Transcript: Kris Newby on the Cold War Bioweapon Program Behind Lyme Disease

Marty Bent [0:01] Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me.

Kris Newby [0:04] Hi Marty, thanks for inviting me on.

Marty Bent [0:06] Well, I'm very excited to do this for the audience out there who may not know sitting down with Chris Newby, who's an award winning science writer, investigative journalist and senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary under our skin. She also wrote a book called bitten the secret history of Lyme disease and biological weapons. in 2019, he won three awards for that book, but I think most importantly, you're delving into this particular line of investigative reporting started because. You and your husband were bitten by ticks. So Martha's vineyard in 2002 and basically went on a wild goose chase to figure out what happened to you. And through that process, sort of went bankrupt and went down this, this rabbit hole.

Marty Bent ⋮ So this is a beat you've been covering for over two decades now at this point. And as I was saying before I hit record, it's a very, uh, very top of mind for many people here in the US as ticks seem to be exploding in population and diseases like Lyme and Alpha Gal begin to pop up all over the place.

Kris Newby [1:18] Yeah, never, I was a tech writer in Silicon Valley and I have engineer, two engineering degrees and I never in a million years imagined that I would be on the tick beat for the rest of my life. But what happened to our family was so devastating and after I figured out what was wrong and we both got back, my husband and I both got back on our feet, I said, I never want this to happen to another family again, so. I'm doing everything I can to educate people to get fast treatment.

Marty Bent [1:54] Is that the most important thing, getting on top of it as quickly as possible?

Kris Newby [2:00] Yeah, if you pulled out an engorged tick and went on a couple weeks of doxycycline, you would go on with your life and never think about it again. the main thing about ticks is they can inject you with up to 20 tick-borne diseases. Some are deadly and the saliva of the tick suppresses your immune system and whatever's in the tick can punk your immune system and if you don't get on it right away, you could be sick for the rest of your life. So that's what I've decided to dedicate the rest of my life to is to prevent that.

Marty Bent [2:44] Well, I think, before we jump in, jump into the more topical questions that are on people's minds as it pertains to Alpha Gal, these, these boxes that people have been talking about and Lyme, Lyme vaccines that may be hitting the market this summer. think getting into the backstory and the heat, the heart of Bitten, the book that you wrote about, the history of governments experimenting with this and, its relation to. the Cold War, I think maybe starting there, particularly with Willie Bergdorfer and his story and how he came to discover lung disease.

Kris Newby [3:26] Yeah, so Bitten is half my medical memoir, and then the other half is about this Swiss scientist, zoologist, who came over here in 1951 to be in the bioweapons program. And his particular role was to weaponize fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes so that we could drop them on our enemies during the Cold War. So this was not known until I sat down with him and got a bunch of his files that had been hidden in his garage. But it's sort of shocking, but I... I believe that a lot of our tick-borne disease problems have been worsened in part because of those irresponsible government experiments. And part of what I would like is more ethical oversight with biomedical experiments that the government is conducting.

Marty Bent [4:30] I mean, that's it's been a big topic this decade, obviously with gain of function research and theories of that contributing to COVID-19 development and proliferation. And I think I've been privy to the Plum Island theories that have been around for a while. And I think I would agree with you. I would like more transparency and insights into whether or not our government has actively been experimenting. with us both on the tick-borne diseases side and then the viruses side of things with things like COVID. And it is insane to think that our government could do something like this in a lab, unleash it on the public, either knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, and have it explode to a point where I think this year specifically, people are legitimately fearful to go outside to play in the woods because they don't want to get Lyme's disease or... or AlphaGaul.

Kris Newby [5:31] Yeah, and a lot of people say to me, well, the tick release has happened 40, 50 years ago. What does it matter? And it does because Willie Bergdorfer and his little lab in Rocky Mountain in Hamilton, Montana, the Rocky Mountain Labs run by the NIH was. putting all sorts of horrible diseases in the ticks, in the fleas, in the mosquitoes. And our current surveillance for how tick diseases are spreading is very flawed. And it would really help researchers and save research dollars to know what diseases were engineered and where were they released. For example, I mean, the first cases of Lyme were in Northern Wisconsin. and why did they start there? Well, the University of Wisconsin at Madison was doing all sorts of bioweapons experiments and a lot of times widows would sell their farms to the bioweapons, I mean the... the head of that program in Wisconsin and they would conduct open air experiments. So, I mean, it would help everyone to know what was released where and when.

Marty Bent [6:53] Yeah, well, you spent a lot of time with Willie before his death in 2014 talking about this, I believe, in my research. I haven't been able to read the full book yet, but did the best I could to get as much as possible. I think at one point you say, he said critically that he didn't tell you everything about the origins of Lyme disease and the narrative that the government and media was putting out there is completely contradictory to reality.

