On December 18 last year, Donald Trump signed into law an order to “review and report on biological weapons experiments on and in relation to ticks [and] tick-borne diseases.” The investigation is long overdue but even so, the facts it uncovers will come as a shock to many. A growing body of evidence shows that during the Cold War ticks were tinkered with and used as delivery mechanisms for biological warfare agents. And these weaponized ticks may have been released both intentionally and unintentionally on an unsuspecting public by the US military.
Ticks and the diseases they transmit (such as Lyme) pose a growing threat to Americans, the military and to agriculture. Record numbers of tick bites have been reported in New York (in 2024), Maine (in 2024), and Wisconsin (in 2023). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates approximately 500,000 new cases of Lyme disease annually. About one-third of patients do not respond to recommended treatment protocols.
Bioweapons specialists infected ticks with pathogens to cause disabilityand death to potential enemies
If these microbes have been genetically altered, we need to know. If the military harmed civilians through irresponsible experiments, the government has an obligation to acknowledge and remedy those harms. And if the original outbreak near Lyme, Connecticut, in the 1970s resulted from a hostile foreign act, future biosecurity protections must be strengthened. Knowing the root cause of an epidemic is vital in developing treatment strategies, containing the outbreaks and preventing future ones. And then there’s the issue of what else ticks may be carrying.
My own investigation began in 2002 after my husband and I became seriously ill with two tick-borne diseases. It took enormous amounts of money and more than five years to recover from those diseases. My “Eureka” moment about why there was so much mystery and stigma surrounding tick-borne diseases came when I met a man in his seventies who had been in black ops in the CIA. He told me that the strangest thing he ever did was drop infected ticks on Cuban sugarcane workers in 1962. I verified the details of what he told me – it turned out that the dropping of infected ticks in Cuba was a subproject of Operation Mongoose, which aimed to weaken Fidel Castro’s position in Cuba by destroying its economy.
But bug warfare didn’t begin in 1962. After World War Two, the US military discovered that the Germans and Japanese had developed a variety of bug-borne bioweapons. The Germans experimented with malaria-infected mosquitoes and the Japanese dropped plague-infected fleas and flies dusted with cholera bacteria on the Chinese. What’s more, documents obtained by the CIA during the Cold War showed that the Soviets were conducting bioweapons-related experiments on ticks, including exploring ways to get ticks to reproduce more rapidly, selectively crossbreeding tick species so they could carry disease agents that caused tick-borne encephalitis and dropping infected ticks from aircraft and balloons. Intelligence reports on “entomological warfare” stoked fear and paranoia in the Pentagon, and the Cold War bug-borne weapons race began.
The US entomological bioweapons program was directed by the Chemical Corps, headquartered at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The program was almost as large and secretive as the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. In 1951, Willy Burgdorfer, a medical zoologist with experience working with ticks and Q fever, was recruited from Basel, Switzerland, to conduct feasibility studies for Fort Detrick. His lab was based in the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, which was home to the largest living tick collection in the US. Burgdorfer often traveled to Fort Detrick, where he worked alongside former Nazi biowarfare scientists who had been allowed into the country through Operation Paperclip.
There are interviews with Burgdorfer in my 2019 book, Bitten, which reveal that he and other bioweapons specialists infected ticks with pathogens in order to cause severe disability, disease and even death to potential enemies in unsuspecting ways.
Weaponized insects (six-legged) and arthropods (eight-legged, like ticks) were considered the perfect stealth weapon. They could be dropped on enemy territory in advance of an air or land invasion to weaken the population and tie up medical resources. The US Army elaborated on the military objective: “In 1953 the Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick established a program to study the use of arthropods [i.e. ticks] for spreading anti-personnel BW [bioweapons] agents. The advantages of arthropods as BW 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.”
Burgdorfer’s first assignment was to figure out how to package fleas infected with plague in cardboard tubes so that they could be deployed in cluster bombs dropped from planes. Next, he experimentally determined the lethal dose of Trinidad yellow fever virus in artificially infected Aedes mosquitoes. And like the Soviets, he worked on ways to mass-produce ticks, mosquitoes and fleas.
One of his ongoing projects was to develop more efficient ways of artificially feeding ticks with potential biological agents. He did this by force-feeding them through glass capillary tubes containing agents for diseases such as Q fever, tularemia, Weil’s disease, western equine encephalitis virus, epidemic typhus, Asiatic relapsing fever, leptospirosis and the rabies virus.
History will judge the tick-borne disease outbreak as one of the gravest public health failures of the last century
After thousands of experiments were conducted throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the US military decided that reliably and safely deploying bombs carrying two living organisms – the bugs and their passengers – was nearly impossible, so this approach was abandoned in the early 1960s. The weaponized bug approach was replaced by Project 112, which included subprojects where biological agents were “brewed” in fermentation tanks, dried, then sprayed over large areas from planes, boats, buoys or vehicles. Some of these biological agents could be spread by ticks after aerosol releases. Later in the 1960s, as microbiological techniques became more sophisticated, bacteria and viruses were genetically combined or modified in military labs to make the agents more virulent, more undetectable and/or untreatable by enemies.
There were many leak points and accidents in the weaponization process of these ticks and tick-borne diseases. These types of accidents can have long-lasting effects on the environment and human health, and this is why I continue to push for declassification of these decades-old military secrets. Knowledge of which diseases got out in which locations will save lives and research dollars. And treatment strategies for diseases caused by genetically modified organisms may be different than treatments for naturally occurring pathogens. I believe history will judge the tick-borne disease outbreak that began in 1968 as one of the gravest public-health failures of the last century. Early on, public-health authorities failed to recognize the simultaneous emergence of three unusually virulent pathogens – Lyme disease, babesiosis and spotted fever, all carried by arthropod vectors.
This outbreak, now global and accelerating, might have been contained through early tick-control measures and a sustained public-education campaign. Instead, the secrecy surrounding the biological weapons program prevented timely investigation and response, costing countless lives.
More than 50 years later, addressing this crisis will require an extraordinary, coordinated effort. Climate change is enabling disease-carrying ticks to expand into new regions. The medical system remains reluctant to diagnose and treat Lyme disease and co-infections aggressively. And chronic underfunding continues to plague tick-borne disease research. If this outbreak resulted from a US accident, the truth must be exposed. Last month, a critical amendment by Republican Representative Chris Smith to investigate whether the US military weaponized ticks with Lyme disease was included in the National Defense Authorization Act. A media release from Smith’s office stated: “Smith’s amendments have been inspired in part by the explosion of Lyme disease in New Jersey and Kris Newby’s book, Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons.” The amendment and evidence presented in Bitten was also supported by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the National Institutes of Health and FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary.
Still, significant work remains. Over time, the scope of the amendment was narrowed from all insect-borne weapons to tick-related bioweapons only, leaving unresolved allegations of bug-borne weapons use in Korea and Vietnam. In addition, the military retains broad discretion to redact documents under “risk-management” rationales, citing concerns about reuse, reinterpretation, or recombination of biological knowledge that could enable harm today.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 19, 2026 World edition.
Comments