“I’m the author of “BITTEN: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons,” and I’d like to discuss some of the points you raised in your article in “The Conversation.”
An open letter to Dr. Telford from Kris Newby:
I’m the author of “BITTEN: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons,” and I’d like to discuss some of the points you raised in your article in “The Conversation.”
First, I heartily agree that the Lyme bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, would be an “unlikely weapon.” This organism reproduces very slowly and it can’t be mass produced in large volumes like other tick-borne agents, such as Tularemia. The evidence laid out in BITTEN leads us to believe that a different organism, likely a rickettsia-viral hybrid, was made more virulent by military scientists and that Willy was asked to cover it up. As with this article, the Lyme bacterium, first described in a journal in 1982, appears to be a convenient misdirection to what the military doesn’t want us to see.