ticks, and he did a ground operation, which he wouldn't tell me what it was, but he brought back one of those agents to his newborn son.
00:26:28.000 There was also a An experiment with uninfected fleas in Dugway, Utah, where they dropped over 100,000 fleas on a target that had live guinea pigs in cages on the desert floor.
00:26:43.000 You know, most of the fleas hopped off into the desert.
00:26:45.000 But in that case, it was called Operation Big Itch, and the people on the airplane got flea bites.
00:26:53.000 So I think by the early 60s, The military people decided, well, trying to control two living organisms is way too hard as a weapon deployable in the field.
00:27:06.000 So they dumped the insects, or actually they're arthropods officially, and they went to just mass-producing germs in large steel tanks like you would brew beer.
00:27:19.000 And by the time 69 rolled around, their go-to bioweapon was What I call the Russian nested doll strategy.
00:27:29.000 So you'd have a bacteria growing in a vat.
00:27:32.000 You'd put viruses in the growth medium along with toxins.
00:27:37.000 So then you'd have a germ inside a germ with a toxin.
00:27:42.000 So their plan was you drop this or spray this organism on your enemies and they would have typical bacterial infection symptoms.
00:27:54.000 So fever, Feeling tired.
00:27:57.000 And they would treat it with antibiotics.
00:27:59.000 And then you would kill the bacteria and release the virus and the toxins.
00:28:02.000 And it would create cytokine storm.
00:28:06.000 And it would just kill someone rapidly.
00:28:08.000 There would be no cure for that kind of overload of your immune system.
00:28:13.000 So that's...
00:28:14.000 Maybe when Nixon heard that...
00:28:18.000 I doubt those kind of details.
00:28:22.000 But, you know, they had one of those big vats.
00:28:25.000 I think the largest one was at Fort Detrick.
00:28:28.000 They called it Black Mariah.
00:28:29.000 It was an entire building where they were brewing these kind of witches brew of toxics and bacteria, really.
00:28:38.000 And then those experiments that they were doing in The Magula populations, which are the Black Islanders off of Georgia and Carolinas, they weren't just limiting that to really poor people.
00:28:51.000 They were doing it all over the country.
00:28:53.000 They did it in New York City.
00:28:55.000 They dropped microbes that they put in glass light bulbs, and they packed them instead of a filament.
00:29:02.000 They had light bulbs and they dropped them into the subways through the grate.
00:29:07.000 They released them in national airport.
00:29:09.000 They released them from airplanes and from ships onto the city of San Francisco and many, many other populated parts of the United States.
00:29:19.000 I mean, in my book, I think I record over 200 experiments, mass open air experiments on unknowing, unwilling, unwitting human populations.
00:29:30.000 That these guys were conducting, and many of them were conducted under the supervision of leading Nazi scientists.
00:29:38.000 And that's all documented in my book, so it's not surprising.
00:29:44.000 You look at all of these terrible plagues that we're facing right now, including RSV, which now is one of the biggest killers of children.
00:29:58.000 We know how that was released.
00:30:00.000 That was released through sick chimps that were brought in for a vaccine experiment in Maryland, at one of the labs in Maryland.
00:30:08.000 And a lab worker got an infection and now has spread it.
00:30:11.000 It's one of the biggest killers of children around the world.
00:30:14.000 And now the companies for which they are making the vaccine are...
00:30:18.000 It was a simian virus that was isolated to chimps.
00:30:21.000 But when it spread to humans, as you said, it was virulent.
00:30:25.000 It was much more infectious and much more deadly.
00:30:27.000 The virgin population and now...
00:30:30.000 As I said, it's one of the biggest killer of children, and now they're marketing a vaccine for that that has all kinds of problems.
00:30:36.000 A French study came out this week that showed that children who get the RSV vaccine are much more likely to die, very, very high levels, that die immediately after the vaccine.
00:30:47.000 And then, you know, the HIV virus, again, has a very suspicious pedigree that has been linked time and time again by the London Times, by really well-researched journalistic efforts and books to smallpox vaccines that were given to children in Africa.
00:31:06.000 And again, another virus that came somehow that leaped from Bonnebo chimpanzees to human beings.
00:31:14.000 Nobody can explain how they did that, but those same chimps, their kidneys were being masticated and used as a substrate of the vaccine.
00:31:23.000 And that was then given to 2 million kids in the Congo, precisely the area from which, you know, HIV emanated.
00:31:32.000 You have the West Nile virus that, again, has a suspicious pedigree that people have linked to Plum Island.
00:31:40.000 You have Lyme disease, you know, and these, you know, we don't know, we can't say for sure, because as you point out in your book, everything is shaded in secrecy.
00:31:51.000 And the institution, the agencies that are supposed to be protecting us all have military pedigrees themselves.
00:31:59.000 CDC came out of, you know, NNIH. They came out of the Public Health Service, which is a military, one of the five uniformed armed services.
00:32:09.000 They were started, most of these agencies were started at the Marine lab, the Navy lab.
