I'm confused by the number of upvotes this article has. It's a mishmash of innuendos and barely-related facts. I thought Lithub was a better website than this.
As far as I can tell, the narrative of this article is "the CIA did some real-world tests of how harmless bacterial spores propagate in a real-world environment; they also did closed-lab tests of how harmful bacterial droplets for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever propagate in a controlled environment among monkeys; a botched chemical weapons experiment ended US offensive chemical and bio warfare research; then a specific researcher had some family troubles, the end." It appears to be structured to imply that an outbreak of tick-born illnesses in Long Island in 1968 is not a coincidence.
Maybe the full book is a different story, but this seems like pretty bad conspiracy theoretic stringing together of tangential things.
Not everything that makes you uncomfortable or embarrassed about your state is a conspiracy theory. Sometimes the state really does commit crimes on its populace, and in this particular case - where there's smoke, there's fire.
The CIA shouldn't be in the medical experiment business. Period. That citizens are willing to let it get away with murder is bad enough.
Touché. As we who follow this subject know too well, every empirical dialectic has its antipode.
And in the middle we will meet, use our free and open societies properly, and provide justice to the victims of the most criminal group that ever existed on Earth.
We just need more eyeballs - conspiracy theorists or concerned fellow citizen, or otherwise - on the subject.
And that's precisely why shutting down the narrative is such an imperative. Nobody wants to really confront the most embarrassing crimes against humanity committed by their state, especially given they happen every twenty minutes or so, unhindered by democratic principles...
I agree that the CIA shouldn't be in the medical experiment business. There are good explanations of terrible things the CIA has done. But not every bad thing said about the CIA deserves credence simply by virtue of being a bad thing about the CIA.
The CIA is responsible for a LOT of bad things. This is not a conspiracy theory.
Therefore as an agency it should not be elevated in any way - it should, in fact, have to answer for these crimes - whether they were discovered and revealed by a conspiracy theorist, or by Congress itself. Often, one cannot proceed without the actions of the other...
They and other agencies are also involved in the psychological experiment business. Historically and probably currently. All the data they've got these days and various means to interact with their subjects is probably pretty wild.
Considering that the CIA is a highly secretive over-funded organization that was built by ex-Nazi's, these developments are indeed a matter of major concern, and one should not be dissuaded by the CIA's "conspiracy theorist" agitprop from investigating and prosecuting their vast and heinous crimes against humanity. Period.
What's your actual claim here? "Everything anyone comes up with about the CIA is either true or invented by the CIA to make people think people like me are insane"? Do you think there's any room for honest weirdos to make idiotic claims about a famous entity? Because there's a well-characterized disease which induces people to do pretty much exactly that, and it's existed since long before the CIA, the OSS, or America were even conceived of.
I do not concur with this limited dialectic/materialist mode of thought.
Alas, conspiracies are not necessary - there is more than enough real evidence of the CIA having committed heinous crimes against humanity without having to resort to some sort of neurotic episode to describe it.
The characterization of the CIA as an honorable institution above reproach is just as fallacious as the idea that everyone who questions its actions is a nutcase.
As an organization the CIA has a very long and sordid well-known and documented history of committing acts that most reasonable people would find extremely difficult to justify - not so, the nationalists, who incidentally are also inflicted with a well-characterized mental disorder deserving treatment.
But whenever someone starts pulling on those threads of evidence to see where they lead, they are immediately confronted with the "conspiracy theorist" agitprop that is designed to stop further critical thought on the subject and protect the agency involved, which has after all spent billions shrouding itself in secrecy and subterfuge in order to protect itself from the democratic principles of justice that it works so hard to prevent its host society from effectively applying to itself.
"Honest weirdos" don't need to theorize. They need to prosecute in a free and open society, the very real war criminals and committers of crimes against humanity who have helmed the CIA and who have destroyed countless societies around the world in order to enact their vile ideology.
Just by way of a simple example, the fact that the American people haven't prosecuted Gina Haspel and sent her off to rot in chains in The Hague for her heinously vile torture programs is ample evidence that, indeed, the conspiracy theorists are all we have left...
