Excerpt from “Biological Warfare Experiment on American Citizens Results in Spreading Pandemic!”
Published in the Public Health Alert (September, 2011)
Allen Steere: Psychopath At Large
The Contribution of the CDC’s and Yale’s "Best and Brightest" to the Synthetic Lyme Disease Epidemic
Allen Steere's "Tuskegee Study" Equivalent
Monitoring The Immune Response of Untreated Lyme Victims for Vaccine Development
Vaccine Manufacturer Thanks Allen Steere For His Work In Bringing Its Disastrous Lyme Vaccine To Market
(Vaccine was licensed to SmithKline by Steere's employer after he established the "non-treatment" model of treating Lyme)
New York Times Refers To Steere's Expertise in Developing Lymerix Vaccine
(neglects to inform that it was based on Tuskegee-style research and induced the very symptoms it was supposed to prevent)
# # # #
“Never would I have deemed it possible that a group of medical people would work so vigorously and with such malice against a group of desperately ill people …. But, here it is.”
–Lyme victim/activist (requested anonymity for fear of reprisal)
# # # #
Careful investigation supports the theory that the epidemic of ignorance and corresponding lack of treatment has been perpetuated by the CDC as part of Phase II of the deadly Tuskegee Experiment.
Even worse, Phase II is being carried out by the CDC with the aid of its secretive biological warfare group. Where the Phase I experiment denied isolated patients from seeing non-CDC-approved doctors,[1] Phase II involves preventing doctors from treating patients (or even providing an accurate diagnosis--recall the Tuskegee diagnosis of syphilis as “bad blood”[2]) outside of CDC-approved guidelines published by a medical society known as the IDSA (Infectious Disease Society of America), on an international basis.
The CDC’s own history of the Tuskegee Experiment describes how the CDC worked with prominent medical societies to gain support for the multi-decade experiment in medical malpractice:
“1969 CDC reaffirms need for study and gains local medical societies' support (AMA and NMA chapters officially support continuation of study).”
So the national agency that was supposed to be protecting the public from a deadly disease was actually in favor of letting it go untreated for experimental reasons and worked with prestigious medical societies to that end!
Tuskegee Phase II is being conducted in a similar manner, including the direct assistance of prominent medical societies through IDSA treatment guidelines[3] enforced by CDC insiders, who are regularly found to be on the payroll of the pharmaceuticals and insurance industries--both of which can profit enormously[4] [5] by not treating the many symptoms[6] caused by the disease.
“One way drug companies have marketed their products is by funding the implementation of guidelines…”
--Civil Action No. 08 CA 11318 DPW
The CDC has used the non-specificity of Lyme symptoms (except for those fortunate enough to manifest the Bull’s Eye rash at the onset of infection[7]) as an excuse to mislabel the disease and thereby prevent effective diagnosis and treatment.[8] [9] As Dr. Brian Fallon summarized:
“Incorrectly labeling these patients as having a functional illness, such as depression, hypochondriasis or a somatization disorder, may result in a delay in the initiation of antibiotic treatment. Such delay may lead to further dissemination of the infection, and in some cases severe disability and possibly chronic neurologic damage.”
The further dissemination of symptoms is highly profitable for pharmaceutical companies, while treating the root cause of the disease with off-patent antibiotics is not.[10]
"Most blockbuster drugs got that way not by curing people but by treating chronic conditions … that can require a lifetime of prescription refills."
--Michael Gianturco, Fortune
The Steere Camp’s War on Lyme Patients
Even more alarming than CDC complicity in spreading the epidemic[11] is the overlap between government personnel in biowarfare and regulatory agencies and private medical societies, universities and corporations involved in fueling the epidemic.
