Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Jan. 19, 2024 - RFK Jr. The Defender

43:01

Bioweapons and Lyme Disease with Kris Newby

A history of the US Military's role in bioweapons and Lyme Disease is discussed in this episode with Kris Newby and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hey, everybody.
	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.
	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.
	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 has 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 Lyme disease and has spent a lot of time studying the Plum Island Lab.
	And so welcome to the show, Chris.
	Thank you very much.
	I'm excited about talking to you about this.
	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.
	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.
	So anyway, let's talk about it.
	Let's talk about your experience and then what you found in your research about Blum Island and about the tick infestation.
	Yeah, so it started with my family getting Lyme disease, my husband and I, and then it took us a year.
	What year was that?
	2002.
	Massachusetts was number two for Lyme disease.
	So my husband and I got really sick for a year.
	It took 10 doctors and $60,000 to finally get a diagnosis, and then it took five to six years to get better.
	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.
	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.
	And how there was something that was not the same as other diseases.
	There were things that were suspicious, like The government was trying to hide something about the disease.
	So we did the documentary.
	It did really well in the documentary world.
	And it really was the first documentary that showed the patient experience.
	Patients being gaslit about their symptoms, telling them it's all in their head, psychosomatic.
	After that was done, I thought, well, I'm done with Lyme disease.
	I got this really good science writing job at Stanford.
	And I said, I'm done.
	But then two things happened where I just knew I couldn't walk away from the problem.
	Because there were always rumors after the Michael Carroll book that something was off about Lyme disease.
	There was rumors of bioweapons, but we couldn't find proof.
	And it was a no-touch subject.
	And we would never get funding on our documentary if we did bioweapons.
	And then two things happened within about a month.
	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.
	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...
	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.
	Payback for the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
	So when I heard those two things, it was like a fork in the road.
	Well, I can either go...
	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.
	If what he said was true.
	So that started another five-year project looking into the tick weaponization program that our U.S. government ran during the 50s and 60s.
	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.
	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.
	I never ran into a deer tick, never saw a deer tick.
	We saw a lot of wood ticks.
	I never saw a deer tick.
	And then I moved to Westchester in 1983 after hiatus in the Hudson, you know, away from the Hudson Valley.
	And because I trained hawks, I was in the woods almost every day.
	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.
	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.
	I would run into nests of them and they would just be all over me.
	My son got Lyme disease, Bobby, and his face was paralyzed for almost a year.
	He had Bell's palsy from the disease.
	My other kids have almost all gotten Lyme disease, various levels of sickness.
	I have one child that is chronic Lyme disease now.
	That is giving him brain fog, you know, among other things, a really intense brain fog.
	He's a very smart kid, but it's really caused some problems.
	I got Lyme disease.
	I test positive for Lyme disease.
	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.
	And so I knew what it was, and I immediately went and took antibiotics.
	And as you point out in your book, it's pretty easy to treat the disease if you get it very early on.
	And I never have gotten sick from Lyme disease.
	I test positive for it, I'm sure.
	I've been reinfected numerous times.
	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.
	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.
	But young people who are even younger than me, but all the guys who aren't my age have problems from it.
	And I remarked to somebody the other day that it's really ruined going into the woods on the East Coast.
	You know, I grew up in the woods.
	And it's now dangerous to go in the woods.
	You're taking a risk that we never had to take when we were kids.
	And that it's another thing that keeps us from enjoying the outdoors and keeps us locked inside.
	And the idea that this may have been is highly likely to have been a military weapon.
	And we cannot say 100% for sure.
	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.
	Deer ticks and other species of ticks, lone star ticks, whatever.
	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.
	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.
	And the bioweapons program was brought over here originally as the first project of the CIA, which was called Operation Paperclip.
	That was the first project in 1947 that the CIA, after its creation, We began smuggling in German bioweapons scientists.
	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.
	And they were brought in from Japan, which had a much, much more comprehensive bioweapons program.
	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.
	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.
	And they, you know, by 19, they were very successful.
