089 Bitten, The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons

Yeah.

What do you think Lyme disease— how do you think history is going to look back on Lyme disease in the year 2040?

Well, I think—

22 years from now, 21 years from now.

I just think they'll think it's the biggest public health disaster ever. I mean, as an informed person who spent about 15 years diving into the history, the politics, the bad tests, it's a huge bloodbath. Shine a light on medical history, and I hope we can learn from it.

Yeah. Welcome to Lion Voice. We are your hosts, Sarah and Aaron Sanchez. We created this show designed to inspire, educate, and encourage you on your path to wellness. This show's purpose is to help you put the puzzle pieces of healing into place. Join us as we interview other warriors and discuss how fighting is a mindset, healing consists of choices, and living is the outcome.

Wishing your doctors could communicate and come up with a cohesive plan specific to your medical needs and genetics? At Invita Medical Center, they offer a team-style approach, giving you the opportunity to heal. In addition to a commitment of providing radical love and care for their patients, they are strategically located in sunny Arizona because Arizona offers the best integrative medical laws in the country. Call today to speak with one of their patient care coordinators. You can find them online at invita.com.

Lime Voice thanks Invita Medical for the continued support. Please reach them at 1-866-830-4576. Hey, Lime Voice listeners, we love bringing these episodes to you every week. If you would like to help us and support us, there's several ways you can do that. Those are all listed at limedvoice.com, and if you look there, there's ways you can donate even as little as $1. Any would be appreciated to help continue to get the message out, to help fight, heal, and live. Thanks again. Welcome to another episode of Lime Voice, episode 89, with Chris Newby.

Yeah, author of Bitten, which is going to be a controversial book for years to come.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's exciting information.

If you have never listened to Lion Voice, let me take a few seconds to tell you all about us. We are an informative podcast. Talk about all aspects, the emotional, the social. We do talk about medical, but we also talk just on the general and we've been—

spiritual, the financial.

Yeah.

But we lean really heavy on the social and emotional side of it.

We've been battling Lyme disease for over—

over 20 years.

Over 20 years now. And we've actually— Sarah's been infected twice and has recovered twice. Well, we designed this podcast just to be a support for people. In fact, let me read a review from one of our listeners. This is from Connie. I found out that I have chronic Lyme disease for 10 years or longer. I found your podcast and I feel like I'm not alone in this, in this horrible disease. You have become my friends. Love, Connie. And that's such a great— that's so fulfilling for both you and I to hear that, you know, we can be a voice to people like that are going through this.

Yeah, that they're not alone.

Yeah.

Yeah, we got a letter and a message this week. Specifically saying that from listeners saying, "This journey is so isolating and so few people know what's going on. Thank you for helping me not feel alone anymore." And that's, you know, you've heard it said that the 5 people that you are closest to or you spend the most time with help shape your life and your interests and your successes. And that's really true. The people who are your key people are a huge influence in your life. And what happens a lot of times if you have been forced to not be able to work and your relationships are suffering, you don't have 5 people in your world who get the complexities of this illness. And so part of, sometimes that's good. You don't want everyone in this own little dysfunctional Lyme world, but it also, you need people to come alongside you help you figure out and navigate those never-ending complexities of caring for people with chronic illnesses.

Yeah, and that's why we, we did this podcast, is for that. And that's actually led into our next subject, which is our coaching.

Yeah, you guys have heard me talk about coaching, and I've done a lot of short-term coaching for people who are going out to treatment, mostly through Invita Medical, because I've gone through their treatment program. But We have a Fight Hill Live coaching program that we have been implementing over the last several years, and I am finally at a place physically where I can give more time and attention to that level. And so that coaching is intense. It's weekly meetings. My coaching program, the Fight Hill Live coaching program, is for people, it can be for people who are really in crisis, but it's really for people who have crossed those physical thresholds and are working on the social-emotional emotional and rebuilding their lives, reshaping, trying to figure out how to be a caregiver. And about 30% of my clients right now are purely caregivers.

Yeah, yeah, recovering from their own disease, but also, but also care. I mean, so complicated. You need help.

You need help.

You need help. We are there for you. If you want to know more about this, yeah, you can email me.

Adversity and Wellness Coaching. Email me at sanchasmile@gmail.com, and we will set up a free 2-hour session to go through and see how we can help you jump those next hurdles.

Yeah, I mean, this is what we wanted for— I mean, when we started our journey, this is what we needed.

Yeah.

And we've— and so, I mean, we've kept that in mind as we're going. We've created this for us, for who we used to be. So this is for you guys, and it's going to be a huge help.

Yeah.

I know I will be.

Yeah, and obviously we talk a lot about, we're approaching our almost 100th episode, so there's a ton of information in past podcasts, but I do talk more about coaching in episode 88. And a lot of you follow us on Facebook. On Facebook we have a page called Lion Voice, but we are starting to actively promote a group called Fight Hill Live. So if you are on Facebook, which so many of you are, not everyone is, but we do have a specific Facebook group Facebook group called Fight Hill Live. So look us up on Facebook. We're gonna be talking about coaching concepts throughout all of 2020.

Yeah, find us there. Let's tell our good people about our Lime— or about limewater.com, even though you don't like the name.

I hate the name limewater.com, but it doesn't matter. Our machines are incredible and amazing, and we have an ionized water machine and And we talk about that, the ins and outs of that, in episode 64. Go back and listen to that one.

But by far one of the most effective moves we've made in our health household, our whole entire house, for us and our 5 kids.

Yeah, so we now clean our entire house without chemicals because we use different pH balances. Our machine makes different pH balances for different things, so We do, and this is a common practice.

This water machine they use in Japan all the time to disinfect many of their medical places because they don't even use bleach like we do.

Well, yeah, and anyone who does commercialized food has to use water, pH balanced water, to actually clean without using chemicals and stuff. So yeah, it's made a huge difference for us. But this is one thing, so many of you guys spend a lot of money on your food and produce. I'm a big juicer, so that's a big thing for me.