00:32:16.000 There's no transparency.
00:32:18.000 The worst thing is there's no accountability.
00:32:21.000 I mean, if any...
00:32:24.000 Yeah, so, I mean, for me, when I'm lobbying for...
00:32:28.000 Is disclosure of these experiments.
00:32:31.000 What, where, and when was released.
00:32:33.000 Not just for ticks, but mosquitoes and fleas.
00:32:37.000 Because it would save us a lot of research dollars to narrow our focus.
00:32:42.000 Right now we're studying the spread of ticks by spreading, by like dragging bed sheets along trails.
00:32:49.000 There are better ways to do that.
00:32:51.000 We can Address the sickness in a more targeted way if we release that.
00:32:56.000 Now, all those experiments happened 50 years ago, and the people who green-lighted them are dead.
00:33:02.000 So why can't we disclose those?
00:33:04.000 It will help the American people.
00:33:07.000 It will save research dollars.
00:33:08.000 So that's the thing I push for at the end of my book.
00:33:12.000 People don't want to hear this truth.
00:33:14.000 They don't want to believe our government does that stuff, but I guess it's just a process to get them to believe it.
00:33:20.000 What was the reaction to your book?
00:33:23.000 Because I've dealt with censorship and I've dealt with the propagandists who immediately appear when a book like this comes out and try to discredit you, try to personally attack you.
00:33:35.000 Did anything like that happen to you?
00:33:37.000 Yeah, and I think I was a pretty easy target because I didn't work for the New York Times or something like that.
00:33:43.000 So the first thing that happened was a professor at Tufts University who teaches biosecurity and researches tics.
00:33:50.000 He published about a thousand word op-ed that just went straight to the Washington Post through a pay-to-play online news platform.
00:34:00.000 So it basically, in the first sentence, linked to my book marketing page and said everything in the book was conspiracy theory and Lyme disease was not weaponized.
00:34:11.000 It said we've never had any sort of bug-borne weapons tests on mainland America, which is not true.
00:34:20.000 So anyways, I read that and I was really appalled because my first job was with Washington Post.
00:34:26.000 I was a paper girl during Watergate.
00:34:28.000 It was just mind-blowing.
00:34:29.000 So I called up the author and said, hey, professor, there's like 15 inaccuracies in this op-ed.
00:34:38.000 Can we talk about it?
00:34:39.000 He goes, sure.
00:34:39.000 And I said, oh, by the way, did you read my book?
00:34:41.000 No.
00:34:42.000 So he basically reviewed the book without reading it.
00:34:46.000 And then I said, After I went through the inaccuracies, he said, eh, you know, and I said, well, do you want me to send you a book?
00:34:52.000 And he says, no, I'll just shred it.
00:34:53.000 It was shocking because that person was obviously protected in a really big way.
00:34:58.000 So then I called up the science editor at Washington Post and I said, hey, there's all these inaccuracies.
00:35:04.000 Do you want to hear them?
00:35:05.000 And she goes, well, no, we don't fact check op-eds.
00:35:09.000 Why don't you talk to the pay-per-play person?
00:35:12.000 It's called the conversation editor and she wouldn't listen to me.
00:35:16.000 So here I'm stuck with this op-ed that carried a lot of weight and it's propagated all over the internet and I can't stuff it back in the bag.
00:35:26.000 It's out there forever and it killed a movie deal for the book and I didn't get any legitimate reviews after that.
00:35:32.000 So it was only when the COVID lab leak stuff started dawning on people that people re-approached and said, well, maybe this person is telling the truth.
00:35:44.000 Well, let me ask you this.
00:35:46.000 I bet you that if you researched That author that you would find links to either the military or the intelligence agencies or, you know, or some other conflict.
00:35:59.000 Well, what they didn't disclose in the Washington Post is that he was the director of a bio-level four lab in Groton, Massachusetts, that studied select agents on animals.
00:36:12.000 They did not disclose that, which I think would be relevant.
00:36:15.000 And they did a quick Google search.
00:36:19.000 You could have Learned that this professor, both his parents were in army intelligence their whole career and his dad was a veterinarian that dissected rabbits after the Nevada nuclear tests.
00:36:32.000 So, and they had taken down from his university website that he was the director of this lab.
00:36:39.000 So I don't think he wrote it.
00:36:40.000 And I think he was protected.
00:36:43.000 So it was just a wake up call to me.
00:36:45.000 And, you know, there's really nothing I can do as an independent author to fight that.
00:36:52.000 No.
00:36:52.000 The Washington Post is known as a voice for the intelligence agencies, the intelligence apparatus.
00:37:00.000 My own experience, first of all, I've published a lot with the Washington Post.
00:37:04.000 I've published a lot of op-eds and they fact check them up the kazoo.
00:37:08.000 So I'll spend typically an hour or more with the fact checker and with the attorneys in some cases.
00:37:19.000 So they definitely fact check them.
