That is an interesting question. The truth has been obscured for decades. This spring I have been reading two books on the subject. Lab 257 by Michael Christopher Carroll, and The Sleeper Agent by A.W. Finnegan. My previous conspiracy-theory understanding was that Lyme Disease leaked out of the bioweapons lab on Plum Island (off the north eastern tip of Long Island), with the first outbreak taking hold across the gap in Old Lyme Connecticut.
However, declassified documents indicate a darker truth - that Lyme Disease was deliberately released by Erich Traub in the early 1950s. Who was Erich Traub? He was the Nazi regime's top bioweapons researcher during WWII, operating from the German island of Insel Riems. After the war ended the U.S. Army imported him to America under the premise that it is better to have him working for us than the enemy. But, if the declassified documents bear out, Traub was a double-agent working for the Soviets. In the aftermath of WWII the Soviets developed the doctrine of soft kill biological weapons. The idea was to soften up the American population with chronic disease and its associated costs. The Soviets tricked British Intelligence into tricking the American military into weaponizing black-legged ticks to transmit Lyme Disease, the release of which was directly orchestrated by Erich Traub on the ground on Plumb Island, overseen through an intermediary double agent operating out of Britain.
"It [Lyme Disease] was being spread by ticks before it was publicly acknowledged, and the Plum Island experiments had been directed and overseen by one of our allies in British Intelligence, a man named Donald Maclean, a confirmed double agent for Soviet Intelligence when he defected to Moscow in 1951." - The Sleeper Agent, pg. 145
That is an interesting question. The truth has been obscured for decades. This spring I have been reading two books on the subject. Lab 257 by Michael Christopher Carroll, and The Sleeper Agent by A.W. Finnegan. My previous conspiracy-theory understanding was that Lyme Disease leaked out of the bioweapons lab on Plum Island (off the north eastern tip of Long Island), with the first outbreak taking hold across the gap in Old Lyme Connecticut.
However, declassified documents indicate a darker truth - that Lyme Disease was deliberately released by Erich Traub in the early 1950s. Who was Erich Traub? He was the Nazi regime's top bioweapons researcher during WWII, operating from the German island of Insel Riems. After the war ended the U.S. Army imported him to America under the premise that it is better to have him working for us than the enemy. But, if the declassified documents bear out, Traub was a double-agent working for the Soviets. In the aftermath of WWII the Soviets developed the doctrine of soft kill biological weapons. The idea was to soften up the American population with chronic disease and its associated costs. The Soviets tricked British Intelligence into tricking the American military into weaponizing black-legged ticks to transmit Lyme Disease, the release of which was directly orchestrated by Erich Traub on the ground on Plumb Island, overseen through an intermediary double agent operating out of Britain.