If you're buying organic, you got—

But we, when we buy berries, when we buy our celery, when whatever we're buying produce-wise, our produce, we do not lose any produce because of mold. We soak all of our produce in 11.5 water and it cleanses it. It cleanses it, but it reverses oxidation that happens. And so, it, you see it truly just restoring vegetables, restoring flowers, and it's doing that same thing on a cellular level. So if you're inside, yeah, we use a 6.0 water for all of our coffee enemas and colonics, and it is one of the most valuable tools that we have found using 6.0 on my hair. Yeah, it's not fair that Aaron has better hair than I do, man.

All right.

So.

You hate me because I'm beautiful?

Right, go to limewater.com. You can learn more about it.

Yeah.

And big news this Friday.

Ooh, yeah.

So really, you're gonna have to read the book Bitten. I think it really gives you a clear understanding of why this illness has been so ignored, why you can't find a simple test half the time.

It really explains a lie.

And this to me is— someone asked me this the other day, like, what other books would you recommend? And Pamela Weintraub wrote Cure Unknown, and that book I read several years ago. And this is just additional information of why it's so complicated, why it hasn't been covered by insurance. I mean, there's a lot of complexities here that are going to be discovered for years to come. I think this is just just scratching the surface.

So we're excited to have Kris on because I think this is going to be huge. I think like this story is just starting.

It really is, and that's unfortunate. But she— we did our 1-hour interview— is going to be doing a Facebook Live with us on Facebook. So Facebook Live this Friday the 8th.

If you go there, join our event. I got it in as an event, just join that event and it'll put you a reminder. You'll be signed up and all that stuff.

Yeah, so it's going to be Friday the 8th at 11 o'clock Pacific Standard Time, 2 PM Eastern Standard Time. But if you go to the Lion Voice page, you can just sign up for the event and it will tell you what time zone you're in and all that good stuff. But that's, that's exciting too because there's been such a great response to her book. As a science writer, Chris Newby was driven to understand why the disease was so misunderstood and its patients so mistreated. And she has thousands of hours into this in personal experience, in education, in understanding. Yes. And so if you want to understand the secret history of Lyme disease and biological weapons on a deeper level Join us on our Facebook Live event this Friday the 8th, and you get to ask Chris Newby all your direct questions.

Yeah, I think it'll be really informative, and I'm looking forward to it immensely.

Yeah.

All right. Well, are we off to the races?

Off to the interview.

All right. Enjoy this episode with Chris Newby.

Welcome to today's episode of Blind Boys. I am so excited because with us today is author Chris Newby, who is an award-winning science writer at Stanford University and the senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary Under Our Skin, which has led, in my opinion, to countless people being diagnosed, myself included. And she has two degrees in engineering, a bachelor's degree from the University of Utah, and a master's degree from Stanford University. She was previously a writer for Apple and other Silicon Valley companies. She is living in Palo Alto, California. Chris, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Thanks for the invitation. I'm happy to be on.

Yeah. So, okay. I have a bajillion questions for you. And I want to just start with your role in the documentary Under Our Skin and just Thank you for all of that work. When I watched that film in 2013, and at that point I had been sick for 17 years, did not know, had barely heard the word Lyme disease, had been in bed for a couple of years, excruciating pain. And when I saw that film, I, I, I didn't cuss, right? And I'm watching the film saying, what the hell is happening? Like, what is this? And then watching myself, like, Watching those people on film were the first people I had ever seen that looked like me, that had the atrophy like me, that could be carrying on a conversation and then completely forget what they were saying. So how did you come to be a part of that to begin with?

Well, like you and many other people who are listening here is, you know, I was struck by Lyme disease and my husband too. So we went on a family vacation in 2002 to Martha's Vineyard. We were there a week and we came home and my husband and I got sicker than we'd ever been about a week later. And, uh, like many of your listeners, you know, for the next year, every day we would get sicker and sicker and we'd go to doctor after doctor. And, you know, it took us basically a year, 10 doctors, and $60,000 to get diagnosed. And, uh, finally, um, Doctor number 9 was at a large medical center and he and his assistant just threw their hands up and said, "We don't, you know, we can't help you. We don't have the tools to treat you here." Even though I had been, I had gotten a positive ELISA Lyme test twice, 2 in a row from their lab. And they said, "That test is unreliable. It's a false positive." We don't have the tools here to take care of you. And they pretty much fired us. And, you know, we'd been already fired from— or we quit our local community because we didn't feel like they were paying attention to our symptoms. And then this large medical institution fired us and wouldn't give us referrals. So we were forced to go on the internet. And, you know, I put my positive tests, my symptoms, because I was an engineer and I had like these detailed spreadsheets and timelines and Instantly, some insomniac Lyme around the world called back and said, "It's obvious you have Lyme and there's a doctor in your neighborhood." And so then we went there and then we soon got treatment. So anyways, what I realized is then I wasn't alone in that waiting room with hundreds of other Lyme patients that you meet along the way. And I said, "Wow, this is just like a bigger problem than I realized." And I said, "I need to do a film." I ended up just— I had transcribed a talk from Eugene Shapiro who was at Yale and he came to Stanford and he was the so-called number one Lyme pediatrician specialist in the world and there he said, you know, Lyme is easy to treat, easy to cure and I'm just saying, "No, no." So I transcribed that and then a filmmaker at the same time in Marin, that's Annie Wilson, very talented filmmaker, wanted that transcript. And then, so then we realized we both wanted to do a film and we teamed up. And so, you know, I was sort of the research fundraising arm for the film and Andy was the talent. And 3 and a half years later, the film was accepted at Tribeca.

Yeah, so powerful.

Yeah. And, you know, really, I went from thinking I just had a— my husband and I had a weird freaky disease and we just had a bad set of doctors to going around the United States interviewing hundreds and hundreds of patients or at least seeing the interviews on film. You just realize the magnitude of the problem. And really the definitions that were published didn't match what we were seeing in the field and what for example, you were experiencing what we are experiencing. So it was just a big why, you know, an exploration.