Notably, the lead author of the controversial IDSA Lyme disease treatment guidelines, pharmaceuticals consultant Dr. Gary Wormser, in his spare time lectures as a biowarfare expert.[12]
Pharmaceuticals consultant Allen Steere, influential researcher and co-author of the guidelines, is a CDC/EIS biowarfare officer. He also worked for the private Yale Corporation[13] that worked closely with the biowarfare tick lab across the Long Island Sound from Lyme, Connecticut, and which also controlled the initial response to the Lyme Epidemic in the Northeast.[14]
It was Steere’s laughable ideology that antibiotics were ineffective against Lyme disease that was used from day one to deny patients this treatment.
The geographical clustering of the arthritis cases in the initial Lyme outbreak,[15] along with seasonal correlation of the outbreaks (arthritis symptoms typically increased in late summer and early fall), made it difficult to ignore the likelihood that insects were spreading the disease. Judith Mensch was a Connecticut housewife who, like Polly Murray, had voiced her concerns about the spreading arthritis epidemic to local health authorities (and even the CDC). She mentioned to Steere the first time they met that she suspected ticks might be the source of the disease.[16] As part of the initial investigation into the mysterious epidemic, Yale sent out bulletins to the local community warning residents to be on the lookout for insects that might be spreading the disease.
While Steere was still prescribing toxic levels of “aspirin therapy” [17] for Murray’s desperately ill family, a man named Joe Dowhan walked into Steere’s office and presented him with the “smoking gun.” Dowhan had not only been bitten by a tick and suffered from Lyme symptoms. He had saved the tick, which turned out to be from the Ixodes Scapularis species.[18]
This vital clue would allow Steere to become famous by publishing a paper documenting the transmission of the mystery disease by Ixodid ticks.[19] A case can be made for the argument that Steere used the prestige offered by this development to tragic effect over the ensuing years.
Indeed, Steere’s institutional ties gave him undeserved influence as an “expert” on Lyme disease. Unfortunately, Steere’s expertise seems geared toward finding reasons for why patients didn’t have Lyme disease and therefore didn’t need treatment. The New York Times summarized Steere’s history:
“As the world's foremost expert on the illness, however, Steere did not believe many of them had Lyme disease at all, but something else … and he had refused to treat them with antibiotics. Many doctors and insurance companies had followed his lead, and in turn, hordes of patients had started to stalk him.” [20]
Over the years, this so-called Steere-camp group has invented a non-existent Lyme virus[21] and a non-existent species of Ixodid tick[22] to justify the denial of antibiotics[23] to an expanding group of Lyme victims. (This camp currently searches for an auto-immune mechanism[24] which would explain chronic Lyme disease symptoms independent of an ongoing infection that might be cured through antibiotics[25] instead of treated with a lifetime of pharmaceuticals products.)
"To sum up the therapy of Lyme arthritis (Lyme disease), it appears that at this point only symptomatic treatment is feasible…"
--Allen Steere et al., Hospital Practice 143 (April 1978)
This fraudulent Steere-camp ideology has been institutionalized in the highly controversial, one-size-fits-all IDSA Lyme Disease Treatment Guidelines.[xxvi] These “guidelines” were so draconian they were investigated by the Connecticut Attorney General, who found “undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists.”[27] [28]
Steere originally worked for the corporation (Yale) that developed and licensed the first Lyme vaccine, Lymerix. He not only established the mythology that has kept his patients from getting effective treatment so that the vaccine could be developed and marketed, but he also personally oversaw the vaccine trials and associated tests[29] run by the company that licensed the vaccine from his previous employer.
Steere admitted in one technical paper how having blood samples from untreated controls throughout the progression of the disease was beneficial in mapping out the long-term immune response to the disease (this was critical for developing a vaccine to mimic the antibody response against the disease-agent):
“In two previous studies, we used a unique set of serial serum samples from untreated patients monitored throughout the course of Lyme disease in the late 1970s prior to the use of antibiotic therapy for this illness. Only with this set of serum samples is it possible to determine how the antibody responses to B. burgdorferi develop and change during the various stages of the illness.”[30]
At the beginning of the epidemic, Steere systematically ridiculed the notion that antibiotics were effective against the Lyme disease bacterium[31] that he erroneously assumed[32] was a virus.[33] His group at Yale said the same thing,[34] even as doctors around him were successfully treating patients with antibiotics.[34]
"We remain skeptical that antibiotic therapy helps..."