Kris Newby [7:23] Yeah, yeah, so I did a series of interviews with him. The first interview was for the documentary Under Her Skin, where he said we were we were there setting up lights and cameras with Andy Wilson, the very talented director and producer who I tagged along with for the five years it took to get that out. And he was setting up lights for about 45 minutes and all of sudden there's a boom, boom, boom on the front door of Willie's house. We couldn't get anyone in the government, the CDC or the NIH to go on camera about Lyme disease, like what it is and why it's so hard to diagnose, treat and cure.

Kris Newby ⋮ And it turns out to be a head scientist at... the Rocky Mountain Lab, was just like two and a half blocks away from Willie's house. And he says, I've been told to sit in on this interview. And the director was just appalled. Like, you can't do that. Willie's retired. He's a private citizen. And it was a very tense confrontational interchange. And I was afraid. the labs would shut us down, anyways, the scientists left. We went on with the interview and that during the interview, Willie said some things that no one in the government had ever said, which is, Yeah, we know that Lyme disease can be chronic, affect the nervous system very seriously, and it's worse for kids who get it, who have developing neurological systems.

Kris Newby ⋮ And then we were shutting down the lights. This was a very long interview. And then he had a little sly smile. He says, I didn't tell you everything. that was his interview was like.

Kris Newby [9:08] That alone was shocking because it was the first time anyone at NIH had admitted that Lyme could go on to be chronic. a lot of them still deny that. But it was like a nagging worry of mine, but we had to get the film out. We'd been filming for three years. and the editing was really involved. so anyways, after the film, I said, well, I'm done with Lyme disease. I was doing the film when I was recovering, so I was sick half the time. And I told my husband, I'm done. I'm going to go on with my life. I got a really good job in the Stanford Med School writing science stuff.

Kris Newby ⋮ And then Two weeks after that, I went to a Texas birthday party. It was my husband's family. I didn't know anybody there, so I was sitting around the kitchen table talking to this other guy who wasn't one of the few people who wasn't part of the family, and he was an old, grisly guy, and he was into his cups. And I said, so what did you do before you retired? And he says, I worked for the company, was CIA black ops. So was just like, of all the gin joints in all the world. And then he went on to talk about like the horrible things he did in Vietnam, because he had a guilty conscience and his wife had just left him.

Kris Newby ⋮ And then at the very end of this, these stories that had all of us at the table with wide eyes, like dropping decapitated skulls on the Viet Cong. no war crimes. He said, well, the weirdest thing I'd ever done was drop infected ticks on the Cuban sugar cane workers. For it was Operation Mongoose for Colonel Lansdale, who was dirty ops. So

Kris Newby [11:20] All of sudden, this must be a movie or something. I can't believe this is happening to me because there's no way this guy could have known. I just spent five years investigating the TIC weaponization program for which there was no public information of us ever doing bio weapons operations in foreign nations. Anyways, then I, that's when I said, well, I can't walk away from this story. No one else is gonna wanna do it. It's too hot to handle. So I did it and I started the research process, which was long. I can get into it, but it might be a diversion. It's in the book. So part of the book is me, how I finally extracted all the information and the confirmation of the Cuban tick drop. ended up coming out a couple of years later in the JFK assassination files of all places because that all those operations were part of wanting to dethrone Castro, the communist leader of Cuba.

Marty Bent [12:31] OK, now I have many questions.

Kris Newby [12:33] Okay, fire away.

Marty Bent [12:35] Well, I guess the order of operations the question is like why ticks what makes ticks good? agents to spread this these types of diseases Did they did they know? the long-term ramifications of something like a line or alpha-gal when they were when they were weaponizing these ticks and Did they understand the potential for them to break containment? Was this truly targeted at? the Cuban regime over there, even more nefarious sort of intent behind it, making people more broadly affected by the spread of these diseases and therefore more dependent on the system to a certain degree.

Kris Newby [13:24] So let's start out why. First of all, you have to frame it in history. This was the Cold War. We would do anything to fight the communists. It was an existential threat. And that's where stuff like MK Ultra came about. New, more lethal chemical weapons, which is what I talk about in my next book. But let me just read the Army's description of why they thought ticks were a good idea. So I pulled this out. OK. In 1953, The Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland established a program to study the use of arthropods, those are ticks, fleas, and mosquitoes, for spreading anti-personnel bio-weapons agents.

