4 ms·

Lyme apparently has been proven to be in the wild since time immemorial and thus the headline is nonsense.[1] [1] https://www.sciencealert.com/congress-is-inve

Lyme apparently has been proven to be in the wild since time immemorial and thus the headline is nonsense.[1] [1] https://www.sciencealert.com/congress-is-investigating-whether-the-us-actually-infected-americans-with-lyme-disease https://www.sciencealert.com/congress-is-investigating-wheth...

dawnofdusk 3y ago
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).
- darkclouds 3y ago
  > 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.
m463 3y ago
smallpox was around before it was first used as a bioweapon.
- unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
  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.
  - darkclouds 3y ago
    > which makes it useless as a bioweapon. 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.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - kyleyeats 3y ago
    It's a great weapon if you want to discourage long-term guerilla warfare, the only real weakness of the reigning modern military forces.
  - thsksbd 3y ago
    As if! A weapon usefulness is strictly determined by its success at achieving the wielder's objective. Perhaps you want to genocide a people over a couple generations -> tailor a venereal disease. Or maybe you want to make them "dumb" so their societies collapse -> weaponize Lyme Or maybe you are an eco-terrorist and want to force ppl to stop eating meat -> spread tics with Alpha-gal syndrome. The list of weapons being surprisingly effective (assault rifle) or a dud (dreadnought) is very long.
strbean 3y ago
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. [0]: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/AEM.01704-09 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/AEM.01704-09 [1]: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/21523-document-09 https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/21523-document-09 (footnote on page 137)
boffinAudio 3y ago
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...

dawnofdusk 3y ago

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).

darkclouds 3y ago
> 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.

m463 3y ago

smallpox was around before it was first used as a bioweapon.

unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
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.
- darkclouds 3y ago
  > which makes it useless as a bioweapon. 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- kyleyeats 3y ago
  It's a great weapon if you want to discourage long-term guerilla warfare, the only real weakness of the reigning modern military forces.
- thsksbd 3y ago
  As if! A weapon usefulness is strictly determined by its success at achieving the wielder's objective. Perhaps you want to genocide a people over a couple generations -> tailor a venereal disease. Or maybe you want to make them "dumb" so their societies collapse -> weaponize Lyme Or maybe you are an eco-terrorist and want to force ppl to stop eating meat -> spread tics with Alpha-gal syndrome. The list of weapons being surprisingly effective (assault rifle) or a dud (dreadnought) is very long.

strbean 3y ago

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. [0]: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/AEM.01704-09 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/AEM.01704-09 [1]: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/21523-document-09 https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/21523-document-09 (footnote on page 137)

boffinAudio 3y ago

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...