--Allen Steere, et. al.
When they could no longer deny the obvious beneficial effects of antibiotics, Steere’s camp suddenly switched to the other extreme, claiming that antibiotics were amazingly effective and therefore only extremely short courses of antibiotics would completely cure Lyme disease. The common thread in these two contradictory ideologies is that they are both rationales for denying patients effective, long-term antibiotic treatment.
These positions allowed Steere et al to conduct what he later termed as a “natural experiment” in which the deadly symptoms (“sequelae”) of the disease could be monitored over the long term (as the “optimal antibiotic therapies were still evolving”), just as they had been in the CDC’s Tuskegee Experiment with a similar, but less complicated, syphilis spirochete. As Steere, who played an active part in discrediting “optimal antibiotic therapies” that other doctors with far more limited resources than Yale’s finest had managed to develop,[36] shockingly admitted in 1994:
“We studied persons residing in an endemic coastal area of Massachusetts who were previously infected with B. burgdorferi in the early 1980s. They contracted Lyme disease while the clinical syndromes and optimal antibiotic therapies were still evolving, which offered a "natural experiment" for the identification of risk factors for Lyme disease sequelae.”[37]
In her book, Lyme research pioneer Polly Murray hinted at Steere’s agenda in not treating Lyme disease, which was consistent with Tuskegee-like monitoring[38] of the progression of the damage induced by the disease:
“He told us that he felt that it was very important for him to follow all his patients on a continuous basis in order to know the stages of the disease.” [39]
Steere even took measures to ensure that the fraudulent ideology[40] he created to maintain untreated controls was enforced. He personally testified against doctors who defied his carefully designed disease perpetuation paradigm. As related by the New York Times:
“To patients with Lyme disease perhaps Dr. Steere's most audacious gesture came in 1994 when he testified at a board of medicine hearing against Dr. Joseph Natole of Saginaw, Mich., who was treating patients for chronic Lyme disease. Because Dr. Natole had so many people on intravenous antibiotics, authorities charged him with medical malpractice and insurance fraud. Dr. Natole was ultimately stripped of his medical license for six months.” [41]
Steere has not only helped destroy the lives of Lyme doctors. He has systematically ridiculed Lyme patients over the years--especially women.[42] Echoing the manner in which Polly Murray was initially treated by the medical community,[43] Steere has taken the position that many Lyme patients want to be diagnosed with Lyme disease. He was quoted in the New York Times:
''I suppose Lyme disease is one of the few diseases that some people want to have, because it's defined. I think it's very difficult to have something that is not well understood.''
On top of all this, Steere is a member of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the CDC agency chartered with responding to biowarfare agents released on U.S. soil, as well as developing vaccines against them. (The EIS has boasted of its history in promoting vaccines.[44])
At this point, I should add that I do not think Steere has any power on his own. He, and other Ivy League Lyme “experts” like him, are simply being used as manufactured “thought-leaders” on behalf of the pharma-biowar establishment to sell profit-friendly Tuskegee policy to the public. His undue influence reflects no expertise whatsoever (other than milking government grants to reach the same conclusion year after year), just the reality that far too much unaccountable influence rests in too few hands at the top of the economic ladder.
“The controversy in the Lyme disease research is a shameful affair. And I say that because the whole thing is politically tainted. Money goes to people that have for the past 30 years produced the same thing: nothing.”
