A biochemist has claimed to have found evidence that the modern Lyme outbreak in the US could have been the result of CIA bioweapon experiments.
Dr Robert Malone, who helped lay the groundwork for mRNA vaccine technology, made the explosive allegations this week after analyzing declassified government documents, historical records from Cold War biological weapons programs and scientific research on tick-borne diseases.
Malone highlighted experiments in the 1960s that allegedly released more than 282,000 radioactive ticks in Virginia and open-air tick research at Plum Island, a federal laboratory located near the Connecticut community where Lyme disease was first identified.
The experiments were designed to track how disease-carrying ticks spread through the environment, with scientists marking the parasites using radioactive Carbon-14 so their movements could be detected with Geiger counters, a portable, gas-filled instrument.
Malone’s report argued the research was part of a much larger Cold War biological weapons program known as Project 112, which involved dozens of secret tests aimed at studying how insects could be used to spread pathogens.
The program, authorized by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1962, oversaw 134 planned tests and included facilities capable of breeding millions of infected insects each week.
According to the report, the same region where these experiments took place later experienced an unprecedented surge in tick-borne illnesses.
Malone’s claims follow calls from US officials to investigate whether federal agencies experimented with pathogen-laden ticks as tools of war.
In December 2025, an amendment by New Jersey Representative Chris Smith called for a review of military, NIH and USDA projects from 1945 to 1972 involving Spirochaetales and Rickettsiales, bacteria linked to tick-borne diseases.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has also suggested Lyme disease may have originated from a failed US bioweapons program in the 1970s tied to research at Plum Island.
Plum Island is an 840-acre island off the northeastern coast of Long Island, New York, and home to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a government lab used since the 1950s to study infectious animal diseases.
However, the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said Lyme disease was never studied at the facility.
Malone’s report also claims key research into a second tick-borne pathogen may have been suppressed.
He alleged the government sidelined research on a pathogen known as the ‘Swiss Agent,’ which was detected in Lyme patients in Europe during the 1970s.
Malone, an expert in biology who earned multiple degrees at the University of California, also accused the government of suppressing research on a second disease called the ‘Swiss Agent’ found in Lyme patients in Europe in the 1970s.
Unpublished papers from Willy Burgdorfer, the scientist who discovered the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, suggested the pathogen complicated treatment because it triggered persistent symptoms that did not respond to standard antibiotics.
You must be logged in to post a comment.