Yeah, the whole easy to treat, easy to cure is only applicable if they are completely ignoring the patient side of things. And basically that's what happens is you do get fired, you're— or you can't go any further with a physician. Well, one of the things I wanted to just commend you and your husband for As I mean, watching the film, I knew a massive amount of work went into whoever did that film. Reading your book, Bitten, which the secret history of Lyme disease and biological weapons, we're going to get into that. But I really do want to just commend you guys on the amount of personal sacrifice that you have made to the Lyme community. And when I was reading your book and you talked about getting on a plane, you and Paul getting on a plane and flying out to Utah to go through boxes of papers I'm assuming at your own expense and all these things. Take us back to a couple of those moments when you started to connect dots where you realized, oh my gosh, they've known about this for a while. There's a bigger story here. Can you take us back to some of those beginning moments where you decided, I'm gonna continually give my time, effort, and energy to this issue?

Well, the first inkling was during the filming of Willy Brüggdorfer because, you know, we'd been filming for about 3 years and we couldn't get anybody from the government to go on camera and say, yeah, this is a big epidemic. This is what we think is happening. No one from the NIH or the CDC would talk to us. So we said, we need something, someone from the government. So we said, well, we'll just fly to Montana in the middle of winter, January or February. I can't remember. It was so cold. And this is Andy and I. And so we started setting up our cameras in— well, Willy was retired from the lab. He still had lab access. He was emeritus, but he agreed to talk to us. It was surprising. So we go there and we have a cameraman and Andy and I, and we're setting up the lighting and the setting. And all of a sudden there's a pounding on the door and there's someone from the Rocky Mountain Labs saying, I'm going to sit in on this meeting. And we were sort of surprised. And the director is sort of this feisty New Jersey guy said, no, you're not. He's a private citizen. He's retired. You're not going to sit in on this meeting. He's from the Rocky Mountain Lab. He's high up. And so it was just unsettling. And, you know, there was something obviously they didn't want, didn't trust Willie to talk about. And Willie was upset too. And so during the interview, he said, well, I know that NIH knows that this Lyme disease thing is chronic. It's— sometimes it can remain dormant for 5, 10, 15 years. And it's worse in children in their developing neurological systems, because that was like jaw-dropping, because they were denying, denying, denying in public. And then so that was about a 3-hour interview. And Andy and the cameraman were shutting down. And then Willie had this little smile and said, I didn't tell you everything. You know, so that was like the first clue that there was more of a story there. But we'd been filming for 3 years, we had to submit it to the film festivals. And it was pretty clear that no one would fund us if we sort of went down that secret conspiracy theory path. So So we shipped it and still the film, you know, did well. And it was the first time really it told the Lyme patient story was told that the symptoms in the field don't match what's in the medical literature. Something weird is going on here, right?

Yeah.

And then Willie also, Willie said the Lyme research is a shameful affair on camera and in the film and that all the money is going to people who know what the results of the experiments are before they're done, which is not the right thing. So that, that suggests a conspiracy too. But anyways, we got the film out and, you know, it was, it did really well, but it was exhausting because the whole, you know, yeah, it was exhausting emotionally and mentally to know that disease. And I was also, I was still recovering and in treatment during the filming of that.

You know, one of the things I appreciated, the fact that you said it cost us $60,000 and 10 doctors in 12 months to find a diagnosis. And I always ask people, what has it cost you so far? Because at one point the CDC actually had on their website that they believed it cost about $100,000. That is no longer on there. I have not been able to find it in a couple of years, but That barrier— some people never are going to have $60,000 to get to a place of diagnosis, too. And we, much like other people, sold off all of our assets. I was sick for a lot of years before we ever got a diagnosis. And so what I appreciate about your honesty on that level is that that shows the real battle that you are fighting. You cannot walk in and get access to basic care because of the dogma that is being taught. And I thought it was fascinating in your book when you went back to one of your original physicians years later and he said, I'm sorry, I wasn't allowed to treat you. But that's not what he said. He just said, you don't have Lyme disease.

Right. And yeah, and no one's done a good study on the cost of the disease. And, you know, my husband and I were in Silicon Valley. It takes two incomes to live here. And so really the lost income, 'cause I was completely disabled, is hundreds of thousands of dollars and who can do that? And you know, so a lot of these people are just permanently disabled. I remember when I was sickest, you know, first of all, a doctor wouldn't put a label on my disease so I couldn't get disability. And I was so mentally impaired. I don't think I looked at the disability forms. I was like, I can't fill these out. Oh yeah, I have two engineering degrees, but I can't fill out a disability form. I'm so disabled, right?

Well, yeah, we're gonna get into that because I had the exact same experience. I was completely disabled, had basically been in bed for two years and not functioning for about six, and I could not apply for disability because I did not have a terminal disease. And so as I'm reading Bitten and the word incapacitation keeps coming up. Incapacitated, incapacitated. And I'm like, that is exactly what the experience is like. This is not a normal illness in the sense of the— I always felt like something was sucking the life out of me.

Yeah, I would say that's true. Yeah.

Which just makes sense on so many levels, like why it's so hard to recover. So let's go We jumped in here because if you have not read the book Bitten yet, you're gonna have to. You just have to read it. There's so much information. I heard you speak at the Live Lime Conference. You spoke for an hour and it was barely scratching the surface of your story and what's going on. And I had read Pamela Cure Unknown by Pamela Weintraub years ago and felt like your book In addition to Lab 257, was really the first books that have come out that really talk about the conspiracy side of things, which I've heard for years, but honestly didn't have the emotional energy to care about. I was surviving and trying to recover myself. But when you started Under Our Skin, that project ended. Advocating in the Lyme community is very emotionally and physically draining on some levels. You have to build yourself back up because it's a heavy topic. So you're done with Under Our Skin. You're in remission. You are getting back to your normal life and you choose to write what I believe will be a very controversial book for years to come. What makes you travel that road over and over again?

