I agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate for a second as I've run out of JIRA tickets for the day: If you are a major world superpower, and you want

I agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate for a second as I've run out of JIRA tickets for the day: If you are a major world superpower, and you want to impede other powers from threatening you, but you want to avoid any kind of overt conflict, you might be interested in developing weapons that would slowly, over time, degrade a rival's ability to aspire towards greatness. Secrecy and plausible deniability would be most important, so something that is slow to take hold would be useful, since nobody would be able to trace it back to you. It doesn't even have to do anything in particular, it doesn't even have to target any specific thing. It just has to degrade their capabilities. So if, for example, you had a weapon that you could deploy completely undetected, that would, over the course of 20 years, cause widespread low grade health problems which cause the target nation's expenditures on healthcare to rise by 3 percentage points of gdp... well that degrades their ability to spend that money on military or other threats to your hegemony. That said, I think this particular conspiracy theory is stupid. What one of the above posters said is true: we have too much knowledge of the source and origin of Lyme for this particular one to be true. But, in general, I don't think that _a version_ of conspiracy theories like this are _laughably and obviously_ false