> As an organization the CIA has a very long and sordid well-known and documented history of committing acts that most reasonable people would find extremely difficult to justify - not so, the nationalists, who incidentally are also inflicted with a well-characterized mental disorder deserving treatment.
Nationalism, while annoying, isn't a mental disorder, and we should refrain from medicalizing everything we disagree with, as that is certainly a trait of horrible organizations. (see: "sluggishly-progressing schizophrenia" in the USSR) Also, "they did bad things in the past so they did this specific bad thing" is a fallacy, or at least a jump into illogic: Just because someone stole a car doesn't mean they stole every car that got stolen in the past thirty years, or that they stole your car in specific. It doesn't follow.
> But whenever someone starts pulling on those threads of evidence to see where they lead, they are immediately confronted with the "conspiracy theorist" agitprop
They're not. You're stating something that's simply not the case.
Yes, the CIA has done horrible things. However, people who point this out aren't called crazy until they begin to say things like the CIA used nanothermite C4 to do 9/11 on the orders of the Jewish Reptilians, or that the CIA steals my thoughts and infects me with horrible compulsions. There's a line between known events and possible events, on one hand, and blatant nonsense, on the other.
Let me add a pearl to that necklace (TL;DR: Morgellons disease is linked to Lyme disease):
> Exploring the association between Morgellons disease and Lyme disease: identification of Borrelia burgdorferi in Morgellons disease patients
> Morgellons disease (MD) is a complex skin disorder characterized by ulcerating lesions that have protruding or embedded filaments. Many clinicians refer to this condition as delusional parasitosis or delusional infestation and consider the filaments to be introduced textile fibers. In contrast, recent studies indicate that MD is a true somatic illness associated with tickborne infection, that the filaments are keratin and collagen in composition and that they result from proliferation and activation of keratinocytes and fibroblasts in the skin. Previously, spirochetes have been detected in the dermatological specimens from four MD patients, thus providing evidence of an infectious process.
Allow me to place the necklace around your neck now:
> Grossman added Kris Newby, an "excellent science writer connected to Stanford University," wrote a book in 2019 featuring interviews with Willy Burgdorfer, who is credited with the discovery of the microbe causing Lyme disease, and the book exposed that Burgdorfer had earlier "developed bioweapons for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)."
> As a science writer, she was driven to understand why this disease is so misunderstood, and its patients so mistreated. This quest led her to Willy Burgdorfer, the Lyme microbe’s discoverer, who revealed that he had developed bug-borne bioweapons during the Cold War, and believed that the Lyme epidemic was started by a military experiment gone wrong.
This paper several authors with professional backgrounds that should make people skeptical.
* Three authors are from Australian Biologics. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has in the past "instituted proceedings in the Federal Court, Sydney, against Australian Biologics Testing Services Pty Ltd and its director, Ms Janette Burke [third author on this paper!], alleging that representations made in brochures and on Australian Biologics’ website in 2001 and part of 2002 were false, misleading, and deceptive" [1].
* Another author is Peter Mayne. In 2017 the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission prosecuted a complaint against him for "unsatisfactory professional conduct" because he "inappropriately diagnosing [a] patient with Lyme disease" and then, among other things, "[i]nappropriately treated the patient with weekly and then biweekly antibiotic injections for Lyme disease over approximately 30 weeks but failed to investigate or consider the patient might have cancer due to his age and medical history" and finally ordered him "[n]ot to advice [sic], diagnose or treat patients who he believes to have or may have Lyme disease or similar tick-borne disease" [2]
* Another author is Raphael B. Stricker, who the NIH found guilty of scientific misconduct in 1993 [3]
It is a red flag if a scientific field is this dense with people who have been found guilty of this kind of misconduct. Maybe being persecuted by an authority just adds fuel to the conspiracy, but I'm going to leave it at this: this strand of the chronic Lyme cottage industry (and maybe the industry in general) appears to be populated by people who either believe they themselves have chronic Lyme disease, or believe that they can make money off people who do. What it does not seem to have is disinterested third parties who are working on it because it's a meaningful research problem. This is a red flag, too: it suggests that there is something repelling people with reputations to lose, and I think it is the quality of research produced by its adherents.
