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This article addresses the narrow claim that the U.S. House of Representatives ordered an investigation into whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks or insects as biological weapons. This claim is true: As first reported by Roll Call on July 15, 2019, the stipulation was added in an amendment to the 2020 Defense Authorization Act and approved with a voice vote on July 11: To understand the rationale for such a move, a brief history of U.S. biological weapons research (and its associated controversies) is required. The United States began biological weapons testing during World War I, when the U.S. investigated — but did not use — ricin as a potential weapon. Though President Richard Nixon banned offensive biological weapons research and development in 1969, the period following World War II saw significant experimentation with the use of germs in warfare, primarily as a way to potentially disrupt enemy agriculture, as described by the non-partisan Nuclear Threat Initiative: Plum Island, also mentioned in Smith’s amendment, played a role in the U.S. biological weapons research as well. An island off the eastern end of the coast of Long Island fully owned by the U.S. government, Plum Island has been under civilian control as a Department of Agriculture research station since 1954. In 1993, reports surfaced that some biological weapons research had occurred on Plum Island in the past, as reported in a 1998 New York Times story: Among the most extreme claims related to U.S. biological weapons research are those that suggest that outbreaks of the tick-borne Lyme disease in the late 60s and early 70s — the first widespread appearances of the condition — and its subsequent spread across much of the nation were the result of the United States government, either intentionally or accidentally. Lyme disease is caused by a bacterium that can live inside ticks and spread to animals and humans. This argument was most recently made in the book Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by science writer Kris Newby. Though the idea predates this book, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) has cited Bitten as a significant inspiration for the amendment. What that book says it brings to light is that the U.S. military has conducted thousands of experiments exploring the use of ticks and tick-borne diseases as biological weapons, and in some cases, these agents escaped into the environment. The book also suggests there was a deliberate release or an accident involving biological weapons experimentation with unintended consequences to the environment. Newby suggests a release of ticks with a transmittable disease in them could have introduced Lyme disease into America. She also suggests that the medically controversial condition of chronic or persistent Lyme disease could be elucidated by records exposing what kind of testing may have been conducted on this bacterial agent. Ultimately, Bitten rests on three assertions. First, that U.S. researchers injected transmittable diseases into ticks and other insects. Second, that the first major outbreak of what we now call Lyme Disease in the late '60s and '70s happened after the release of infected ticks into the general population. And third, that the agent being experimented with was — or was related to — the bacterial agent now known to cause Lyme Disease: Borrelia burgdorferi. Evidence for each of these pillars comes for the most part from a single source — the U.S. National Institutes of Health scientist for whom that bacterial species is named: William Burgdorfer. Interpreting a video recording of a 2013 interview made of Burgdorfer for a film, Newby writes: These claims are controversial, and the testimony of Burgdorfer collected by Newby — at the end of his life as he was suffering from Parkinson's and diabetes — is inconclusive, as conceded by Newby herself in the book’s epilogue: The primary problem with the notion that Lyme disease was not a naturally occurring germ is that the occurrence of Borrelia bacteria living inside ticks goes back to a time at least millions of years before humans existed to insert the bacteria into ticks. In 2014, for example, scientists found a 15-million-year-old tick fossil found in a chunk of amber from the Dominican Republic that showed evidence of being infected with Borrelia bacteria. The existence of Borrelia bacteria in the northeast United States, similarly, predates the U.S. biological weapons program. A study conducted by Yale researchers, who compared B. burgdorferi genomes from different areas collected over a 30-year period, calculated that the bacterium has been in North America longer than humans — at least 60,000 years. This lends support to the more scientifically accepted view about the emergence of Lyme disease: that it had long been dormant in the United States until ecological and economic changes produced conditions that allowed its spread to flourish, as explained in a Yale School of Public Health report on that research effort: The broader question of whether the United States ever experimented on ticks in general, however, has independent support outside of Burgdorfer’s vague claims. In a 2016 interview with the academic journal American Entomologist, Georgia State University entomologist James H. Oliver, who served at Fort Detrick in the '50s working on biological weapons, stated: As reported in Roll Call, Smith’s amendment would require a report on this topic from the Department of Defense Inspector General: The next step for Smith’s initiative is to reconcile the House version of the 2020 Defense Authorization with the Senate version, which does not presently contain such an amendment.
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