Oh, I just remember it so well. I had finished the film for about a year. I had to go on— to finally get better, I had to go on IV, 'cause you can't go flying around with cameras and stuff with bags of antibiotics, right? So I was recovered. I said to my husband, I'm gonna pass the torch to someone else in advocacy. I'm done. I'm gonna have this really great science writing job at Stanford. Moving on. And then 2 weeks later, I get it. So it's the universe telling me something. I get a call from this rogue indie filmmaker that I had met once at a conference, and he did this conspiracy film called Under the 8 Ball that said that, you know, Lyme could be caused by a bioweapon. So, you know, I just knew him from the one meeting, and he's just calling me, and he's speeding away from Hamilton, Montana. Chris, I just talked to Willy Burgdorfer and he said Lyme is a bioweapon. What? What? I said, okay, well, you better send me a copy. I'll look at it. And, and so I guess, you know, there's only a few people that would believe that story. So he sent me express mail a DVD of this pretty much 3-hour CIA-style interview of Willy by him. And he is actually a very good interviewer. But Willy at that time was fairly disabled by Parkinson's. I mean, he was mentally with it, but he would have, you know, brain freezes or whatever. And so I listened to the whole thing and I go, oh my gosh, I believe him. I mean, when— his name is Tim Gray— and when he would get to the punchline, what was that thing that you discovered, you know, around Lyme, Connecticut? Do you believe that that was one of the biological weapons that were developed at your Rocky Mountain lab in the '50s. And he just goes dead silent for about almost 2 minutes. You know, he doesn't say, no, that's outrageous, or whatever. It's just dead silence. And you can just see the thoughts crossing across his face. I mean, you can just read his thoughts. And then he says, ja, like more in German than in English. And that last scene And then Tim Gray does this thing where he had two cameras on Willie and he turned off one, but the second camera was still going. And then to see the guilt wash over Willie's face, Willie being the, you know, the discoverer of Lyme disease, was just, you know, that's what sold me. And I said, oh my gosh, this is— this— I think this is true. And how can I walk away? I mean, because I I had, you know, this, I had all this experience. I had Lyme disease myself. I had seen the massive suffering across the US. I understood the politics of the disease and who the players were. And nobody else was gonna follow this story to the end. Like a researcher at university who was funded by the NIH, that researcher couldn't afford to do it. A journalist in this 24-hour news cycle where, you know, you need to crank out a story every week. They can't spend 5 years on an investigation. So anyways, I said, well, I'll just take baby steps. So the first baby step into the investigation was, I, you know, after I got the video, I, like a couple weeks later after I got the video confession, I learned from one of my FOIA friends that the Willy Bergdorfer papers that I requested 5 years before during the film had finally been posted to the National Archives. So I fly with the filmmaker Tim Gray to the National Archives and there's like 33 boxes there of Willy's files and he meticulously documented— it looked like every letter he had written for 34 years, you know, and every paper he drafted and all the slides. So we Over a few days, we went through it. And the weird thing, there was just like nothing on his discovery, the thing he was famous for, the pictures of the spirochetes. And in the part of the folder with letters from people he'd sent, there was like no Stier file. The guy that he worked with from Yale who gave him the blood samples were in the tick samples where he had discovered the Lyme disease. That was weird. It was— if your papers are collected by the NIH and posted in a historic archive, you'd think the thing that you were most famous for would be in there. So, but there's still plenty of things to look at. There was like one thing in the timeframe when Lyme was discovered, there was this mysterious organism called the Swiss agent. And so I thought, wow, that's interesting. And the Swiss agent wasn't in any of the US literature, you know, the medical literature. It's like, what is the Swiss agent? And why was it discovered in the Long Island ticks? So then that was the first baby step. Well, that's interesting. The only person who would know the answer to that question would be Willy. So I planned a trip to see Willy in December of that 2013. And I got a local cameraman to show up just to document it. So I did a couple-hour interview and he still was cagey, but he at least said, yeah, I, I was more than a decade in the biological weapons program helping them develop, you know, basically weaponized ticks. They asked me to try and mass-produce ticks in large quantities. I put various diseases in ticks. And, you know, he didn't say— he wouldn't say Lyme disease was a biological weapon outright. But it was obvious that he didn't so much discover it as recognize it as something that came from the lab. And he wasn't clear on who knew and who was involved in the cover-up, but that there was a cover-up based on that interview. And that— so then I knew I had a story. And I kept my job at Stanford but worked nights and weekends. And used all my vacation time and money to go to archives. Glamorous vacations in Wisconsin and Utah.

Yeah, well, yeah, and that's what you see in this community is people are desperate for information. They are spending their vacations flying to Lyme conferences and reading and researching and trying to problem solve, but you guys just took it to a whole nother level. For nearly 2 decades, Invita Medical Center has been leading the way with the latest in personalized treatment options designed for patients dealing with Lyme disease complex. At Invita Medical Center, they offer a team-style approach and the latest technology regarding treatment and testing at an unmatched radical love and care environment for their patients. Call to speak to one of the patient care coordinators today to learn why hundreds of patients choose Invita Medical Center each year. You can find them online at invita.com.

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So how long did it take you to write the book? Was that a 2-year process, or was that really years in the making because of your work with Under Our Skin? Or were those pretty distinct research times? Like, did your research from Under Our Skin transfer into Bitten, or was it really a separate project?

That was really a separate project, but I couldn't have done it so quickly if I hadn't known who had a basis in the research and the science and who's who. I would say the first 3 years was a crash course in analyzing Willy's papers, learning microbiology from the ground up. Pretty much since I had all of his research papers, I learned microbiology of ticks as he did. Learned about the organisms that way. So 3 years, and then I really didn't want to commit to a book. I was hoping I could do a long-form story. But then I, you know, I couldn't put all the information that needed to be communicated. Because, I mean, so many things were new information. First of all, that the scope of the biological weapons program is so much larger and vaster than anyone realizes. It was almost as big as the Manhattan Project and actually they were competing, you know, the Manhattan Project for nukes versus bug-borne weapons, which the people developing the bug-borne weapons felt was a much more humane way to kill people than a nuke.

I'd rather go quickly.