--Willy Burgdorfer [name-sake of Lyme bacterium]
Footnotes:
[1] http://www.cdc. gov/nchstp/ od/tuskegee/ time.htm
[2] Lyme patients are also diagnosed with the equivalent of “bad blood.” If they are fortunate enough to finally find the cause of their ongoing symptoms (depression, arthritis, chronic fatigue, cognitive impairment, etc.) and receive some semblance of treatment, they are often labeled with “Post Lyme Syndrome.” This diagnosis allows the underlying cause to be named but not treated since it is assumed to be due to a noninfectious source—the original causative infection being magically cleared by the official short-term antibiotic regimens recommended by “experts” who, in the early days, claimed antibiotics had no effect at all on the disease.
[3] Miguel Perez-Lizano summarized the simple-minded IDSA position on Lyme disease treatment with short courses of antibiotics:
“According to the IDSA Lyme guideline authors, regardless of how long one has had the infection, how entrenched it is in immune protected sites or how disabling it is, a short course of antibiotics will eradicate the disease from the body. This has never been proven. Numerous scientific studies have shown IDSA‘s claims to be false. … according to IDSA, after a few weeks of antibiotic treatment a person is cured of Lyme disease. Then, suddenly, ongoing symptoms are due to some other unidentified problem which can be managed with ongoing drug treatment. IDSA Lyme guideline authors have known financial ties with pharmaceutical companies, making perfect financial sense for this false claim of cure. It is only the undeserved clout of the CDC and IDSA and the gullibility of the media that give this incredible information any credibility.”
[4] Insurance companies profit by denying reimbursement to patients for expensive antibiotic treatments. In 1993, the New York Times estimated that the cost of long-term antibiotics was $100,000 per year (it is probably much higher currently): “Although some doctors prescribe long-term, high-dose intravenous antibiotics, most do not. And many insurers refuse to pay for these long courses, which cost over $100,000 annually, citing scientists who do not believe that extended therapy is necessary. Politicians at both the state and Federal levels, including the Labor and Human Resources Committee, are holding hearings in part to address patients' complaints that the practice is unfair.” Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Lyme Disease: Does It Really Linger?,” New York Times, Aug. 24, 1993.
[5] Treating symptoms can be far more profitable than treating the underlying disease itself. According to Michael Gianturco, president of Princeton portfolios, "Most blockbuster drugs got that way not by curing people but by treating chronic conditions, such as ulcers or depression, that can require a lifetime of prescription refills." “SmithKline’s Promising Vaccines,” Forbes, December 1997.
[6] Lyme disease has been called “The Great Imitator” because in addition to arthritis and depression, victims may develop symptoms similar to multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, Parkinson’s disease and ALS. Miguel Perez-Lizano (June 2010) summarized the potential profits at stake in treating these symptoms:
“The market for symptomatic treatment of Lyme disease through pharmaceuticals is undoubtedly immense. The pharmaceutical market for arthritis alone generated $15.9 billion in revenues in 2008.
Worldwide sales of Parkinson's disease therapies will increase modestly from $2.5 billion in 2008 to $2.8 billion in 2018 in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and Japan
“According to PharmaLive, pharmaceutical industry experts expect the fibromyalgia drug market to quadruple to $2 billion by 2016.
“Leonard Sigal, a rheumatologist and contributor to the IDSA Lyme guidelines, is heavily involved with promoting fibromyalgia as an alternative diagnosis. Sigal, a former academician, now works for a pharmaceutical company He has also testified in legal cases, on behalf of insurers, against Lyme disease doctors and victims.”
[7] Even if the characteristic Bull’s-Eye rash is observed, the CDC demands that it be of a certain size and appearance to count as Lyme disease. And even then the patient may have to prove that he is from a “Lyme endemic state” for the case to count in the CDC’s statistics, which are manipulated to deny the scope of the epidemic in order to deny treatment. If these criteria are not met, the disease may be labeled something other than Lyme, making it even more difficult for the patient (and future patients from the “nonendemic” state) to get treated. This occurred in the era of the Dr. Ed Masters’ investigation of Lyme disease in the Southeast. At the time, part of the CDC criteria for diagnosing Lyme disease was an EM rash greater than 5 centimeters. Even patients who had this rash, but did not test positive (tests are based on one strain out of hundreds of the disease), were not diagnosed with Lyme disease because they did not live in a Lyme endemic area. According to Jonathon Edlow: “In these early cases, blood testing was not a part of the case-finding definition. So using the CDC’s own definition, physicians in Georgia and Missouri reported that they were seeing Lyme disease. But because the cases were in a nonendemic area, the CDC tossed out these purely clinical diagnoses.” Bull’s Eye, p. 159.