	By 1969, they had achieved what they boasted was a nuclear equivalence.
	In other words, they could kill as many people in a nuclear bomb as cheaply.
	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.
	And then Richard Nixon...
	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.
	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.
	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?
	You know, I mean, like, why stockpile that many weapons?
	Chemical, too.
	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.
	It's changed the nature of American democracy.
	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.
	They ended up killing a lot of people, and the Patriot Act passed immediately.
	And the anthrax was blamed on Saddam Hussein, and we went to war.
	And we now know, because the FBI told us, that the anthrax actually was Ames anthrax that came from a U.S. bioweapons lab.
	They blamed Fort Detrick.
	And so it was not a foreign attack on our country, as we were told.
	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.
	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.
	And they The Pentagon did not want to do the research itself because it was scared.
	You know, it is a hanging offense.
	They weren't sure they were going to get full immunity from the Patriot Act.
	They began funneling money to Anthony Fauci in NIH. And as you know, bioweapons research and vaccine research are the same track.
	So you can say it's vaccine research when you're actually developing, doing gain-of-function studies for bioweapons.
	And that in 2014, three of those bugs made high-profile escapes from those U.S. bioweapons labs that Fauci had started.
	And they got national attention, the escapes.
	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.
	And President Obama ordered a moratorium on all those 18 studies by Fauci, but Fauci didn't stop them.
	Instead, he moved the bulk of his science, the worst studies, to the Wuhan lab offshore, where he could continue doing this science.
	And it was funded not just by him, but most of the funding came from USAID, which is CIA money.
	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.
	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.
	But we do know that Operation Paperclip scientists were working at Plum Island.
	And they were working at Dietrich.
	Willie Bergdorfer, the Lyme discoverer, said...
	I worked with some of the paperclip Germans.
	They were very nice fellows.
	That's what he said.
	Of course.
	They were picking their brains.
	Yeah, we were exploiting them.
	So tell us what you know about what happened at Plum Island and the links with the tick infestations.
	Well, what I did was I looked at the stake in the ground where NIH and the CDC said, 1981, we discovered Lyme disease.
	It's just this one organism.
	It doesn't help people know.
	It was Willie Bergdorfer who identified the...
	The organism, yeah.
	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.
	They called in Willie Bergdorfer from Rocky Mountain Lab.
	He was a Swiss-German doctor.
	A scientist who was brought over in 1951.
	He was our leading tick expert.
	So he was called in.
	He was actually investigating a bunch of people dying of rocky man and spotted fever on Long Island.
	And then he started looking at You know, how did it get to Long Island from the Rocky Mountains?
	But also, there was a cluster at that time of kids who were getting rheumatoid arthritis, swollen knees, fevers, all of these other issues.
	A very, very, very strong cluster in Lyme, Connecticut, which is right across the water from Plum Island.
	Yeah, it's just a few miles.
	Easy trip for a bird.
	A deer can swim across that channel, too.
	Yeah.
	So the story from NIH is the spirochete was causing all the illness.
	Game over.
	You can cure it with two weeks of doxycycline.
	With the information that it was a bioweapon, I started looking backwards in time.
	And what I realized in the late 60s, three freaky new tick-borne diseases showed up.
	Just within like 10 miles of Lyme, Connecticut, Long Island, and Massachusetts, Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard.
	You know, if you draw a circle of 10 miles around there, really suspicious for pretty much three novel pathogens to show up.
	There was a really deadly Rocky Mountain spotted fever, where they had usually only had like one case a year.
	All of a sudden there were hundreds and people were dying.
	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.
	And one thing you should know is Plum Island was the headquarters for anti-animal bioweapons.
	And so they studied hoof and mouth disease mostly, bird plague, and probably babesiosis.
	Anthrax as well, which is...
	It's like our go-to bioweapon at the time.
	And then the other thing was the Lyme arthritis, which is what Alan Steer at Yale named it.
	He was a very ambitious young rheumatologist, and he saw the disease only as a knee disease since he's a rheumatologist.