Look, I believe these people are suffering, and suffering is bad, so I hope they get help, but I am very skeptical that the people claiming to offer help are the right people to do so.
Fine, one more thing. Willie Burgdorfer died in 2014, five years before Newby's book came out. He was 89 and died of complications from Parkinson's disease. The numbers for Parkinson's disease, dementia, and old age may, depending on the dates when Newby talked to him, make his testimony somewhat less than ironclad.
In this thread, the argument that chronic Lyme's disease does not exist, seems to repeat itself. It may very well be that chronic Lyme's disease does not exist, but the arguments that claim this still appear to miss some key points.
The argument that chronic Lyme's disease does not exist relies on the existence of a reliable test for Lyme's disease. The article questions the existence of such a test. If the tests are not reliable, any research that uses the tests to deduce that chronic Lyme's disease does not exist, is not reliable either.
There are researchers that believe in the existence of the chronic Lyme's disease. They have some arguments on why it is difficult to test, eradicate and even understand Lyme's disease.
First argument is that Lyme's disease is actually an amalgam of several diseases that work synergetically, such as borreliosis, babesiosis and bartonella. If you are cure one, the others take over, and make the body more suspective for the re-emergence of the cured disease.
Second argument is that apparently the side effects of the diseases are not actually caused by the disease itself, but poisons released during the die-off of the disease. This is called Herxheimer reaction. So, more you are able to cure, the worse you feel, initially. That is why it is difficult to recognize what is helpful in curing the disease and what is harmful.
Third argument is that borreliosis has been observed (by microscope) to change form, and "hide" within other micro-organisms and blood cells. Spiral form is only one of the forms. Perhaps antibiotics can only cure some of the forms?
Not saying that I believe in the conspiracy theory, but can't the disease exist naturally while also being the subject of bioweapon research? The only way to know would be to figure out more precisely what kind of research was being done on the Lyme bacteria... I'm not sure if there are signatures one can look for which indicate that some strain is certainly a wild mutation and not from concerted research (similar to how archeologists distinguish which sharp rocks are ancient human tools and which ones are just coincidentally sharp rocks).
> while also being the subject of bioweapon research?
It can, Anthrax is a classic example, occurring naturally, the bio weapons part of the military will want to know how to make it more potent, in case "the enemy" develops the same or similar potent strain of bio weapon. Thats the justification part for this development which is probably labelled as "proof of concept" in much the same way a variety of drugs will be tested against a variety of bacteria or virus for medical research, in case its found in the wild.
Man has been selectively breeding stuff for hundreds of years, animals like pedigree dogs, cats, livestock, plants, why wouldn't the military of any country despite international agreements find ways to get around those agreements.
Just look at the US nuclear stockpile, the US didn't proliferate new weapons, they merely upgraded the existing nukes and upgrading wasn't in any agreement.
And if we were to have a perfectly encapsulated bubble of safety, how much would the population levels increase by more than we currently see with todays accidents?
Survival of the fittest has evolved to include modern day living.
When thinking about the ever lasting lightbulb, if man stopped developing light bulbs of sorts, would we have got to have created the led light bulb as quickly?
So conspiracy theories do exist, because we hear them, but they serve many purposes in society, they can smooth over events, they can be educational, they can be used to draw certain types of people out into the open who arguably have health complaints or a drug problem of sorts, which could be worded as a chemical imbalance.
Take covid, it funnelled money into drug companies, AI's were developed to speed up the making of vaccines which have now started to apply to other viruses, at the same time, the planet was given a rest from our daily activities, insect numbers started to rise, police were able to catch up with criminals that they have been trying to track down for ages, in fact the excuses for catching a lot of criminals was one of the covid successes that hasnt been discussed much, we all got forced into working remotely to get used to not having to commute, bosses and managers had to deal with that loss of instant dictatorship and fire fighting and start to plan more. There's a whole host of reasons for covid to have been released on this planet which is why I say it was a biological weapon if it wasn't people having panic attacks and a sudden rise of pseudomonas in the lungs like cystic fibrosis sufferers experience due to a sudden influx of iron in their diet, perhaps caused by eating more meat and thus iron during lockdown.
So CT's do exist, but what is its purpose is probably a better question to ask.