Kris Newby ⋮ The advantage of arthropods as bio-weapons carriers are these. They inject the agent directly into the body so that a mask is no protection to a soldier, and they will remain alive for some time, keeping an area constantly dangerous. So what it did was it would disable soldiers and everyone around them. And then it would tie up medical resources. And Willie, at that time in ticks, was mixing multiple diseases. So he specifically was mixing, let's see, Rocky Mountain spotted fever with Colorado tick fever virus.

Kris Newby [14:57] It's not clear if he was able to do that, but if you were to drop something like that in an area that you wanted to eventually invade, there would be no fingerprints on the ticks. It would just be a hard to solve crime. And then everybody would get sick, and then it would be easy for ground forces to go in and take over. And by the way, you wouldn't destroy the infrastructure like you would with a... a nuclear bomb. So some people called it by weapons, poor man's nuke. had some arm, I had a report from some army bean counters said tick-borne tularemia, which is still on the select agent list. You could kill a person for a dollar 33.

Marty Bent [15:50] Pretty cheap.

Kris Newby [15:52] Yeah, I know. That's what I mean about we need some sort of bio-ethical overview if this kind of stuff makes sense because, you release a bunch of ticks on an enemy city or area and then, well, what about the soldiers who go in? There's no way to tell the ticks, okay, you can only bite Soviets.

Marty Bent [16:15] Yeah, well, and that, mean, you have the chart here too. On your side, I'll pull it up, like, going back to the question of like, could they foresee the expansion and proliferation of these tick populations throughout time? Like if you're dropping it somewhere, you have the Lyme disease numbers over time here in this GIF. And as you can see, it's spreading pretty rapidly. And I think that's one thing. That is obvious this year specifically as you have a bunch of people going on hikes and running farms, whatever it may be, and highlighting that the number of ticks that they're encountering is far beyond what they've ever seen historically.

Marty Bent ⋮ And so they're wondering, why is this? it? or ticks just naturally invasive species that will have these population explosions if there aren't natural predators in the area that you're dropping them. Is there some accelerated attempt to artificially increase their populations? And I think maybe that gets into the question of these boxes that people are talking about. Is this a Frankenstein that the government has lost control of? I think that's what many people are worried about.

Kris Newby [17:35] Well, there's multiple components to that question. First of all, Willie did try to get ticks to produce faster so they could just have tick boxes ready to go. But he said he was not able to do that. So why are ticks exploding right now? On the face of it, legitimate scientists will say, well, Climate change, some places that have bad winters, the ticks, certain percentage of the ticks would get killed off and that would keep the population down. Another thing is housing is proliferating into tick habitats so people are exposed to it more. Then the other thing is that, Deers are cute and we're less, we're more reluctant not to shoot them and kill them.

Kris Newby ⋮ then ticks are where, deer are where ticks overwinter and breed and lay their 3000 eggs. So that's safe haven for legitimate scientists. I would suggest that the military, intervention and tick releases, uncontrolled tick releases, are part of the problem. And you could see on that chart, and the USA Today has the newer numbers on their chart from the weekend, but somehow Lyme disease started spreading in an aggressive way around the 70s. And no one's asking why. So there are two things that could be going on there. One is Wheely told me when he was sent out to investigate what was happening with the Lyme sickness, he said it wasn't just the Lyme bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi, named after him.

Kris Newby ⋮ There was another organism that was mixed in the ticks. And he suggested it was a rickettsia like Rockyman had spotted fever.

Kris Newby [20:00] the most dangerous tick-borne bacteria in the US. it was in the drafts of his original article on the discovery, but somehow between the handwritten draft that I got a copy of and what published in Science Magazine, the... discussion about a second rickettsia germ that may or may not have been weaponized because they were working on that. have documents on that. He was asked to cover it up. So really the question is, you know, if you name a disease that people get Lyme disease, is it really two different organisms that made people so quick? Could have been a virus too, because they were experimenting with viruses too.

Kris Newby ⋮ So. That's one factor is, was there a military open air experiment there? And can we get records for that? The other thing that happened, which is related to AlphaGal, is in the late 60s, this young, ambitious bug scientist, Daniel Sonenschein, who was at Old Dominion College and they wanted to be at real university. So Daniel somehow got some military contracts and started doing tick experiments because at that time they were looking for a tick that would survive. Russian winters and that they can inject with various things. So he was reporting to the Army in the Atomic Energy Commission. And what happened is in this set of experiments, it was near Norfolk, Virginia, which is on the Atlantic Bird Flyway.

Kris Newby ⋮ You can probably pull up a picture of that on my website.