Yeah, chronic incapacity. These are people who haven't had chronic Lyme, so we could have a debate about that. So, so I had to communicate, like, the history of the Cold War and why bug-borne weapons made sense to them. It was a stealth weapon. You couldn't protect against the ticks or the lice or the mites that were infected or the spiders. And it would keep the area constantly dangerous. You didn't have the PR effect of body bags. Of this mysterious disease. And the people that ran, you know, in the enemy territory, the people that ran the factories or the power plants, you know, they would be there to tell you how to operate them after you took over that territory. Or in the case of Cuba, where I did find a witness who dropped poison ticks on Cuba, you know, they wanted to oust Fidel Castro and they could weaken the economy and hopefully get people to rise up against that horrible communist dictator. And that didn't happen.

I think I heard you say one time in an interview that through some of your research, they had said that if they could put diseases in a tick, it would cost 29 cents a death.

Yeah. So they— yeah, that was tularemia. And I don't know if that was aerosolized or in a tick, but they actually I think it was tularemia aerosolized. But tularemia, once you spread tularemia aerosolized, it can be breathed in by bunny rabbits, mice, and then ticks can spread it. So yeah, it was like they put prices per death on— some economist worked that out.

Of course, of course. You know, I wanna go to something you said. You used the term a heavy silence, and I'm talking about when you and Paul go together and are looking through boxes of paperwork. And this is just so typical of what we see in the Lyme community. Like, the longevity factor plays out on so many levels because you're not just researching and fighting for your life, you're advocating for yourself on all these different levels. Your finances are being completely hijacked, and you guys are still, in addition, advocating and trying to figure stuff out. And you describe this heavy silence and realizing that Paul needed to go back through treatment again.

Oh, yeah, that was, that was a horrible moment. That was, yeah, because we had spent the day, Ron Lindorff, who had collected Willie's files from his garage in Montana, then Ron came back to Orem, Utah, and had a giant pool table and he put plywood on it and just, you know, 20 boxes of Willie's files. So we went through them. And I made my husband be my document mule. And he would take pictures when I'd say, okay, Duplicate this, duplicate this, you know, and I have to read them. And then I'm just reading about all these horrible biological weapons experiments on animals and primates and humans at the 8 Ball at Fort Detrick. So it's, it's just I'm trying to keep my mind focused. But you realize what, what a large evil program it was. And that you might have one of these germs inside of you. And then, you know, my husband— I think a lot of men are like this. They're tough guys. They don't want to admit that they're sick, or your loved one, whether it be a child or a husband, won't want to admit that they're sick because they know you love them more than anyone else and you don't want to share that pain, you know. So my husband, I had seen the relapse symptoms developing over the previous weeks. And then I read these documents and, you know, then we, you know, we just have to talk about it. And he agrees that he has to go back into treatment. And anyone who's been through Lyme treatment realizes it's just— it's worse than the disease for a few weeks. So anyways, it was just hard. And so that after we had looked at the documents I had bribed him on the trip. I said, oh, I'll get one of those cute cabins at Sundance Resort. So we went there and Sundance Resort, which was founded by Robert Redford after he had done the Sundance film, which is about two desperados, you know, trying to escape the law enforcement. So we're in this little cabin and we're just sharing a half bottle of wine, listening to the peaceful creek below us in the cabin. And then all of a sudden there's this pounding and this SWAT team comes around the corner of the cabin and they're in full SWAT team gear with bulletproof vests and all in black and automatic weapons with their fingers on the trigger. And we're just freaked out anyways from what we've been looking at. We're thinking, are the men in black coming to arrest us? They said, oh, a skinhead has escaped from the Utah prison and have you seen them? So it was this weird surreal move. A moment where we're at this resort that was after— about a movie that was founded because of a movie about desperados. And then there, these guys with guns are after desperados. And are we the desperados? You know, so it was this weird moment. Well, you have to read about it in the book.

Well, it just brought to light there's so many the, again, the longevity, the intensity of the illness, the fact that it's impacting more than one person in a family. Just dealing with one person is hard. Dealing with multiple is a whole nother level. And I went through treatment in 2013, spent 5 years working my way up to being recovered. Um, and then in 2018, I actually was reinfected. And about a bullseye rash, I knew exactly what was happening. About a week later, um, started— it hit my neurological system like a lightning bolt. All of a sudden I had neuropathy in all four limbs again and couldn't think, wasn't sleeping. And when I read that part in your book where you said, um, you know, just the heavy silence, that's what I felt like. Like I called it going back into the darkness. Like you have to face so much when you're either coming out of remission or being reinfected because you know what you're in for. And that is, that is something that very few people really understand, the intensity of those years just kind of compounding on themselves. If you've been through it once or twice, or it just doesn't end and the rest of life doesn't get magically easier for you.

Right. I mean, I described it as into the abyss. And then you have a certain amount of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, from the whole process— the, the abuse of the drugs on you, the abuse of the medical system, the stigma of the disease, because everyone's got a brother-in-law who's an infectious disease doctor who says you don't have Lyme.

Yes, they do. Yeah. So, okay, I— how do you think— okay, actually, let me start over here. Um, on page 145 of your book, you talk about being exposed to a germ cocktail that was mass-produced at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, and it said theoretically few people would die, but it could put a significant percentage of a population out of commission. Making an invasion easier, and, and no city infrastructure would be harmed. Later, Henry Kissinger questioned how non-lethal these weapons could be, and wrote— Riley noted that they would be non-lethal only for someone with two nurses.

I love that quote.

Yes, I'm like, yes, because it takes, it takes someone taking care of you, and if you cannot afford two nurses, right away that's— I'm like, yeah, if you can afford two nurses, you might survive. That's where we're at.

Yeah, and as I researched the whole strategy, the Pentagon strategy for incapacitating microbes, incapacitating germs that could be sprayed from airplanes over whole cities, it's just like, as they described the symptoms that they would note from the human testing at Fort Detrick, I go, that sounds just like Lyme. You're sick for months to years. And so that, I mean, that's why I took a whole book. You have to really describe the history of the biological weapons program. You know, I went through the minutes of the Pentagon planners and really get into their heads about, you know, what they were thinking and then see the hundreds and hundreds of experiments as they tweaked the weapons. So they would be ready, you know, when they needed them to be deployed by, you know, enlisted men and the organisms that would be alive and ready to go and they would meet the Pentagon's objectives because sometimes they wanted fast-acting lethal weapons and sometimes they would want slow smoldering weapons and sometimes they would, you know, probably combine the insect weapons with anticropp weapons, which is what happened in Cuba.