00:37:21.000 Number two, when my book Thimerosal was published, which was around 2014, I think, I got 12 reviews in the mainstream media, in a place like Forbes, Wall Street Journal, etc., the New York Times, and not one of the reviewers had read the book.
00:37:45.000 And the reason I know they hadn't read the book is because when those reviews came out, my book was not available to anybody.
00:37:53.000 We had made a mistake on the publishing date and it was late.
00:37:57.000 They published it on the publishing date.
00:37:59.000 And, you know, as you know, a lot of times the publishers will send out advance copies to reviewers so that they, you know, the review can receive the publishing date.
00:38:09.000 But in this case, we weren't able to do that.
00:38:12.000 And so the reviews came out on a time they would typically come out, but not one of them had read the book.
00:38:18.000 And they all, you know, were filled with, obviously, inaccuracies about what the book has said.
00:38:24.000 I never mentioned them.
00:38:25.000 The first copy of that book, I'd written three or four chapters on autism, but it was such a radioactive topic, I just decided to take them all out.
00:38:34.000 So I took them all out of that first edition, and it was the book without the autism chapters.
00:38:40.000 But all the reviews were about how badly, what a bad guy I was, and how anti-science I was for writing, for linking autism firefacts.
00:38:54.000 And then the second edition, I said to the publisher, just put those chapters back in the book because they're going after me anyway, so I might as well lay it out.
00:39:03.000 So we laid it out in the second edition.
00:39:06.000 But anyway, your experience does not surprise me at all.
00:39:11.000 So, yeah, it's surprising that more and more people are reading it now.
00:39:17.000 So I guess that's reassuring.
00:39:19.000 Because it's important to public health.
00:39:21.000 You have to take a tick bite seriously because it can inject you with two or three or four different pathogens and then you'll be really sick.
00:39:30.000 And no one's studying the mixed symptoms of these tick-borne diseases because our whole research institution is geared to Cox postulate, one disease, one set of symptoms.
00:39:43.000 No one's studying the mix of what my husband and I had, which was Lyme and babesiosis.
00:39:49.000 Which has its own little profile and none of the mainstream doctors knew what that was.
00:39:56.000 I think you'd have a hard time even finding any doctor at this point who can properly diagnose.
00:40:03.000 There's a few, you know, and because my son has it right now, I'm in the middle of a, you know, of identifying doctors and we found an amazing doctor from a woman who's a friend of his.
00:40:18.000 She spent $200,000 on her Lyme disease.
00:40:22.000 Her parents ruined her acting career.
00:40:25.000 She had a very promising career.
00:40:27.000 She had a couple of big films and she was debilitated by it.
00:40:32.000 And she finally found a doctor, a Chinese doctor in West LA, a guy called Dr.
00:40:37.000 Chang, who cured her very, very quickly.
00:40:42.000 And, you know, we found good doctors at treating at least some of the symptoms of it.
00:40:47.000 And, you know, a lot of people just have to live with Lyme disease, but if their immune system is very, very strong.
00:40:54.000 They seem to be able to live without symptoms.
00:40:59.000 So anyway, but everybody has a different experience.
00:41:01.000 And I'm acting like I know what I'm talking about.
00:41:04.000 And I don't.
00:41:05.000 I just, I have a lot of experience with my family.
00:41:08.000 I'll add it at least.
00:41:10.000 I'm visiting a lot of doctors and, you know, having a range of experiences.
00:41:15.000 Yeah.
00:41:16.000 So, I mean, one thing I did for the last two years during COVID is I worked for a nonprofit called Invisible International.
00:41:22.000 And we worked on a library of 40 accredited continuing medical education courses on all the tick-borne diseases and flea-borne diseases.
00:41:32.000 I mean, it's growing all the time, but that's free to physicians and patients alike.
00:41:38.000 So I feel like that's a big contribution.
00:41:41.000 Getting past the primary care physicians who are just so busy now, you know, 13 minutes a visit.
00:41:49.000 How do they have time to research the literature?
00:41:52.000 Yeah.
00:41:54.000 Well, they do what the pharmaceutical industry tells them.
00:41:58.000 They know exactly how to treat everything.
00:42:03.000 As you say, coax, postulates, a pill for every ill.
00:42:09.000 Chris, how can people find you?
00:42:11.000 You can go to my website, chrisnewby.com.
00:42:15.000 My book sells on HarperCollins website and all the places you can buy books.
00:42:20.000 There's Kindle audio.
00:42:21.000 And then I published a lot of articles at Stanford.
00:42:25.000 You can read about various public health things.
00:42:27.000 I mean, I think if there's a theme to my work, it's social justice for people with chronic diseases, whether it's tick-borne diseases or lead poisoning or all these other arthropod-driven diseases like Bartonella.
00:42:43.000 You are talking my language there.
00:42:46.000 Chris, thank you very, very much for your research.
00:42:49.000 Thank you for your book, Bitten.
00:42:51.000 You know, let's stay in touch.
00:42:54.000 Well, thank you for having me on.
00:42:56.000 I appreciate you letting me tell my story, because it will save lives, I think.