Kris Newby [21:51] what he did was he ordered some pregnant ticks, they're called Gravid ticks from Willie at Rocky Mountain Labs and he had a lot of them and he made them radioactive. He injected the pregnant ticks with a radioactive fluid so when they laid their 3000 eggs all the ticks that were born would be radioactive. Why would he do that? so he could track their spread over months to years because the military would need to know if I dropped poison ticks on an enemy how long it would take to infect this city or whatever it was. So what he did was he went out to a couple swampy lots marked off meter grids put a thousand ticks in each grid of the radioactive ticks and then he'd go out with his lackey students every month collect the ticks in grid, each grid, see how many of the radioactive ticks were there, then he'd go and put them back.

Kris Newby ⋮ If there were new ticks in the grid, he would paint them with fluorescent paint, and that way he could track them. He also tracked how many of them, the bird migrations, because they'd want to know, some of the ticks would go on the birds. what one of his papers said is it would take five days for a tick to go from, coastal Virginia up to Long Island, New York. So like a year or two after his Virginia experiments, all of a sudden the ticks that he was experimenting with. there were the Lone Star ticks, the ticks that carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the ticks that spread alpha-gal allergy.

Kris Newby ⋮ Before those experiments, that tick was only native south of the Mason-Dixon line. When he put it to the north in Virginia on the bird flyway, all of a sudden, these ticks were starting to get established in Long Island.

Kris Newby [23:58] All of sudden there was an outbreak of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and people were dying. Yeah, that's the list of radioactive ticks that he released. And those are the only releases that were published. There could be more. So what's wrong with that? He's taking, first of all, Lone Star ticks are very aggressive and they were the only tick in North America that had that. eyes on their shoulders. So they not only just sense carbon dioxide on a blade of grass like the deer ticks did, but they would actively stalk prey because they could sort of see them and smell them. so they swarm and they can just spread more diseases.

Kris Newby ⋮ Then the other thing is they carry spotted fever the most deadly bacterium tick-borne bacterium in the US and then the alpha-gal and Nobody has a good explanation as to how alpha-gal all of a sudden Started being a real thing we noticed it in the 80s. So I've never been able to determine if it's part of the bioweapons program or what. But I should explain what alpha-gal is, because I haven't done that yet.

Marty Bent [25:24] Yes, please, because as somebody who loves red meat, it scares the hell out of me.

Kris Newby [25:29] Yeah, it's horrible. Okay, so in the bite of a lone star tick transmits a protein, alpha-gal, that starts circulating in your blood. It's an allergen and it creates a condition where every time you eat red meat, you get an allergic reaction. But it's not like a wasp's thing. You'll wake up two to six hours later in the middle of the night and you might be vomiting, nauseous, hives. You might even go into anaphylactic shock. And it isn't just a one-time deal. Usually it happens on the second bite of a Lone Star tick. It can be a lifelong allergy. I don't think that'll be, it'll be that way forever, but right now it's just people are waking up to it like, what?

Kris Newby ⋮ And it takes people a long time to get diagnosed. And okay, so then let's say you get diagnosed with alpha-gal allergy. It's almost impossible to avoid meat products right now. They're in the gelatin capsules in your vitamins or your medications. All of a sudden you have to tell your pharmacy, I can't have any medications with a bovine based capsule. Or let's say you go to your Jersey subs and say, I want a turkey sandwich because bird meat doesn't seem to be that bad. You have to tell them, OK, do not cut the turkey where you cut the ham or the beef sandwich. Some people are so allergic, they can't even go to a Texas barbecue without having respiratory issues.

Kris Newby ⋮ So, it's serious. And not much money is being spent on research about what to do.

Marty Bent [27:28] very serious. Yeah, I've heard acupuncture works or SAT. As we've been talking about it more people have been responding with that. And that's like to your point, I think you sort of hedge like this could be a lifelong allergen, but you don't think that'll be the way. That'll be the case forever. And that's like we've been covering this for a few months now. That's just becoming more prominent. And that's like one of the first.

Kris Newby [27:36] Hmm.

Marty Bent [27:59] Responses will get is the will actually you can treat this and it's like well actually we shouldn't have to treat this like is this really a a government bioweapons program that broke containment and is having a Very drastic negative effect on hundreds of thousands of Americans now At this point and if so, are these people going to be held accountable? And what does it say about our government and what they'll do? to their own populace and maybe for being Generous, what they'll do to to our enemies that that can break containment and begin to affect the populace. it's insane that we Have a government that is actively Doing things like this and the the sphere of bio weapons and biologic biological warfare and like I said, I think covid it's becoming clear to me at least that the nih the wuhan lab and Fort Detrick experimentation with gain of function.

Marty Bent ⋮ They're obviously doing this stuff and I think it is sensible to question number one, why and number two, how do we make them stop if we can?