So one of the things you said, you had a CIA document that talked about breeding ticks so that they could produce faster.

Yes, they did that with mosquitoes and ticks, the military, because they wanted to release large amounts— large numbers, not amounts— well, and then the enemy—

did I understand this correctly, that at some point, it used to be the disease just transferred from tick to person, but at some point in some of the genetic manipulations, the tick was able to transfer the disease directly to all their larva or all the little nymph ticks, so to where there doesn't have to be a person involved?

Is that? No. So, so they started out, Willie started out doing these experiments where he would try to put different diseases in ticks to see what would stick. Because ideally, if you were going to do a tick-borne weapon, you would want to drop a tick that was native in the region so that it wouldn't make people suspicious. Oh, this is, you know, this is a Colorado potato beetle in France, which is what happened, you know, during World War II. That doesn't make any sense. So they would get a native tick and then they would put non-native germs in it because because the local population there wouldn't have built up innate human immunity for that particular germ. So it'd make them sick in that local population. They couldn't test for it because they had never seen that germ in that region before. It would be puzzling. And then they'd just end up saying, oh, I guess it's just a bad flu season. So it started out that the military was trying to combine a bug with a germ or multiple germs. So Willy said he combined bacteria viruses, and the viruses would suppress a person's white blood cell count. So, you know, first line of diagnosis when you go into the doctor, oh, we'll take some blood. And if you have a lot of white blood cells, oh, you have a bacteria from a tick, you know. But if the virus suppresses the white blood cells, then wow, it's a head-scratcher. Well, you better come back later, you know. So that was the strategy for a while. But then the military realized it's just too hard to keep an insect or a bug alive and the thing that's in it and have it be deployed from a bomb from an airplane and have it sit on the shelf and be alive for a long time. So they found out ways to grow the microbes, some of them tick-borne, but some of them can be spread by ticks in large vats, like you'd brew beer with yeast and sugar compounds, or in the case of viruses and rickettsias, which is another tick-borne bacteria. They would grow them in live insect cells and mass produce them. And then they would freeze dry those microbes and powderize them. And the Navy did a bunch of tests where they would spray them from planes, from tugboats, from ocean buoys, from frogmen that would have sprayers. So it's just Yankee know-how applied to weapons of mass destruction. Wow.

I think that was one of my hugest takeaways in spending so many years in bed disabled, trying to figure stuff out. I'm reading your book and I really had not formed a con— this is way over my head. I've not formed a conclusion on, on a lot of it, but I was just astounded. That map you have on page 187 of the actual paper book, I just was astounded because I'm like, they've known. They being a very generalized broad term. I know there's a lot of different people involved, but I just thought, you know, okay, they've known since the '60s and they knew in the '80s and the '90s and the 2000s. And even when you compare what the Lyme community has gone through versus the AIDS community, Like those came out around the same time and yet so little progress has been made through Lyme. And I'm like, okay, that would make sense. It would make sense why we're not seeing massive progress if there's multiple layers of coverup happening.

So, oh, go ahead.

How do you think, you talk about the gold rush of medicine, and there's a lot of factors at play here. We have the NIH, the CDC, we have Big Pharma, we have a lot of different powerful platforms coming together. So how does the gold rush impact what we are seeing now as far as levels of care and treatment?

So you have, um, The— let's see. The biggest factor, I think, is that there isn't money in the cure for tick-borne diseases. The cure is basically early applied off-patent antibiotics. If you compare it to AIDS, which was discovered in about the same year, AIDS, you had to develop a new patentable antiviral. Drug. So there's patents, there's competitive production, you know, there's— you can charge a lot of money for a new drug. But with Lyme disease, it's off-patent antibiotics. I mean, at the time I was sick, you could go to Costco and buy a dose of doxycycline for $8. You know, it's gone up since then. So that's one factor. The other is the insurance companies. I talked to an exec at Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield They said they were about to go IPO and they were looking at what their most expensive diseases were and number 1 was AIDS and number 2 was Lyme disease. So they had incentives not to really recognize chronic Lyme disease if they wanted to improve their bottom line because then they wouldn't have to treat it. They could just deny, deny, deny. Then you have, if you look at it from the point of view is— and this is what I think. And I lay the groundwork for it in my book, is the government all of a sudden realized there was some sort of accident, I think, in the, in the early '70s, mid-'70s, and they thought, well, why don't we just say it can be cured with doxycycline? I think it was a rickettsia and/or a virus, and that'll at least at least push down the rickettsia, which can kill you, you know, in 14 days pretty much if you have a weakened immune system. And then we'll fast-track a Lyme disease vaccine. The Lyme spirochete, I believe, was just a hitchhiker, a complicator of these mixed tick-borne diseases that got out of the lab. And so to do that, they would have to keep a set of academic researchers with security clearances on a tight leash. And so they had to have security clearances because a lot of those tick-borne diseases are select agents. They're on the watch list for bioweapons. And so I think they kept the research pretty tightly controlled. And then those researchers at that time, there was a change in laws that said, if you slightly modify a live organism or a surface protein on the live organism such that it can be used in a, a vaccine or a test kit, you can earn royalties from it. So you can be a person in the CDC and earn up to $140,000 a year in royalties on that discovery. Or you can be a university researcher and get a cut and the university gets a cut too. So all of a sudden they discovered a dangerous new disease and it was, intellectual property and they were teamed up with big pharma and they had to keep it a secret rather than sharing scientific knowledge, which is the way the system worked before. So those three factors I think has slowed down the research on this disease. So it's the, the insurance companies want to deny, there's no profit in it for pharma, and then there, the research has been tightly controlled with people that the government can control.

