From “Forgotten History”
During the Cold War, the United States explored whether insects could be used as weapons. Fleas and mosquitoes were tested in military programs designed to study dispersal, survivability, and battlefield use, part of a disturbing chapter in America’s biological warfare history.
Those programs have fueled decades of suspicion about what else may have been studied behind closed doors. That suspicion later attached itself to Lyme disease, especially after lawmakers called for reviews into whether ticks or tick-borne pathogens were ever examined in Cold War biowarfare research.
But suspicion is not proof. Public health authorities state that Lyme disease is a tick-borne bacterial illness caused by Borrelia burgdorferi, and experts have argued the bacterium existed before the lab-origin theory now popular online. This is the story of what the government really did, what remains unclear, and why the mystery still refuses to die.