	And that sort of set the course for the research course for the disease off because...
	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.
	So that was unusual.
	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.
	So then I started asking why.
	And there were just some shocking things I learned.
	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.
	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.
	You know, why would someone destroy their reputation like that?
	So after a few interviews, I looked at the National Archives, all his lab notebooks.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	So that was pretty shocking.
	And at that time, they were doing crude...
	Willie Bergdorfer was doing crude gain-of-function experiments with ticks.
	Inside of ticks, he would mix bacteria and viruses to see which ticks...
	Could transmit that because normally a tick has a disease that takes eons to adapt to that tick.
	And then over time, a population develops immunity.
	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.
	You're going to see the massive illness that we saw in the 70s with these things.
	So then I kept on digging and also Willie...
	Worked on putting plague in fleas so we could drop that on the enemies and deadly Trinidad fever virus in mosquitoes.
	And this is the kind of mosquito, it's tropical, it usually is in the south or in the tropics.
	It's the mosquito that spreads Zika and Dengue.
	And so we were, to test it, they were dropping these non-native mosquitoes.
	On the poor Black communities of Georgia.
	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.
	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.
	The thing about that tick is it's a stalker, really aggressive, swarming.
	It has, unlike deer ticks, it has rudimentary eyes, so it can track its prey.
	And what's really horrible about this tick is it carries these Rickettsia is the Rocky Man and spotted fever.
	So anyways, back up.
	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.
	He set up several grids in the swampy areas of Virginia, and he would put a thousand ticks in each square.
	And over the months to years, he would take a Geiger counter out to see how far the ticks creeped.
	And then he also did bird studies to see how long it would take.
	It takes five days for a tick to go from coastal Virginia up to Long Island, where the outbreak of spotted fever was.
	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.
	So it's just so irresponsible, and I interviewed that scientist, and I said, well...
	Did you have to get any kind of permitting for this releasing radioactive ticks?
	Which radioactive ticks, I mean, could cause mutations in whatever germs are in them.
	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.
	I have documentation on that.
	Anyway, as a scientist, when I say, well, what about those uncontrolled experiments?
	And he goes, He just laughed and said, I only had to get a permit from the city of Newport News.
	He said, I never could have done that today.
	And later that researcher tested drugs and vaccines for animals and his lab was shut down for cruelty to animals and safety lapses.
	So what I'm saying is these kind of experiments, in the interest of beating the Soviets, had no guardrails on them.
	And I certainly believe that part of the problem in Lyme, Connecticut was this release of the ticks.
	Now, the other thing that I'm looking into now are that Plum Island was doing illegal animal waste dumps on mainland Connecticut.
	They were previously dumping animal waste in Long Island Sound.
	I think that'd be okay.
	And then in 72, the EPA came along and said, you can't do that anymore.
	There are reports of that happening, but that's not proven yet.
	But that certainly would explain how babesiosis came about.
	Let me go back there.
	But by animal waste, you mean not fecal material, but dead animals?
	Both.
	Okay.
	And so, speaking of animal cruelty, how do they raise the ticks?
	You need a live, you need like a live substrate in order to feed them blood, right?
	Well, I don't know about the mass production.
	Willy Bergdorfer worked on mass producing both mosquitoes and ticks.
	They would have guinea pigs and rabbits and they would have these little cages that would go around the ears or on the bellies.
	And so they would feed on rodents that way.
	Yeah.
	So I don't know about mass producing, but I know I have pictures in my book of that with mice.
	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.
	It keeps sort of a cage of insects attached maybe surgically or with straps to that little animal.
	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.
	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.
	What about West Nile virus?
	Did you run across that in your research?
	No, I stuck with the tick vector mostly in all the experiments on ticks.
	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.
	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.
	You know, most of the fleas hopped off into the desert.
	But in that case, it was called Operation Big Itch, and the people on the airplane got flea bites.
	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.
	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.
	And by the time 69 rolled around, their go-to bioweapon was What I call the Russian nested doll strategy.