Wow, it's just crazy because the impact— as I get to the end of the book, and you— I think you do a fantastic job of laying out the history and just documenting for an average person how— why we're at where we're at. And one of the things I just kept coming back to was, if this was the intent which it seems like it was, to disable large amounts of the community and it go undetected through not just bacteria, but toxins, fungus, all these, this mix. And no one has just one bacterial infection. They have this whole host of issues when they get infected. I thought, oh my gosh, they did a really good job. Dude, we are, you know, I spent 8 years being fully disabled and climbing into bed over and over again in the middle of the day because I couldn't hold my head up. So, okay, we have a bunch of questions from some listeners that I want to get to. But one final question, which was another big just epiphany in your book, was when you were talking about Willie's bullseye rash and his Um, I see if I get the story straight here. 1983, he was exposed to urine. He got urine splashed in his eye that was infected and then ended up from rabbits.

From rabbits.

You're— yeah, rabbit urine splashed in his eye and he ended up developing bullseye rashes under his arm, right? And then in 2014 you get to ask him, hey, your Parkinson's, do you think your Parkinson's is related to your Lyme infection? And even the fact that the doctors that he was working with were like, it could be Lyme, it might not be, probably isn't. I'm like, oh my gosh, he's in the same battle we've all been in.

Which is, I think, why he had so much empathy towards the end of his life to the patients. Much to the irritation of his employers, you know.

So as you ask him about this and he says, you know, you get through to— you, you tell his story and he says, ask the doctors. I was just like, oh my gosh, you are the doctor. Like, you— I mean, he's the research side, but there's no clear-cut answers. It's been— it's so confusing that that even the people who are knee-deep in it don't have clear-cut answers.

Right. And it's frustrating. And that's why I was just thrilled that the Republican Chris Smith of New Jersey read the book, waved it on Steve Spann during the middle of the defense appropriations debate, and said, you know, this is credible evidence, and we need to look into this. And that's what I feel like is these are sins of our Cold War fathers and we need to come clean with what they researched. Like, what did they release, where and when? And what vaccines did they work on? What cures did they work on for their soldiers? Because they would never develop a weapon without developing a vaccine for our side. And was there an accident and a coverup? You know, we need to know that. Which is cheaper, like, to send in one guy into a dark, dusty archive to pull this stuff out or to test every tick in every state? Because once you see the scope of the biological weapons testing program, you know, it was all over the U.S. And different germs were released in different people. And sure, yeah, like, everyone's baffled with the mystery of Lyme disease. It's because it's not just Lyme disease. It's all these other organisms that they tested, mixed, and matched. And, of course, it's confusing if you're following the rules of traditional natural epidemiology, but this is unnatural, and the vectors are men in uniforms in airplanes or trucks.

Yeah. One of the— you said the discernment between deliberate and natural infectious disease outbreaks I thought was so fascinating because if a disease does break out naturally, there's certain things that happen. And with the statistics and what has happened in the Lyme community, it's not natural.

Right. So the scientific paper written by Zig Denbach, who used to work at Dietrich, I think, is what are the clues for a deliberate epidemic? They are: 1, a highly unusual event with large number of casualties. Well, that's the 1968 outbreak of Babesia. A spotted fever that was undetectable and Lyme arthritis, right? Higher morbidity or mortality than is expected. Yeah. That's what brought the CDC out there, body bags. Uncommon disease. Yeah, we had Babesia. That was like the second case of cattle-borne Babesia in the US, fifth in the world. Lyme arthritis, new. Point source outbreak. So in the US in the late '60s, 1968, first outbreak was in Wisconsin area near Lake Michigan. Second one was around Long Island Sound, Lyme, Connecticut, and then multiple epidemics. Yeah, that's what we have now. And then certainly tip of the hat to Mary Beth Pfeiffer, who wrote about the impact of climate change on these diseases too. You can't discount that growth in population, rise in deer populations. Those are all complicating factors that you need to add now to the secret history of bioweapons.

Yep, and add the fact that we're in a for-profit medical system.

Right, where they profit from chronically ill people and denying diseases.

Yeah.

So what—

one of the questions that some of our listeners had were, what are you hoping is going to come from the book? What are some of your hopes and aspirations or primary goals for the years moving forward? What do you hope is going to come from what you've laid out?

Well, I sort of, in the last chapter, I lay out my hopes is I hope I inspire some microbiologists, some entomologists to really do genetic sequencing and figuring out and figure out what's in these ticks. You know, I've been told by one scientist on Plum Island, this thing that got out has no name, you know? So we need to start from scratch and genetically sequence all the pathogens in the tick and know, are there new frankengerms we haven't identified? The other thing is I hope that epidemiologists, the people that study the spread of disease, will be able to access the records of what was released when by the military so we can work backwards and find out, you know, whatever was released 50 years ago is certainly genetically morphed now, but at least if we know its origins, we have a better idea on how to treat it. I hope that public health people and first-line physicians get over the obsession with Lyme disease and say it's Lyme disease plus these co-infections that are creating really complicated clinical pictures of patients. And it's— there's no one-size-fits-all cure. We just need a massive education program with our frontline general physicians to identify these diseases. I mean, I walk around Stanford and I say, oh yeah, I've had Lyme and babesiosis, and I get this blank stare. I mean, most of them don't know what babesiosis is, so we need better education.

How long do you— okay, do you think we're headed in the right direction for that to be happening? And how long before our front line— because so when I got infected in 2018, reinfected, I'm years into this, I know exactly what's going on, and I was told there's You can't have Lyme disease because there's no Lyme disease in Colorado. And it— I was— I had so much trauma and PTSD from just the medical side of having to go back in and advocate for myself all over again, shelling out thousands of dollars to get told this was all in my head. And I'm like, what? So are we headed in the right direction in educating our frontline? And how many years do you think it's going to be before the front line of even family physicians and primary caregivers understand what they're looking for or are released from the dogma of the past?

You know, I think about when I released the book on May 14th, I went to the tip of Long Island, Riverhead, which is really ground zero for the release. That was my first talk. And Paul, my husband, listened to the talks and he goes, "Oh my gosh, nothing has changed in 10 years." I— but since that release of the book, a couple things happened. You know, the Lyme Working Group's report has come out. CDC has softened their stance on the disease, and they're admitting, yeah, this tick-borne disease thing is out of control. So that's a first step. So I feel like we're getting to a tipping point right now. And certainly the congressional investigation is a hopeful sign because just like one whistleblower that is brave enough to come forward and say, yeah, it really happened. I think that would change a lot of minds, you know, in front of Congress with their hand on the Bible. And then people would go back and read my book and go, oh yeah, now it makes sense. But so I feel like we're getting close to a tipping point, but I just can't predict. I mean, Yeah, it's a really weird political time right now.

