Q uestions raised by Kris Newby in her book Bitten have been amplified by the United States House of Representatives.
On July 11, 2019, the House voted to require the Pentagon to disclose whether the Department of Defense ever experimented with weaponizing disease carrying ticks and whether they had ever been released on the public.
The issue was introduced by New Jersey Congressman Christopher H. Smith, co-chair of the House Lyme Disease Caucus, as an amendment to the fiscal 2020 Defense Authorization Act.
The amendment says the Inspector General “shall conduct a review of whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975.”
If so, the amendment continues, the Inspector General must report to Congress about the scope of the experiments and “whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experiment design.”
According to Smith, he was inspired to write the amendment by “a number of books and articles suggesting that significant research had been done at U.S. government facilities, including Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Plum Island, New York, to turn ticks and other insects into bioweapons.”……Join or login below to continue reading.