May 9, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
10:09
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| If you live in certain parts of this country, rural areas particularly, you know people who have or who have had Lyme disease. | ||
| And for some of them, maybe most, it's not a huge deal. | ||
| You go in and you get a big dose of antibiotics, you have some symptoms and then it seems to go away. | ||
| But for some percentage, and you may know these people too, it's totally life-destroying. | ||
| It's years in bed. | ||
| It's agony. | ||
| It's really the end of your productive life. | ||
| So what is that exactly? | ||
| What is Lyme disease? | ||
| Well, there's still an active debate about that very basic question. | ||
| Some have dismissed it as a psychological symptom, actually. | ||
| But even people who acknowledge that it's a physical syndrome aren't always very clear, and they're certainly not in agreement with one another about what it is or where it came from. | ||
| So back in 2008, a woman called Chris Newby produced a documentary about Lyme. | ||
| At that point, it was becoming a very serious global illness, and its origins were mysterious, unknown. | ||
| People whispered about it, but no one could be certain. | ||
| That documentary was called Under Our Skin. | ||
| Here's part of it. | ||
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Some infectious disease doctors, they don't believe in Lyme, and they said that I was faking it and... | |
| Pretending so I could get out of school. | ||
| Lyme is the fastest growing infectious disease in the country. | ||
| 200,000 new cases here, maybe even more. | ||
| It is a political disease and an economic disease as much as it is a bacterial-borne infection. | ||
| I would never, never have thought that something like a bacteriological infection can become so politicized that the truth can be so brutally distorted. | ||
| I go into despair daily. | ||
| I cry daily. | ||
| I want to die daily. | ||
| Well, when I saw this doctor, you know, he said, you've got a long road ahead of you. | ||
| It's not going to be easy. | ||
| So that scared me. | ||
| The unknown is pretty scary. | ||
| It is a national health crisis that is completely and totally being ignored and squashed. | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| Well, you could write it off, and again, some have as a figment of your imagination, but there are real neurological symptoms, and if you know anyone who's had it, you know that it's entirely real. | ||
| So again, what is this? | ||
| Well, Chris Newby has spent a lot of time thinking and researching on this topic, has been affected personally by Lyme, is the author of Bitten, The Secret History of Biological Weapons and Lyme Disease, and she joins us now. | ||
| Chris Newby, thanks so much for coming on. | ||
| So can you just give us a... | ||
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Thanks for inviting me here. | |
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| A quick and succinct overview of what Lyme is. | ||
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So Lyme disease is caused by a spirochetal bacteria, and you get it through a tick bite. | |
| And if you treat it immediately with doxycycline or amoxicillin, it will go away. | ||
| The problem is it's very often... | ||
| It's misdiagnosed or diagnosed late, and that's where the controversy comes in for the disease. | ||
| It can linger for months to years, and then it's really hard to get rid of. | ||
| And to complicate it, a tick can transmit up to 20 different disease-causing microbes, and so if you have two or three or four of those in one tick bite, it creates a confusing set of symptoms that doctors have trouble diagnosing. | ||
| So doctors can isolate, however, the organism that causes Lyme specifically. | ||
| I mean, there's no mystery about where that comes from. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
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Well, there are antibody tests for Lyme disease. | |
| It's really, really hard to culture the, you know, take blood and culture it in a Petri dish. | ||
| Yes. | ||
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The problem is the tests are not very reliable. | |
| The Lyme disease antibody tests. | ||
| Don't usually work in the first month. | ||
| It takes a while for your body to develop antibodies to the level that they can be measured. | ||
| And then later on, the tests aren't that great. | ||
| It's no better than a coin flip because it just depends on what strain you have and if you're really sick, you won't produce antibodies. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So the problem with tick-borne diseases is there are a lot more ticks than there have... | ||
| Ben, in our lifetimes anyway, parts of the Northeast have seen an explosion in tick populations to the point where large mammals are being decimated, sucked dry of blood and dying because they have too many ticks on them. | ||