It is. And I like— you use the term disinformation war, um, when you were talking about the 2006 IDSA guidelines where they basically discredited Lyme patients and their physicians and started calling them Lyme loonies or it's all in your head. And the way you said that, the discern, um, disinformation war, I'm like, they did a really good job on that too. Because here I was, 2018, knew exactly what was happening, had pictures of the bullseye rash, and was being told that's not Lyme.

Yeah, yeah, I know. So I, I mean, just sometimes it's jaw-dropping, the misinformation, disinformation. So I, I don't know. That's why I'm still, still working on this. Uh, it's just interesting from a sociological point of view. How do you change people's minds? I mean, it's, it's like one of the hardest questions I always get when I'm talking now for the book is, but why wouldn't the doctors treat you? You were so obviously sick. Why won't they treat you? Well, it's really hard. Well, they're afraid of losing their medical licenses. They're afraid of being called believers in those conspiracy patients about Lyme disease. Oh, they use that bad lab. You know?

Yes.

Yes. So the academic medical institution is sort of driven by peer review, what your peers think of you. So in a way, it's operating on middle school politics. Yeah. So there's a lot of forces against them believing patients. So it is also good that patients have a voice now, that the cures are getting good enough where now they can fight back. And that's what happened in the AIDS movement too.

Yeah.

Wow.

Okay, so another question as we approach the end of our hour. What is the best outcome with bioengineering moving forward? Should the US discontinue this, and would that put us behind in our ability for national defense?

Well, I think that's— I hope that one big takeaway in the book is that we need to learn from history, and this has been a secret history. And what my book shows is there was a bunch of genetic engineering going on crude at first, more sophisticated towards the end of the bioweapons program. And it got out of hand. And one thing is they really needed bioethics when they were making these decisions on human experimentation, on modifying, you know, releasing, for example, hundreds of thousands of lone star ticks on the Atlantic bird flyway. Why didn't someone say that is a really bad idea? 'Cause now, like 2 years after they did these open-air tests with hundreds of thousands of Lone Stars, now the Lone Stars, like 2 years later, they were on Long Island and then they're taking over Long Island and now they're creeping, crawling, riding on the backs of birds up through Canada. So, you know, we need some sort of bioethics structure when we do these experiments. So, I mean, we can learn from this history book that I published, the people making these decisions now. Should we genetically modify mosquitoes? Well, let's talk about that.

Yeah. What do you think Lyme disease— how do you think history is going to look back on Lyme disease in the year 2040?

Well, I think—

22 years from now, 21 years from now.

I just think they'll think it's the biggest public health disaster ever. I mean, as an informed person who spent about 15 years diving into the history, the politics, the bad tests, it's a huge history, a huge blight on medical history, and I hope we can learn from it.

Yeah. Chris, where are you getting your inspiration from? Where do you get your energy from to do what you've been doing?

I don't know. I just— when I did the film, I saw a lot of suffering and that really moved me and I just want to stop the needless suffering. Let's get good tests out there. Let's remove the stigma. Let's listen to the patients. So I think— I feel like if I can do that before I die, it would have been a life well lived.

Well, I just want to thank you for your time and your energy and your passion and your drive and the money you've invested, and both to you and Paul. And I— one of the other big takeaways from your book was closer to the end when you go back to see the physician who denied you care. And tell us the story of what he said to you, because you standing you taking a stand inspired him to take a stand. Can you tell us about that moment?

Yeah, he just— he said, you know, he was— he's a survivor in a very competitive academic medical institution, and his department's policy at the time, and I believe it's at least a year ago, is same policy, is they don't treat chronic Lyme patients there. They believe the IDSA, Infectious Diseases Party line, that chronic Lyme doesn't exist. It's hypochondria or autoimmune disease. So, you know, he just works on another disease, chronic fatigue, and he said, you know, "Your bravery in your questioning authority inspired me to keep going with my work with chronic fatigue." So, and he gave me a big old hug. So that was nice.

I thought that was just so powerful because it showed both sides that, It sometimes feels like our fight is against the physicians, but it's not. They're in their own fights to protect themselves, to protect their practices. Everyone is coming at this from so many different angles, but I just thought, you know what, when you stand up against a regime, an establishment, a dogma of any kind, you simultaneously empower the people around you to do the same. And so I mean, you have done this on little levels, like, in ways, but you've also done this on huge levels. And I just want to thank you for— I think you're just going to have a huge impact on this community.

Well, thanks so much. And keep up the good fight on your end too. Yeah.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks.

Hey guys, I wanna let you know about a book I wrote called Little Bite, Big Trouble, and I'm gonna read a review that recently came in. This is from Carolyn, and she says, thank you so much for writing your book. It has become the means by which I have explained Lyme to my 4-year-olds. They ask for it to be read as a bedtime story over and over again and love that the mama birdie does yoga and juicing like their mommy. I can't thank you enough for writing this book. It has helped my family so much. You can find it today at Amazon.com. Little Bite, Big Trouble. Disease is contrary to life. Therefore, wherever disease exists, life must also fight to exist.

Good job fighting, Lyme fighters. Keep it up. We'll see you next time. LymeVoice contains general information about medical conditions and treatments. The information is not advice and should not be treated as such. Okay, Lincoln? Okay. The medical information on LionVoice is provided as is without any representations, warranties, expressed or implied. Okay?

Okay.

LionVoice makes no representations or warranties in relation to the medical information on this podcast. You must not rely on the information on this podcast as an alternative to medical advice from your doctor or other professional health healthcare provider. If you have any specific questions about your medical matter, you should consult your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. And for you, you consult your parents, okay?

Okay.

If you think you may be suffering from, from any medical condition, you should seek immediate medical attention. You should never delay seeking medical advice, disregard medical advice, or discontinue medical treatment because of information on this podcast. Got it, Lincoln?

Got it.