Lyme's incubation is long and impact on infected people uncertain, which makes it useless as a bioweapon. The sciencedirect article effectively dismantles the innuendo about Lyme as a bioweapon.
a weapon released without a means to target and control damage is generally less effective than one you can make sure isn't pointed at your feet.
lyme disease 'immunity' is spotty at best, and not well correlated to a specific group of people or traits; so while I could imagine its' use as a weapon, it seems that from a military strategy point of view that there should be better options.
there are plenty of diseases out there with what seems to be a racial component to immunology, I would imagine those are the ones with a lot of bio weapons interest towards them.
So why use timers on bombs then or have land mines, why not just kill immediately?
So bioweapons with an incubation period are still valid and makes it hard to prove who is behind it, and plausible deniability is a form of stealth bio weaponry.
If I put a tick carrying this bio weapon strain in your coat at a conference, you would not know it was me, because of the incubation period, assuming a 100% infection rate, just like you probably wouldnt check your coat for ticks before putting it on.
So why wouldnt it be anything other than a bio weapon, if it was man made and used in such circumstances? The only people probably safe from such risk of it being used against them would be scientists who could come up with a solution or cure, if one doesnt already exist.
The fact that it exists in the wild means its a perfect vector for covert experimentation as its natural presence provides the cover of plausible deniability needed for all governments to perform biological experiments on their citizens...
The arguments presented there make very little sense.
1) Lyme existed before
> So decades before Lyme was identified – and before military scientists could have altered or weaponized it – the bacterium that causes it was living in the wild.
Of course it was, regardless of whether the conspiracy theory is correct. If it was a bioweapon, do you think they were engineering a fully synthetic bacterial genome de novo? In the '60s and '70s, decades before the first publicly known successes with fully synthetic genomes in the 2000s?
It would be far more reasonable to assume they were working from a reference species, selectively breeding, maybe inducing mutations or engaging in some rudimentary gene editing (although the latter seems unlikely).
2) The genetic distribution doesn't support the conspiracy theory
> Population genetics research on Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterial agent of Lyme disease, suggest that the northeastern, Midwestern and Californian bacteria are separated by geographical barriers that prevent these populations from mixing.
> Had there been a lab strain, particularly one engineered to be more transmissible, that escaped within the last 50 years, there would be greater genetic similarity between these three geographic populations. There is no evidence for a recent single source – such as a release from a lab – for Lyme disease spirochetes.
Keeping in mind the counterargument to point 1) above, this argument is wild. If we assume that a weaponized form of Borrelia burgdorferi was created from a wild specimen, we would absolutely expect specific variants to only exist in certain regions, particularly the region in which the conspiracy theories allege an outbreak of the weaponized form occurred. The paper the author references here even notes that the worst strains were not found in California [0]:
> Eight of the most common ospC genotypes in the northeastern United States, including genotypes I and K that are associated with disseminated human infections, were absent in Mendocino County nymphs.
This all seems very consistent with the most likely scenario if there was in fact an effort to weaponize the bacteria and it was released in the northeast.
3) Lyme isn't a good bioweapon
> One of the most important characteristics of a biowarfare agent is its ability to quickly disable target soldiers.
Unless the goal is to softly neutralize Communist sympathizers, unfriendly foreign leaders, and left wing politicians. This thesis is in fact wholly refuted by the fact that the CIA plotted to use tuberculosis as a bioweapon to neutralize Fidel Castro in the '60s [1].
> Lyme disease does make some people very sick but many have just a flu-like illness that their immune system fends off.
Again, consistent with the theory that there is a weaponized strain in the wild alongside less harmful natural strains.
Final note: none of this is really evidence *for* the conspiracy theory, but those arguments against all seem totally specious.
> It would be far more reasonable to assume they were working from a reference species
Not if the species was unknown to science. What would they reference?
> Again, consistent with the theory that there is a weaponized strain in the wild alongside less harmful natural strains.
Well, where is this weaponized strain? It’s not as though variability in the impact of a bacterial disease is a sign of bio-weaponization.