| So that's not anyone's imagination. | ||
| That's measurable. | ||
| So if you have a disease that's spread by ticks and there are a whole lot more ticks, you're going to get a whole lot more cases of the disease. | ||
| Is this measured, measurable? | ||
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Yes. | |
| And I would say just the cases of Lyme disease are going up, which is proving that ticks are biting people, The CDC estimates they're half a million cases a year. | ||
| That's on average 1,300 people a day, so that's significant. | ||
| Now, why they're spreading so quickly, I go into that in the book a little bit. | ||
| I mean, there certainly is global climate change, which means winters aren't as severe and a lot of the ticks don't die off. | ||
| That's true in Maine. | ||
| And then part of it is people are moving into the woods and are exposed more to the ticks. | ||
| Yes, all true in Maine and other northern states. | ||
| But it does raise the question, like, how did this... | ||
| I mean, if you're 75 years old, you did not grow up with Lyme disease. | ||
| If you're 15 years old, you're worried about Lyme disease. | ||
| That's a pretty short period. | ||
| Where do we think this came from? | ||
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Well, the thing I found in my research for my book is Lyme disease wasn't a noticeable problem until the mid-70s. | |
| And what my research said is that there are actually three really virulent tick-borne diseases that showed up right around Lyme, Connecticut, at the mouth of the Connecticut River, which is right across from Plum Island, which was the U.S.'s Anti-animal crop headquarters for the Biological Weapons Program. | ||
| So late 60s, the peak of the Biological Weapons Program in the U.S., these three freaky diseases showed up. | ||
| So that was Lyme arthritis caused by the spirochete. | ||
| There was a rickettsia, which is Rocky Manus spotted fever. | ||
| And then there was a cattle parasite. | ||
| It was the second time it was found in man in that area called Babesia. | ||
| And that's actually, I got Lyme and Babesia, which can be fatal, and it's a serious disease. | ||
| So you have a cluster, effectively, of these three previously rare diseases right across the water from the U.S. government's biological weapons testing facilities. | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
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Yeah. | |
| And if you're working for the CDC and on the lookout for natural versus unnatural disease outbreaks, having three new tick-borne diseases show up, extra deadly disease-causing having three new tick-borne diseases show up, extra deadly disease-causing than in the past, it would get their attention and there would be investigations, which is what happened. | ||
| That sounds like a crazed conspiracy theory to me, just because you have previously rare diseases show up all at once across from a biological weapons facility doesn't mean... | ||
| Okay, so the CDC investigated this. | ||
| What did they find? | ||
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Well, a housewife in Lyme, Connecticut, Polly Murray, was the first one to start documenting, and she started pounding on the doors of local health departments and the CDC. And it really took her seven years before the CDC responded, and a doctor named Alan Steer showed up and started from Yale. | |
| He's a CDC EIS officer and started investigating it. | ||
| And he figured out it was tick-borne, but he couldn't figure out the causative agent. | ||
| And at that point, the U.S.'s number one tick researcher, Willie Bergdorfer, a Swiss-American... | ||
| Tick guy who was in NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratory came out to investigate. | ||
| And that's where he found... | ||
| I mean, the public-facing story is he found the spirochete. | ||
| It causes this bullseye rash. | ||
| He said that's what's causing all the disease. | ||
| And the panic should stop. | ||
| Just take two weeks of doxycycline and the problem will go away. | ||
| But it didn't. | ||
| And that's where my book took off. | ||
| I started looking at the backstory and wondering what really happened. | ||
| And people associated with that disease weren't acting in the normal way. | ||
| Normally, when you discover a dangerous new disease, you say, oh, this is horrible. | ||
| Give us money. | ||
| We'll research it. | ||
| But instead, it just became more and more secretive. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So is it your belief that Willie Bergdorfer, who I think is gone now, but knew the truth about what happened? | ||
| And what do you think is the truth? | ||
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Well, I worked on the Lyme disease documentary. | |
| Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. | ||
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