[8] Dr. Masters, along with the Missouri state epidemiologist (H. Denny Donnell), worked with the CDC investigating the cases of suspected Lyme disease in Missouri. Edlow summarized the predictable outcome of the “investigation”: “Although Masters and Donnell and the CDC were studying the same phenomenon, they arrived at vastly different conclusions.”
The CDC claimed the disease, which also produced a Bull’s-Eye rash and other Lyme-similar symptoms, was not Lyme disease. They ended up calling it Southern Tick Associated Rash (STARI).
Ultimately, the two independent authors working with the CDC on the investigation of STARI disease in the Southeast were so incensed they demanded that their names be removed from the final paper summarizing the study. As the author of Bull’s Eye reported, the authors “believed that the CDC had approached the investigation with a preconceived conclusion and then made the data fit that conclusion.” The same could be said about the CDC’s ongoing investigation of Lyme disease from the beginning.
Masters did not pull any punches in relating how the CDC intentionally derailed his investigation: “The most serious and disappointing circumstance was when I caught the CDC red-handed trying to... masquerade opinion as data supported by objective and provable facts.”
[9] With respect to the national level, the under-reporting of Lyme cases affects the overall attention Lyme disease gets and therefore the amount of money and effort that is spent on fighting the disease. According to Edlow, commenting on the situation in Missouri:
“The implications of whether Lyme disease exists in the South are important. For instance, should cases from these southern states count in the official CDC numbers? These official counts can affect the number of research dollars or public education campaigns that are earmarked for Lyme disease.”
[10] The emphasis on treatment of symptoms over treating the underlying cause of disease is an increasing trend. As noted by Wortis and Stone in 1992:
“The overall influence of the industry is to emphasize drug treatment at the expense of other modalities: psychotherapy, social approaches, nutritional, herbal and natural remedies, rehabilitation, general hygienic measures, nonpatentable drugs or other alternative approaches. It focuses attention on disorders that are treatable by drugs, and may promote overdiagnosis. It reinforces the practice of dealing with disease by treatment of symptoms, and diverts interest from prevention.”
Wortis J., and Stone, A. “The Addiction to Drug Companies. Biol. Psychiatry 32:847-849, 1992
[11] Upon close examination, the IDSA’s recommendations are in fact tailor-made to perpetuate the disease under the pretext of treatment. This is because short-term treatments of the Lyme disease spirochete—a “pleomorphic pathogen”—can cause it to change into a form that allows it to evade the immune response and antibiotics. The disease may appear to be cured, while merely going into remission—only to re-emerge at a later date, similar to the late stages of disease caused by the syphilis spirochete.
[12] One of his biowarfare presentations is entitled: “How Germs Become Weapons—Recognizing Agents —Treating Patients.”
[13] Yale works closely as a research arm for start-up and established pharmaceutical companies. It has cloaked its massive endowment fund in secrecy, so that the extent of its investments with pharmaceutical companies cannot be investigated by the public.
[14] “Yale scientists played a pivotal role in the discovery of Lyme disease and are credited as the first to recognize, name, characterize and treat the affliction.” Elbaum-Garfinkle S., “Close to Home: A History of Yale and Lyme Disease,” Yale J Biol Med 2011 06; 84 (2): 103-8.
[15] The three towns that initially had high rates of Lyme arthritis were along the eastern bank of the Connecticut river. Bulls-Eye, p. 40.
[16] Polly Murray had also noted this possibility in her notes, as early as 1965. Bull’s-Eye, p. 81.