	So you'd have a bacteria growing in a vat.
	You'd put viruses in the growth medium along with toxins.
	So then you'd have a germ inside a germ with a toxin.
	So their plan was you drop this or spray this organism on your enemies and they would have typical bacterial infection symptoms.
	So fever, Feeling tired.
	And they would treat it with antibiotics.
	And then you would kill the bacteria and release the virus and the toxins.
	And it would create cytokine storm.
	And it would just kill someone rapidly.
	There would be no cure for that kind of overload of your immune system.
	So that's...
	Maybe when Nixon heard that...
	I doubt those kind of details.
	But, you know, they had one of those big vats.
	I think the largest one was at Fort Detrick.
	They called it Black Mariah.
	It was an entire building where they were brewing these kind of witches brew of toxics and bacteria, really.
	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.
	They were doing it all over the country.
	They did it in New York City.
	They dropped microbes that they put in glass light bulbs, and they packed them instead of a filament.
	They had light bulbs and they dropped them into the subways through the grate.
	They released them in national airport.
	They released them from airplanes and from ships onto the city of San Francisco and many, many other populated parts of the United States.
	I mean, in my book, I think I record over 200 experiments, mass open air experiments on unknowing, unwilling, unwitting human populations.
	That these guys were conducting, and many of them were conducted under the supervision of leading Nazi scientists.
	And that's all documented in my book, so it's not surprising.
	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.
	We know how that was released.
	That was released through sick chimps that were brought in for a vaccine experiment in Maryland, at one of the labs in Maryland.
	And a lab worker got an infection and now has spread it.
	It's one of the biggest killers of children around the world.
	And now the companies for which they are making the vaccine are...
	It was a simian virus that was isolated to chimps.
	But when it spread to humans, as you said, it was virulent.
	It was much more infectious and much more deadly.
	The virgin population and now...
	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.
	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.
	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.
	And again, another virus that came somehow that leaped from Bonnebo chimpanzees to human beings.
	Nobody can explain how they did that, but those same chimps, their kidneys were being masticated and used as a substrate of the vaccine.
	And that was then given to 2 million kids in the Congo, precisely the area from which, you know, HIV emanated.
	You have the West Nile virus that, again, has a suspicious pedigree that people have linked to Plum Island.
	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.
	And the institution, the agencies that are supposed to be protecting us all have military pedigrees themselves.
	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.
	They were started, most of these agencies were started at the Marine lab, the Navy lab.
	There's no transparency.
	The worst thing is there's no accountability.
	I mean, if any...
	Yeah, so, I mean, for me, when I'm lobbying for...
	Is disclosure of these experiments.
	What, where, and when was released.
	Not just for ticks, but mosquitoes and fleas.
	Because it would save us a lot of research dollars to narrow our focus.
	Right now we're studying the spread of ticks by spreading, by like dragging bed sheets along trails.
	There are better ways to do that.
	We can Address the sickness in a more targeted way if we release that.
	Now, all those experiments happened 50 years ago, and the people who green-lighted them are dead.
	So why can't we disclose those?
	It will help the American people.
	It will save research dollars.
	So that's the thing I push for at the end of my book.
	People don't want to hear this truth.
	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.
	What was the reaction to your book?
	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.
	Did anything like that happen to you?
	Yeah, and I think I was a pretty easy target because I didn't work for the New York Times or something like that.
	So the first thing that happened was a professor at Tufts University who teaches biosecurity and researches tics.
	He published about a thousand word op-ed that just went straight to the Washington Post through a pay-to-play online news platform.
	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.
	It said we've never had any sort of bug-borne weapons tests on mainland America, which is not true.
	So anyways, I read that and I was really appalled because my first job was with Washington Post.
	I was a paper girl during Watergate.
	It was just mind-blowing.
	So I called up the author and said, hey, professor, there's like 15 inaccuracies in this op-ed.
	Can we talk about it?
	He goes, sure.
	And I said, oh, by the way, did you read my book?