Kris Newby [29:11] I know there have there has been some positive movement under Kennedy to get the gain of function experimentation under control, but there's just so much money in it right now. I don't know if they'll win. Like what I did with Lyme disease to try and figure out why it's such a disaster zone for people trying to get diagnosed and treated. It's because of, first of all, ticks are intricately tied to the bioweapons program now and the tick-borne diseases. So a lot of those research grants require a security clearance. So if you're a smart researcher in arthropods or tick-borne diseases, you'll get a security clearance. And then all of a sudden, that's a competitive advantage to other researchers who you know, they're in an obscure field and they might not get be able to get funding.

Kris Newby ⋮ But if you have a security clearance, less competition for those grants. And you're also like a tick tapping into the very, large biosecurity budget. You know, that's why the whole Wuhan lab people and university, the state, the North Carolina University are fighting it because, man, that was easy money.

Marty Bent [30:38] Well, I mean, you highlighted this as one of the things to talk about the money printing machine. How do you realign incentives to make sure this isn't the case? Because it seems like it's a case of, I can produce not only career, I can de-risk career risk by working in this very, very niche, but considered highly important field by the government and they will throw insane amounts of money at it. It's hard to get people to actively work towards making it so their career isn't as stable as they thought it was previously.

Kris Newby [31:23] Yeah, and because of the security clearance requirement, I feel like the tick-borne diseases don't have the A-team of researchers with bright ideas and a deeper knowledge of genetics and genetic manipulation. The old researchers have circled their wagons around Lyme disease. You look at a new fellowship student, they just got their PhD and they need to work under someone in a lab. Well, the security clearance could take a year, maybe more now. Some of those tick-borne pathogens are bio level three, especially the rickettsals. So they can't risk their career on. just twiddling their thumbs for a year before they get clearances. So that's why we have a lot of really, really old people.

Kris Newby ⋮ So what I did was I went through the last 20 years of grants at the NIH under Fauci. And I found out that a huge percentage of the Lyme disease and tick-borne disease grants went to internal NIH projects. So those are people who aren't necessarily eager. to sequence these germs and say, yeah, NIH at that time during the Cold War, we were trying to solve tick-borne diseases, make people healthier, but we were also trying to create germs of mass destruction. So that would be career suicide in NIH to take all that money that Congress said we needed to spend on breakthroughs for Lyme disease. And same with the people at the universities.

Kris Newby ⋮ They don't want to do that anyways because NIH is where they get all their funding.

Marty Bent [33:11] Yeah, seems like Fauci and NIH are at the core of the problems here, the moral hazard that exists in the realm of medical research and bio weapons.

Kris Newby [33:23] Right. when Lyme was discovered and when Fauci moved into the number two spot at NIAID, that's the infectious diseases group in NIH, that's when the laws changed and the Bayh-Dole Act passed so that all of a sudden scientists and the universities and the agencies like CDC and NIH could make discoveries and then they could become business partners with pharma. So When Lyme disease happened, all these guys looked, like on the carpet baggers, they looked at the microscope at this spirochete and they patented the proteins on the surface. then they could team up with pharma and say, if anybody uses this genetic sequence of proteins on the surface of this bacteria that in a vaccine or a test kit, I get a cut of the profits.

Kris Newby ⋮ So immediately Pharma teamed up with these researchers and they realized, well, the vaccines are annual moneymakers. People have to go in to get a Lyme vaccine every month or every year versus the cure, which is just at the time I started my film, was $10 of doxycycline covered by insurance. So it's like, no, we're going to do the vaccine. They had to bolster the myth that... two pills of doxy cure the disease and then they go on and have chronic diseases and then we could sell more vaccines and we could sell the anti-inflammatory drugs and the antidepressants to treat the symptoms of chronic Lyme. And then meantime, people at the CDC or the NIH, they could get a cut from all these drugs and vaccines.

Kris Newby ⋮ And so they could.

Kris Newby [35:23] more than double their salary, their government salary. But from a scientific point of view, they corrupted the foundational science because pharma could say, that discovery you made on Lyme disease that might cure people, that's intellectual property and that's secret. And so then scientists weren't going to conferences and sharing information because most initial discoveries are wrong in science and then it takes multiple brains to get it back on track and add value to the discoveries.

Marty Bent [36:03] Yeah, I mean, as pertains to the vaccine, we're getting the is this the first line vaccines coming out the summer from from Pfizer or the third?

Kris Newby [36:13] No, it's hard. There were two other vaccines around 1990, and a lot of scientists were on contract with the vaccine manufacturer. So there's some belief that they weren't telling the truth about what they understood about the disease. And I don't want to get in it here, but read Pam Weintraub's book, Cure Unknown. And she was there in the vaccine hearings. No, she has the receipts for who was paid off. So that's the best book to read on that.