[17] Members of Polly Murray’s family were prescribed up to 13 aspirin per day under Steere’s care.
[18] Murray, p. 157.
[19] Steere AC, Broderick TF, Malawista SE, “Erythema chronicum migrans and Lyme arthritis: epidemiologic evidence for a tick vector,” Am J Epidemiol., 1978 Oct;108(4):312-21.
[20] “Stalking Dr. Steere Over Lyme Disease,” New York Times, June 17, 2001.
[21] The fact that the organism was difficult to detect in the blood and difficult to grow in cultures (even after it was identified) allowed Steere and his colleagues to continue to pursue his erroneous hypothesis that the disease was caused by a virus. Holding to the virus theory provided a justification for discrediting the use of antibiotics since they don’t affect viral infections. This act in itself wasted years in the development and dissemination of effective treatment protocols. As Jonathan Edlow summarized:
“If the cause were clearly known to be a virus, then antibiotics available in the late 1970s would have been ineffective. If on the other hand the causative agent were shown to be a bacterium, then the imperative to treat would be greater.” [emphasis added] Bull’s-Eye, p. 117.
[22] The name of this invented tick species was Ixodes dammini. Jonathan Edlow summarized the impact of this imaginary tick species on Lyme diagnosis:
“This change in nomenclature was not without its effect for it meant that doctors could not ‘legitimately’ make a diagnosis of Lyme disease in states where the vector was not found. If I. Dammini (only prevalent in the Northeast) were a separate species from I. Scapularis (whose northernmost range is the middle Atlantic states) then doctors would not be able to diagnose Lyme disease in the southern states.” Jonathan Edlow, Bull’s-Eye, p. 117.
[23] The Steere Camp maintains a similar position today, insisting that the Ixodes species is the only one capable of spreading Lyme disease in the US. Victims of Lyme disease in the southeast, spread by the Lone Star tick, are paying the price for this position.
[24] Steere has pursued the hypothesis that the long-term damage resulting from the agent he proved incapable of diagnosing and treating effectively was from the action of the victim’s immune system, not the infectious agent itself. As he summarized in one paper: “We believe that the later manifestations of Lyme disease—neurologic, cardiac, and joint—are immune mediated.” Bull’s-Eye, p. 191.
[25] Dr. Joseph Burrascano summarized the quality of Steere’s care for his Lyme patients/experimental subjects: "Patients come to us after Steere and his colleagues deem them treated and cured, and we are able to demonstrate clearly, through biopsies and cultures and DNA probes, that they were still infected." “Stalking Dr. Steere,” New York Times.
[26] Dr. Leo Galland has summarized the effects the IDSA guidelines are having on the public: “The Infectious Diseases Society of America has stated that three weeks of antibiotics will cure over 95 percent of people with Lyme disease. But many experts have challenged these treatment guidelines as being inaccurate. As I see it, even if the Infectious Diseases Society of America's guidelines are accurate, they are grossly inadequate: A failure rate approaching 5 percent for a curable disease is unacceptable.
“…Let's check the math: At present there are about 30,000 new cases of Lyme disease reported to state health departments each year. Everyone acknowledges that under-reporting is the rule, so that there are undoubtedly many more new cases in the U.S. every year. The annual incidence is probably more than 100,000 new cases each year. Lyme disease has been with us for at least 30 years. So, even if the failure rate of the IDSA guidelines is only 1 to 4 percent, as claimed, there are tens of thousands of Americans living with incompletely treated Lyme disease.” “Lyme Disease Symptoms: Key Facts About This Mysterious Illness,” Huffington Post, June 8, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-galland-md/lyme-disease-symptoms_b_876096.html
[27] Blumenthal summarized the results of his investigation into the process behind the drafting of the Lyme treatment guidelines:
“My office uncovered undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists. The IDSA's guideline panel improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising serious questions about whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science.”
