ON THE ORIGINS OF LYME DISEASE AND WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM IT It was an infamous moment in the history of disease. People living near a secretive government bioweapons lab suddenly start getting sick. The government launches an investigation and declares that they’ve found a new disease. Independent journalists learn that the government was using the nearby lab to conduct gain-of-function experiments on animal-borne illnesses, and speculate that a lab leak might be the cause of the outbreak. The corporate media and expert class immediately spring into action and declare that the lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory. You may be thinking that this is a summary of the SARS‑CoV‑2 lab leak story from 2020. In fact, it describes the outbreak of Lyme disease in the 1970s.