Original air date: February 23rd 2025

There’s an epidemic of tick-transmitted Lyme disease with some estimates putting the number of people diagnosed and treated in the U.S. at 476,000 people a year, according to CDC. But there’s ongoing controversy, with many saying the medical establishment too often refuses to recognize the illness. When science writer Kris Newby got deathly ill after a tick bite, her research led her to uncover shocking facts about America’s history of weaponizing parasites.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

Her book, Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, raises the question of whether Lyme Disease is the result of a military experiment gone wrong. She also produced the documentary: “Under Our Skin.”

Under Our Skin documentary: I used to do balletShe just went downhill very fastI went from being a gifted athlete to there are times where it is hard to put a shirt onIt just doesn’t seem possible that this poppy seed size thing is going to make you bedridden, possibly for the rest of your life.

Kris Newby: This is a story of the history of the Tick Weaponization program in the U.S. and the government’s involvement in that, and the coverup and how it’s related to Lyme disease.

Sharyl: Can you summarize what you discovered about the U.S. government’s work? Were they using ticks somehow in their research?

Newby: Yes. So the after World War II, our military people interviewed the Germans and the Japanese, and they found out, well, geez, they were, they were weaponizing fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes, flies.

Sharyl: To try to spread diseases?

Newby: Yeah, as a stealth weapon. So, if there’s a country you wanna weaken and disable, you would put these bio weapons, these unnatural germs, and it’s carried by insects. It’s a stealth weapon. It would weaken the population, it would tie up medical resources. Then it would be easier to go in and invade the country.

Sharyl: Are you suggesting the U.S., there’s evidence the U.S. started doing similar research?

Newby: Yeah, we took like Himmler’s, good ideas and General Ishii, good ideas, and supersized them. So the main subject of my book, Willy Burgdorfer, was brought over from Switzerland because he was an expert on Q fever, a biological weapon of choice during World War II. He flew over, the biological weapons program in Fort Dietrich, Maryland, gave him assignments, he would research things. His first job was mosquitoes. So he put a deadly strain of Trinidad fever virus into the mosquitoes. And then fleas, they put plague in fleas, and he was trying to package the fleas in little tubes and then put them in cluster bombs so you could drop these cluster bombs and it would spread infected fleas over a battalion sized area. And then ticks. So his specialty in Switzerland were, soft ticks from Africa and relapsing fever bacterium, it’s related to the Lyme spirochete. And so he would take ticks and inject them with mixes of bacteria and virus, put ’em on little animals. And the goal was to create virulent strains that nature had never seen before. So then those ticks could be weaponized and dropped on our enemies.

Sharyl: So how did Lyme disease factor into what you learned about our experiments back then?

Newby: Well, I never could find proof that the Lyme disease bacterium, named after its discoverer Borrelia burgdorferi, had been weaponized. But what I did discover is that there were several tickborne diseases that they weaponized. So first was Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which is the most deadly tickborne disease in the U.S. There’s Tularemia, which is also called rabbit fever, and then there’s Q fever. And so those are the ones, the main go-to bioweapons.

Sharyl: What do you think you learned that taught us, if anything, about what happened with Covid? Are there any parallels or lessons when you look at the two?

Newby: Yeah, I think there are a lot of parallels. I often say that the Lyme disease outbreak is a prequel to what happened with Covid. So you have people messing with nature, engineering their genomes. And first of all, there was not really good oversight of a lot of these programs. For example, I found someone who said he dropped infected ticks on Cuba in 1962 to try to destroy Cuba’s sugar crop. So those are all dark budgets. Dark budgets, “need to know,” very little is in writing. So we need more transparency. Shine the light on what happened with Covid, what happened with Lyme disease.

Under Our Skin documentary: There is Lyme disease everywhereIt is more prevalent than AIDS. How many more people are going to suffer before the truth comes outAs citizens we ought to be astonished and alarmedThe major medical journals have published that chronic Lyme disease is not real and it is a psychosomatic condition

Sharyl (on-camera): Newby says if you can find a tick that bit you, you can save it in a plastic baggy with a damp paper towel and send it to a lab that will test it for everything, not just Lyme. She adds that early treatment with antibiotics can be a lifesaver for numerous tick pathogens that could make you very sick.

Watch video here.