> This thesis is in fact wholly refuted by the fact that the CIA plotted to use tuberculosis as a bioweapon to neutralize Fidel Castro in the '60s
You must have read the footnote you cite… so you know the plan was to use a gifted scuba equipment as a delivery mechanism as a kind of soft assassination attempt on a specific individual. Is there really any argument that this plot (which was not executed) suggests anything about their general bio weapon approach? The reality is, Lyme isn’t a good bioweapon… it’s slow, weak and easily treated with cheap and common antibiotics.
> but those arguments against all seem totally specious,
Frankly, I don’t think you’ve really addressed them.
Well, information warfare is warfare by analogy, not actual warfare. It’s useful, so could be a motive of a kind…
But if you think Lyme was developed as a weapon of information warfare, what’s your argument? To induce fear and terror, I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be fast, but it needs to be terrible and, to some extent, inexorable. Lyme, as something that’s mild and easy to treat is neither.
I don't want to argue for Lyme being developed as bioweapon. I'm debating the argument that Lyme is not a weapon due to mild and slow action. IMO that's a bad argument in itself.
Deploy a deterrent from venturing into the wilderness, deploy disinformation campaign blowing effects out of proportion and in merely a generation you will drastically reduce wilderness survival capability of the population and in turn capability to organize guerilla style insurgency. That's a very far fetched argument for Lyme in particular, but a solid argument for deterrent weaponry in general.
Warfare is not necessarily about lethal precision strikes, that's the argument.
> Not if the species was unknown to science. What would they reference?
Perhaps a novel bacterium they found in a known disease carrying parasite in their back yard. Doesn't seem remotely outlandish. If I was looking for a stealth bioweapon, I would try that avenue as well. And there is precedent for significant discoveries being kept under wraps for extended periods before being independently discovered and released to the public. See public key cryptography, which was discovered secretly at GCHQ and only became public 6 years later with Diffie-Hellman.
> Well, where is this weaponized strain? It’s not as though variability in the impact of a bacterial disease is a sign of bio-weaponization.
I suppose in the wild in the northeast, and presumed to be a natural variant?
> Is there really any argument that this plot (which was not executed) suggests anything about their general bio weapon approach? The reality is, Lyme isn’t a good bioweapon… it’s slow, weak and easily treated with cheap and common antibiotics.
Moving goalposts. Different weapons have different characteristics which make them useful for different things. The fact that a biological agent would not be good for "bioweapon use-case A" is not an argument that it isn't a bioweapon. The anecdote is proof positive that the US has planned to use biological agents with similar attributes to this hypothetical biological agent as a weapon.
The whole argument here amounts to saying "The army would never use knives as weapons, they are so ineffective. You have to be close range, and you can't kill that many people effectively with them!" And when I point out that they do, in fact, use knives as weapons, you just reiterate the same line?
> (which was not executed)
(stated reason: because the would-be assassin had already given Castro a dive suit, and another would arouse suspicion)
>the condition was named Lyme disease. A conspiracy theory spread like a fever: that the researchers at Plum Island had engineered a new sickness, one that now afflicts more than 30,000 Americans per year.
> Why would a PhD from MIT start debugging her family’s health ... Learn how we went from debilitating chronic Lyme Disease to radiant health. No practitioners were able to help us, so we had to figure it out on our own. Many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, this website summarizes everything we learned along the way. The quest for a Lyme disease cure led us to health better than we have ever had before we contracted Lyme.
About halfway down the page is this video [0] in which she appears to "debug" by holding a box full of bottles of supplements, and remove them selectively until she finds the one that makes her stronger. Is this for real? Am I missing a key detail, or is this family batshit insane?
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture has repeated it several times since the book came out: no one has ever worked on Lyme disease on Plum Island. Eric Traub himself never conducted any research there. He simply visited the site! He wasn't a tick specialist, but a foot-and-mouth disease specialist. Pressed by an Associated Press journalist, Michael C. Carroll admitted back in 2004 that he had "no direct evidence "2 of his claims.
The strongest argument in support of this thesis is in fact a simple geographical coincidence. Lyme, the small Connecticut town that gave its name to the disease, is located in Connecticut, a few dozen kilometers from Plum Island, as the crow flies. It was here, in 1975, that researchers drew up a summary of what they called "Lyme arthritis". They had observed an unusual recrudescence of oligoarthritis in children, and attributed it to tick-borne bacteria of the Borrelia genus.