Blumenthal added,
“The IDSA's 2006 Lyme disease guideline panel undercut its credibility by allowing individuals with financial interests -- in drug companies, Lyme disease diagnostic tests, patents and consulting arrangements with insurance companies -- to exclude divergent medical evidence and opinion.”
[28] As it turns out, the IDSA panel that drafted the Lyme treatment guidelines was not only riddled with conflicts of interest but also with military agents of the CDC’s EIS. This might explain why the panel’s “voluntary” treatment guidelines were immediately picked up by the CDC’s website. It may also explain why the board’s increasingly narrow-minded treatment protocols have been used to target doctors for elimination because they choose to treat Lyme disease according to the best-known methods instead of according to the IDSA’s “voluntary guidelines.”
[29] As the employees of the vaccine licensee revealed in one paper: “All of the testing was performed by one central laboratory (that of Dr. Allen Steere), and the challenge was to provide the investigator with the results within 48 hours.” “Specific Issues in the Design and Implementation of an Efficacy Trial for a Lyme Disease Vaccine,” François Meurice , Dennis Parenti, Darrick Fu and David S. Krause, Clinical Infectious Disease, Vol. 25, Supplement 1. Basic and Clinical Approaches to Lyme Disease: A Lyme Disease Foundation Symposium (July 1997), pp. S71-S75.
[30] Evren Akin,, Gail L. McHugh, Richard A. Flavell, Erol Fikrig, and Allen C. Steere, “The Immunoglobulin (IgG) Antibody Response to OspA and OspB Correlates with Severe and Prolonged Lyme Arthritis and the IgG Response to P35 Correlates with Mild and Brief Arthritis Infection and Immunity,” January 1999, p. 173-181, Vol. 67, No. 1; Robert A. Kalish, John M. Leong and Allen Steere, “Early and Late Antibody Responses to Full-Length and TruncatedConstructs of Outer Surface Protein A of Borrelia burgdorferi in Lyme Disease,” Infection and Immunity June 1995, p. 2228–2235.
[31] "We remain skeptical that antibiotic therapy helps..." Allen Steere, et. al. “Erythema Chronicum Migrans and Lyme Arthritis: The Enlarging Clinical Spectrum,” Annals of Internal Medicine, June 1977.
[32] Steere’s justification of how he completely missed the bacterial nature of Lyme disease: "Viruses are hard to find, whereas bacteria are large and should be sitting there in the synovial tissue. We thought we'd have seen a bacterium in the tissue, if that's what it was."
[33] Steere somehow missed the classic Jarisch-Herxheimer reactions in the patients he eventually reluctantly treated with antibiotics. Observing this well-known response in his patients would have told him the precise nature of the bacteria that was causing the disease, the source of which he was supposedly investigating. This well-known Herxheimer reaction was fundamental evidence that the infectious organism was a spirochete—the type of bacterial agent that causes Lyme—and not a virus. This important connection was made by a visiting CDC colleague (George Schmid) during a 1-week collaborative trip to Steere's clinic, after the very first patient of Steere's that he saw described her classic reaction to antibiotics. Bull’s-Eye, p. 119.
[34] Steere and his colleagues at Yale ignored decades of published data on a bacteria-induced rash similar to the one that often precedes Lyme arthritis. They arrogantly refused to admit that antibiotics were effective at all in treating the bourgeoning Lyme disease epidemic. A letter that the Yale Investigative Group sent to the Lyme victim community (May 18, 1976) stated: "The best treatment for the usually mild symptoms of arthritis is not yet clear. At present, we suggest taking only aspirin during symptomatic periods." Jonathan Edlow, Bull's-Eye.
[35] As a Navy doctor quoted in the book Bull’s-Eye related: “Allen [Steere] at that time was very adamant about antibiotics having absolutely no role in the disease. We left with some feelings of animosity at that point. And the academic people made us feel like we obviously didn’t know what we were doing. And we knew from our observations that we did.”