Marty Bent [36:47] Okay, we'll bring it back to the tick boxes. I'm sure you've seen the video.

Kris Newby [36:51] Okay, the boxes. Yeah, of course, my email boxes are flooded. My text with, my gosh, someone's dropping boxes of ticks on Missouri farmers lots. And of course, I feel bad because I might be responsible for those rumors on in some part, but I followed up. I traced it to the original rumor, which was from a holistic doctor. I don't know what that means from Iowa. Her name is Sarah Outlaw. And I called her and she goes, well, yeah, actually that report of a ticks box on a farm was secondhand from a colleague from Missouri. And she said she heard it from an Amish farmer. So there's only one box secondhand.

Kris Newby ⋮ So that's where that. rumor came from and she was surprised that she got about a million hits. She's also a health and wellness influencer. And so I was going, my gosh, I want to do this site research project to see if this is true or not. But luckily, a senior reporter at Snopes, a fact checking group, his name is Jordan Lyles. He went and called about 100 Missouri officials and no one in Missouri has heard about this rumor from the farmers that might report it or whatever. So.

Kris Newby [38:31] I think Jordan, I talked with him briefly this weekend and he said, no new news. And we called hundreds of officials. This has not been confirmed. So that said, I would say that dropping ticks on the farms would. I mean, there's rumors that, Pfizer did it to sell their vaccines. My point of view is the tick problem in the US is already completely out of control because of these, the factors I mentioned earlier. And it's just now we're waking up to how big the problem is because the range of the ticks is slowly increasing from ground zero, which was Lime, Connecticut and Long Island.

Marty Bent [39:22] Well, how do you, to that point, I mean, regardless if the government or some big pharma company is dropping techs, I think to your point, it's been spreading slowly but surely over time. How do you combat it? How do you slow the growth or like decrease the tech populations? Do we just need to have? guinea fowl and chickens roaming across grasslands and the affected areas for a number of years. Is this a reversible problem or is this something that we're going to have to live with in perpetuity?

Kris Newby [39:56] Well, climate change is part of the problem, but my best friend just bought a farm in Wisconsin and, you know, because the government hasn't acknowledged that it's really a countrywide problem now and we need to think big, use AI for strategies, it's up to the individuals now. So, I mean, the thing, there's bait boxes. So you buy boxes with anti-tick, medicine and for mice and you you know it's got nice warm nesting box for the mice and then they get this anti-tick medicine on them when they go in it. There are you can collect ticks on your yard with these co2 boxes you can make your own or i don't know if anyone buys them i sort of suspect that maybe this tick box rumor started from the co2 collection boxes But dry ice, put dry ice and they can go in there because they're attracted to the CO2 that your body emits or any mammal.

Kris Newby ⋮ And then guinea fowl or chickens, that helps. You build a perimeter around your lawn where there's no leaf litter for the ticks to collect. And then, you know, in the big tick season, you probably spray some chemical to keep them away. So that's all I know about, but there are better websites online that have advice from people that have to deal with it every day. I moved to Utah. There are not many ticks here.

Marty Bent [41:30] Well that mean it's Again, I think this gives back to government accountability too. Like what are your hopes in terms of? Of that I saw there was a GAO announcement that they're look into it I think earlier today that came out or maybe yesterday. So it does look like Enough people are making enough noise of the government saying okay. It looks like we got to look into this Do you think it's a national emergency that demands a federal government investigation and response in action?

Kris Newby [42:10] The good news, a first step was taken this year because Chris Smith of New Jersey, a congressman from New Jersey, after five years of trying, finally got an amendment in the DOD budget that says they have to declassify all this tick-borne weapons program info. So what was released where? So that's a first step and that a GAA, GAO, Government Accounting Office report needs to be released in about a year and a half. So that's a first step. That said, it could be like the Epstein files. We might get five pages with blackouts on them. But that's a first step. have. K. Jr. in office whose whole family has been affected drastically by Lyme disease.

Kris Newby ⋮ I mean, he has places up in that hot zone. He goes to Martha's Vineyard a lot. That's where my husband and I were bitten. Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket. You get Lyme and this other really horrible disease. It's a parasite called Babesiosis. It's a red blood cell parasite. So when get those two together, it's hard to cure. So that's a first step. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I've been in it 20 years and I thought we would have made more progress. But at this point in time, I am optimistic. that things will get better.

Marty Bent [43:50] What was the most radicalizing thing about doing this research over the last 20 years?