In fact, these researchers were not the first to observe what was to become Lyme disease. Other outbreaks were scattered across Europe and North America, thousands of miles from Plum Island."
If one has good evidence of the sort of thesis hinted at, one should state it straightforwardly and present the evidence for it perspicuously, rather than darkly hinting as the first section does, which style rather suggests the evidence to follow is weak and only convincing through obfuscation.
While not a great book, there were two elements I found compelling 1) a heat map of Lyme prevalence can basically be drawn with plum island at the center, 2) the us government did bio weapons tests, using ticks as a disease vector, on ways of killing an enemy’s livestock supply (and hence crippling their food supply).
> While most Lyme disease patients who are diagnosed and treated early can fully recover, 10 to 20 percent suffer from persistent symptoms, some seriously disabling.
There's no evidence that chronic Lyme exists:
> There is no evidence to suggest that “chronic Lyme” exists, or that long-term antibiotics are required to treat it.
There is evidence of "Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome" [1].
> Several recent studies suggest that B. burgdorferi may persist in animals after antibiotic therapy.
There's also evidence that the standard Lyme treatment increases the "round bodies" form of the bacteria [2].
That being said, there's still a lot of shysters who, as you say, push long-term antibiotics or diagnose patients with "Lyme disease," despite not having evidence.
The CDC recognizes the existence of "Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome," but highlights that long-term antibiotics aren't a good solution [3].
> This study aimed to demonstrate that severe neurological motor deficits in the context of late tick-borne disease with mixed microorganism involvement are eligible for long-term combined antibiotic/antiparasitic treatments. The inclusion criteria were: 1. neurological limb paralysis with a disability score >4 according to the EDSS Kurtzke disability scale; 2. serological tests pointing to an involvement of the main tick-borne microorganisms Borrelia burgdorferi s.l., Babesia, Anaplasma, and Bartonella; 3. a general disease for more than 6 months with fatigue, pain and subjective cognitive deficit. The patients were administered long-term treatments with repeated cycles (at least three) of 35-day IV ceftriaxone and repeated oral regimens of azithromycin–doxycycline and azithromycin–doxycycline–rifampicin. For Babesia, repeated courses of atovaquone–azithromycin were administered. Ten patients had intractable or severe motor deficits before treatment in the context of Borrelia (two cases) Borrelia–Babesia (four cases), Borrelia–Babesia–Anaplasma (two cases), Borrelia–Babesia–Anaplasma–Bartonella (one case) and Babesia–Anaplasma (one case). For several months, five had been in wheelchairs, and four had been walking with sticks. Seven patients out of 10 (70%) showed complete remission after a mean active treatment duration of 20.1 + 6.6 months, with a mean number of 4 ceftriaxone cycles. Three patients showed an initial remission but suffered secondary antibiotic/antiparasitic-resistant motor recurrences. Among the nine patients with Borrelia serologic positivity, treatments obtained complete remission in seven cases (77%). The findings of this ten-case series suggest the usefulness of long-term antibiotic/antiparasitic treatments in patients with severe late tick-borne neurological deficits with highly significant elements of tick-borne involvement.
Can you elaborate on the difference between the terms “late untreated borreliosis” and “chronic Lyme disease”? Borreliosis is just another name for Lyme disease. What distinction are you so sure about that I’m missing?
Chronic lyme is a vague term that usually refers to people who have already been treated, but continue to have symptoms, and may not test positive. It's a grabbag of stuff.
I have heard this claim before but I couldn’t follow the logic, genuinely would like to understand your perspective.
So “late untreated borreliosis” is a “real thing” but if someone gets borreliosis, gets treated, yet their symptoms persist (this scenario is what people usually mean by the term chronic Lyme) then that is NOT a “real thing”?
Does this mean that treatment is 100% effective or that if it didn’t work, then it wasn’t borreliosis to begin with?
I can’t begin to explain the misery of watching a loved one, close to you, fall into the trap of bullshit medicine. Someone who was otherwise bright and intelligent lost their ability to think critically because they were suffering too long. Or maybe it’s severe mental illness. Even worse, they may extend their fears to their children and family, forcing their Internet bought potions on them.
