I was going to throw this in the politics meme thread but thought it was worth it’s own thread so we could discuss it a bit without it getting buried in memes.
Half watching the confirmation hearings for RFK yesterday and one of the interactions that caught me off guard was Senator Michael Bennet asking RFK if he once said lyme disease was a “highly likely military engineered bioweapon”, to which RFK responded, “I probably did”. I thought, wow, that’s quite a thing to say at a hearing, I wonder why he would have said such a thing… Which of course sent me down the rabbit hole.
I did not know, for instance, that lyme disease got it’s name from Lyme, CT, a small town in Connecticut that was the first place the disease was identified in 1975 because of an outbreak.
I also did not know that Plum Island is home to the US Government Animal Disease Center, and just happens to be a stones throw across the Long Island Sound away from Lyme, CT.
What were some of the things the government was up to back then? Oh, just researching ways to use insects to spread a disease somewhere like Cuba (after the Bay of Pigs failed) so we could decimate their sugar production by discretely infecting the laborers in the fields using insects covertly dropped in the fields.