Kris Newby [43:57] I never would have imagined that they had done these things. Even Daniel Sonenschein, who released the radioactive ticks, who has no moral boundaries. He just laughed when I said, well, did you get any approval for these open air tick experiments? He just laughed. says, I got a city permit. I could never get this approved nowadays. So he just laughed it off. Okay, what was the most surprising? Well, first of all, if you've gone through six years of being really, really sick from a disease that the medical establishment and the government are in denial, it was very dark and depressing to go through the research. I turned that depression into action, so, well.

Kris Newby ⋮ I can get over this depression if I just help other people. And the main advice I have is take every tick bite seriously. Don't get gaslit by a doctor that says wait and see, that's what happened to us. then a year later, we're almost incurable because of the two tick-borne diseases. And I would say send the ticks that you pull out in to have them screened for all the worst tick-borne diseases. It might be free through your public health department, or it might be $75 or $100, but that is cheaper and faster than a human test. The human tests aren't very good right now, mostly.

Kris Newby ⋮ And it takes their antibody tests, which from COVID, know, it takes a while for antibodies to develop when you get a disease. So you have to wait three weeks before the human tests work. But tick, tick tests, they're mostly DNA based. Fast couple days. So that's what I would say.

Marty Bent [45:59] That's good to know. mean, you said, I forget the gentleman's name, that he was really unabashed in how egregious he was. I think he wrote in the book that Willie did have some regrets in terms of what he worked on and what he contributed to.

Kris Newby [46:07] Dr. Sump. Yeah, and I'm from a military family. My dad was a Navy pilot who brought the first gallons or drums of Agent Orange to Vietnam. So I think at some deep level, I'm wondering, like, how can all the people in the military organization not think about the bigger implications, they're just following orders. So if we look at Willie, that's the interesting thing about what I learned about him for the book Bitten. He was a very smart, ambitious Swiss researcher who had a chance to come over to America. He was excited, he went to this Rocky Mountain lab, he got his own assistant. He never would have gotten that kind of freedom.

Kris Newby ⋮ in Switzerland and then he realized what he had to do. He went up to Canada and saw all these nerve agent and biological experiments up there and then he took what he learned there and brought him to his lab and that's where he started doing the horrible experiments he was doing. So he was with the program but as he got older, just like we all do, we realize we look at the bigger picture. Like he was stuffing plague in fleas. This is the disease that wiped out a huge percentage of the population of Europe several times. And he would come home to his new kids and he couldn't help thinking, what am I doing?

Kris Newby ⋮ But, and then at a certain point, you know, in his forties, he would go to conferences in Europe. and he would think he could move back to Europe, but no, all his best work was classified because it was about killing people. So he was stuck, like someone who might join the CIA or the mafia. You can't put that on your resume. It's hard to get a new job. So he's stuck there. But then the tipping point was when he just, well, did he discover Lyme disease? That's...

Kris Newby [48:32] That's a complicated question. But when he got the credit for discovering Lyme disease, he was working night and day to bolster the evidence and learn more about it. And on the weekends, the techs weren't in there to clean the infected rabbit cages. So he said infected urine splashed in his eyes and he got Lyme disease and he had multiple bullseye rashes down the side. I have pictures of that. And then he believes that caused Parkinson's in him, that he suffered a few years later. And he had to go on workers' comp. I have his workers' comp documentation where he shows the rashes and everything and had to take time off. then he realized how bad, there it is, how bad the disease is. And... That's when he started talking to lime advocates and journalists. And I was just one of several people he talked to.

Marty Bent [49:33] Yeah, you see, yeah, he became affected by the disease that he helped potentially create and spread. And yeah, it's insane that humans can do this stuff. What is it about a, it reminds me of like the Stanford, what is it? The Stanford prison experiment where, where like when authority figure tells you to hurt another human, you know, because, because you've got clearance to do so you'll just do it. And how. that level of psychosis reaches critical parts of our government and is weaponized against the populace. Maybe originally the intent was to weaponize against enemies, but I think we find that a lot of that research typically ends up being focused on the population at large at some point down the road anyway, too. Yeah, so what is the government even for? Are they here to help us? This is question I am constantly asking myself.

Kris Newby [50:38] Well, I spent a lot of time thinking about that for my second book, which is about nerve agents. And it's the Nazi prison guard question. how did well-meaning Germans all of a sudden become Nazi prison guards? Oh, here's a bar of soap. Come into the shower. And the same thing at Dugway Proving Grounds and the nerve agents. They were very isolated in a compound in the desert and their work was so secretive they couldn't share it with their family or friends or the people at church. You if you said, I put a drop of nerve agent in a goat today. You know, your neighbors would go, what? And, know, and you would respond to it, but they're in this happy circle and they're just given lists of experiments to do every day. Same with Willie and You're in a bubble and to me it's like slow acting novocaine. You all of sudden don't feel about the 10,000 guinea pigs that died. You're not thinking about life.