What I have found is that all the bullshit medicine keeps similar company: Chronic Lyme, Bartonella, Biofilms, non-native Parasites, mold, heavy metals, and even emf sensitivity.
How about the misery of a loved one going untreated, undiagnosed and dismissed by physicians with a facile understanding of chronic multi system disease dynamics. People who do that are usually ones who cannot find physical relief elsewhere.
Sounds like the lab leak theory for that novel coronavirus being the result of gain-of-function research.
Who could be taken in by a canard like that? Coronaviruses emerge naturally and jump species sometimes, it was probably the wet market near the biolab studying that virus that it crossed species at.
Not to mention there was a government bio-research facility a mere 14 miles away From Lyme, CT on Plum Island, that did bio-weapons research targeting livestock during the Cold War.
I grew up in the town the disease is named after, I know it's a real thing, but if I had to go by the absolute nonsense that's posted about it on the internet I'm not sure I would.
I read this book a few years ago and really enjoyed it. Many things to say but one thing, why do books like this have to mention JFK somewhere in there.
I dont think conspiracy nuts need to join the dots when you watch this BBC documentary.
It explains the paranoia of the military which unfortunately is not recognised in the DSM strangely, but if you spend the 1hr watching this, I wont spoil how the British state were forced to come clean about their military fubar.
I think the military do a lot more biological and chemical testing on the population than they care to admit, mainly because its their responsibility to secure the country (any country) which means trying to stay ahead of the curve.
I even got to pick a (mad) scientists brain who worked at Porton Down the UK military biological and chemical testing place, they have stuff there which makes ebola look like a walk in the park, without going into any more detail.
Does anyone know why they used sheep in the anthrax tests? Its because sheep are natural carriers, and sheep shearers get infected quite frequently.
> Just look at the RAND report on how covid nearly took out the US Navy!
I'm not sure if 7 military deaths count as "nearly took out the US Navy!" ... maybe you're being sarcastic. Looks like twice that number die from drowning every year: https://nps.edu/web/safety/rods-identification
I think you missed the quarantine. There comes a point where any entity falls below a minimum staff level. It was reported that some ships were held back or had to return to port because too many people were sick, due to the close confined living conditions. That's unless what I was reading online was being man in the middled to provoke me.
>Because, why not? It would be very reproductively succesful.
Eh, HIV has a very specific affinity to CD4+ T cells, which explain the symptoms associated with AIDS.
For viruses that spread either by droplet transmission or true airborne transmission, they must have sufficient affinity for upper or lower respiratory tissues. Usually, this involves an optimization problem where they develop a particular affinity for those tissues and are less effective at other tissues. They then tend to present with... respiratory symptoms.
All viruses are different, but on it's face, it doesn't make too much sense.
There are some respiratory viruses with interesting mechanisms for causing immune suppression to evade the host immune system for longer, but none that I know of work the same way as AIDs.
I suppose in a future world, you possibly could create a respiratory virus that causes a cell to create two viruses, one copy of the original, and one copy of standard HIV.
There's a lot of issues though: For one the viral envelope would have to actually fit all that genetic material inside it. For two, it's not like copying a file... The viral genome has instructions for making more of itself, and that includes a hideous protein folding and packaging problem that is really non-trivial. I don't think you could take two off the shelf viruses and just splice them together and stuff them in a virus, it would just at best create a virus that after the first generation, just created two viruses. Finally, even if you did do this, the respiratory part of the virus derives zero benefit from the HIV component, so it will, after a few generations probably just ditch that part and evolve back into a cold virus.
As far as I can tell, the narrative of this article is "the CIA did some real-world tests of how harmless bacterial spores propagate in a real-world environment; they also did closed-lab tests of how harmful bacterial droplets for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever propagate in a controlled environment among monkeys; a botched chemical weapons experiment ended US offensive chemical and bio warfare research; then a specific researcher had some family troubles, the end." It appears to be structured to imply that an outbreak of tick-born illnesses in Long Island in 1968 is not a coincidence.
Maybe the full book is a different story, but this seems like pretty bad conspiracy theoretic stringing together of tangential things.