	No.
	So he basically reviewed the book without reading it.
	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?
	And he says, no, I'll just shred it.
	It was shocking because that person was obviously protected in a really big way.
	So then I called up the science editor at Washington Post and I said, hey, there's all these inaccuracies.
	Do you want to hear them?
	And she goes, well, no, we don't fact check op-eds.
	Why don't you talk to the pay-per-play person?
	It's called the conversation editor and she wouldn't listen to me.
	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.
	It's out there forever and it killed a movie deal for the book and I didn't get any legitimate reviews after that.
	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.
	Well, let me ask you this.
	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.
	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.
	They did not disclose that, which I think would be relevant.
	And they did a quick Google search.
	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.
	So, and they had taken down from his university website that he was the director of this lab.
	So I don't think he wrote it.
	And I think he was protected.
	So it was just a wake up call to me.
	And, you know, there's really nothing I can do as an independent author to fight that.
	No.
	The Washington Post is known as a voice for the intelligence agencies, the intelligence apparatus.
	My own experience, first of all, I've published a lot with the Washington Post.
	I've published a lot of op-eds and they fact check them up the kazoo.
	So I'll spend typically an hour or more with the fact checker and with the attorneys in some cases.
	So they definitely fact check them.
	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.
	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.
	We had made a mistake on the publishing date and it was late.
	They published it on the publishing date.
	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.
	But in this case, we weren't able to do that.
	And so the reviews came out on a time they would typically come out, but not one of them had read the book.
	And they all, you know, were filled with, obviously, inaccuracies about what the book has said.
	I never mentioned them.
	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.
	So I took them all out of that first edition, and it was the book without the autism chapters.
	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.
	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.
	So we laid it out in the second edition.
	But anyway, your experience does not surprise me at all.
	So, yeah, it's surprising that more and more people are reading it now.
	So I guess that's reassuring.
	Because it's important to public health.
	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.
	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.
	No one's studying the mix of what my husband and I had, which was Lyme and babesiosis.
	Which has its own little profile and none of the mainstream doctors knew what that was.
	I think you'd have a hard time even finding any doctor at this point who can properly diagnose.
	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.
	She spent $200,000 on her Lyme disease.
	Her parents ruined her acting career.
	She had a very promising career.
	She had a couple of big films and she was debilitated by it.
	And she finally found a doctor, a Chinese doctor in West LA, a guy called Dr.
	Chang, who cured her very, very quickly.
	And, you know, we found good doctors at treating at least some of the symptoms of it.
	And, you know, a lot of people just have to live with Lyme disease, but if their immune system is very, very strong.
	They seem to be able to live without symptoms.
	So anyway, but everybody has a different experience.
	And I'm acting like I know what I'm talking about.
	And I don't.
	I just, I have a lot of experience with my family.
	I'll add it at least.
	I'm visiting a lot of doctors and, you know, having a range of experiences.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, one thing I did for the last two years during COVID is I worked for a nonprofit called Invisible International.
	And we worked on a library of 40 accredited continuing medical education courses on all the tick-borne diseases and flea-borne diseases.
	I mean, it's growing all the time, but that's free to physicians and patients alike.
	So I feel like that's a big contribution.
	Getting past the primary care physicians who are just so busy now, you know, 13 minutes a visit.
	How do they have time to research the literature?
	Yeah.
	Well, they do what the pharmaceutical industry tells them.
	They know exactly how to treat everything.
	As you say, coax, postulates, a pill for every ill.
	Chris, how can people find you?
	You can go to my website, chrisnewby.com.
	My book sells on HarperCollins website and all the places you can buy books.
	There's Kindle audio.
	And then I published a lot of articles at Stanford.
	You can read about various public health things.
	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.
	You are talking my language there.
	Chris, thank you very, very much for your research.
	Thank you for your book, Bitten.
	You know, let's stay in touch.
	Well, thank you for having me on.
	I appreciate you letting me tell my story, because it will save lives, I think.

▲