Marty Bent [51:57] Interesting about the results of the experiments that you're told to You have you have it in your notes here that there's a specific call out for people Going to the Hamptons this summer to be aware of the ticks there Why the Hamptons?

Kris Newby [52:08] Okay. Well, that's well, it's just the same as Martha's Vineyard in Antarctica. It's hot spot and none of the real estate or tourism boards want you to know how bad it is. What do I think about that? I think that if you don't go out in nature, they win. We're part of nature. We're healthier when we're outside in the sunlight watching birds, fishing or whatever. And you need to go out into nature, but just take precautions. Use some sort of repellent on your clothing. Wash your clothes after you go outside because that's how I think my husband and I got it. We did tick checks, but we re-wore our beach clothes the second day and they were hanging out there.

Kris Newby ⋮ I think. And So tick checks, repellent, just be aware. And then, like I said, you pull out an engorged tick, my gosh, treat it seriously. It could ruin your life. Just get some doxycycline, not two pills. It has to be more than two pills. That's a flawed study. And then you'll never think about it again.

Marty Bent [53:37] Until you get bit down the road. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for coming on. I'm sure you're extremely busy right now. Like your beat is a top of mind for many people in the United States. Any other things we should make the audience aware of before we wrap up here? Any other pressing calls to action or details that we...

Kris Newby [53:38] Again.

Marty Bent [54:04] didn't get to that people should be aware of.

Kris Newby [54:08] Well, if you want to read more about the whole Tick Webinization program, it's on my sub stack. it's just Chris, search Chris Newby on sub stack. It's free unless you want to do a donation. And then for my next book on chemical weapons, that's a good way to hear about it. You can't order it yet, but it's it's the same mode. It's narrative nonfiction and exploring. The history of nerve agents and the people involved in the program and why. these weapons of mass destruction keep perpetuating and are never in control. mean, people have no oversight really.

Marty Bent [54:47] I think it would be important to have oversight for bio weapons and nerve agents that could drastically change the course of individuals' lives in human history if applied in certain ways.

Kris Newby [55:01] Yeah.

Marty Bent [55:04] Well, we're going link to all this in the show notes. Chris, really appreciate you again for taking the time for doing this research and for banging the drum for many years, even though people may not have always been listening, but think considering everything going on. as it pertains to the explosion of tick populations here in the United States, they're definitely listening and eager to learn more. So I think the fact that you've been focused on this for more than 20 years is great for society, this audience, because they get to learn from somebody who's done all the hard work already.

Kris Newby [55:43] Well, thank you so much for the invite and keep your babies safe.

Marty Bent [55:49] We'll try, we'll try. It's stressful, I'm not gonna lie.

Kris Newby [55:50] Pennsylvania, I think last year it was number one in tick bites. Pennsylvania has a really good tick screening program and you can send in your ticks for free and then whatever's in them will be used for research, which is a great thing.

Marty Bent [56:10] And so you can just mail them or you drop them off somewhere.

Kris Newby [56:13] You mail them. You just put them in a little plastic baggie with a wet paper towel. I think it's Strausberg University. It's that. They're the ones that have a rockin' awesome tick research program.

Marty Bent [56:20] Mm-hmm. It's good to know my home state is on top of things, even though the tech population and the deer population here is massive.

Kris Newby [56:34] Yeah, I know. Give him more hunting permits.

Marty Bent [56:39] That's what we have. I we're right outside of Philadelphia. I mean, there's deer all throughout our neighborhood.

Kris Newby [56:44] Yeah, same here.

Marty Bent [56:48] Awesome. thank you. Who knows, maybe we can do this again at some point in the future. Maybe when you release your next book, we can talk about nerve agents and the government research that's got into that.

Kris Newby [57:02] Happy topics. I love the research though. It's really fun going to old archives and I hang out with a lot of 80 year old ex-military people. What fun. Yeah, I mean, like next time you're in airport, sit next to an 80 year old and say, tell me your story. It's great.

Marty Bent [57:15] Unless she does sound like a lot of fun. Alright. Were you in the CIA working on tick bombs by any chance?

Kris Newby [57:32] He says, I didn't work for the CIA. It was the company.

Marty Bent [57:42] Maybe I'll do that. I'm going to be in airport tomorrow, so maybe I'll try to find the 80-year-old sitting by himself.

Kris Newby [57:49] Yeah, they'll wear Navy or Army merch. They'll be the first ones in line because they get on first.

Marty Bent [57:55] It's good to know. All right, Chris, thank you again. This has been awesome. And peace and love, freaks.

Kris Newby [57:59] Thanks, Marty. Hahaha