[36] As far back as the 1950s, German and Swiss doctors had demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating the skin conditions and joint problems induced by a disease similar to Lyme disease. They did this by injecting themselves with tissue samples from sick patients. They were able to demonstrate not only that that telltale rash was infectious but that it could also be subsequently treated with antibiotics. Dr. Klaus Weber, a German dermatologist summarized: “[A]ll of these experiences together left no doubt to dermatologists in Europe that antibiotic treatment was indicated for these conditions; this was standard practice!” By 1970, Dr. Rudolph Scrimenti, an American dermatologist from Wisconsin had already diagnosed and successfully treated (with antibiotics) a case of what appeared to be a type of Lyme disease (the patient had the tell-tale Erythema Migrans rash). This case was published in 1970, in the Archives of Dermatology. As Jonathan Edlow relates in Bull’s-Eye, “Scrimenti promptly treated this patient with penicillin. The patient improved and remained free of recurrences for the next twenty years.” Scrimenti was successful because he had familiarized himself with the European literature on the topic and acted on it, rather than superimpose his own erroneous model of the disease on his patients. Bull’s-Eye, pp. 51, 52, 68-71.
[37] Steere and company systematically monitored the rheumatologic and neurologic disease symptoms in untreated patients: “We ascertained the prevalence of persistent symptoms in unselected patients with a history of Lyme disease; ascertained their rheumatologic, neurologic, and health status outcomes; and identified potential risk factors for these long-term sequelae.” Allen C. Steere, et. al., “The Long-Term Clinical Outcomes of Lyme Disease: A Population-based Retrospective Cohort Study,” Ann Intern Med. 1994;121:560-567; http://www.annals.org/content/121/8/560.full.pdf+html
[38] Steere even published a paper describing the similarities between Lyme and syphilis (caused by the spirochete Treponema pallidum)—the subject of a previous CDC “natural experiment”:
“The immune response to Treponema pallidum in syphilis has similarities to those in Lyme disease.
• During the first several weeks of leutic infection, the immune response is suppressed, and the antibody response is restricted to a few polypeptides. In tertiary syphilis, as in Lyme disease, specific IgM has been detected after the development of specific IgG, although the responsible antigens have not been identified in syphilis.
• Similarly, in certain chronic parasitic infections, immunosuppression occurs in the illness, and specific IgM responses have been detected in the presence ofspecific IgG. No comparable information is available regarding infection with the relapsing fever borrelia.
• In both syphilis and Lyme disease, serodiagnostic tests often give false-negative results early in the illness.”
[39] Polly Murray, The Widening Circle, (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1996), p. 151.
[40] One doctor summarized her frustration with Steere’s ideology: “As a physician trained in an academic institution, I find the defensiveness, denial and refusal of Dr. Steere and his colleagues to recognize what is, rather than what fits their disease paradigm, both frightening and destructive.” Murray, p. 239. -Deborah Amdur, letter to the New York Times (1993)
[41] Steere served on two committees that published guidelines used to deny patients effective antibiotic treatments and published numerous papers denying the existence of chronic Lyme disease (a position he had earlier defended), claiming Lyme disease was hard to catch and easy to cure, and he has been active in the effort to destroy doctors who were treating it.
[42] In a Powerpoint presentation from 2010, (Lyme Disease, Study Highlights and Controversial Issues), Steere ridicules the concept of a chronic Lyme infection outlasting his simple-minded treatment paradigm and implies that women who believe they have a chronic infection are simply vulnerable victims, seduced by their doctors into believing they have a real illness. From his slide entitled “Mind-Body Medicine, The Power of Suggestion”, Steere quotes Ann Harrington:
• “In its classic form, this narrative begins with a vulnerable, naïve, or needy person (often a patient, quite often a woman) and an authority figure (typically a doctor, healer, hypnotist, or priest, but invariably a man) who is believed to possess personal charisma, special skills, powerful medicines, or expert knowledge that brooks no skepticism.”
• “The patient believes whatever is said, does whatever is said, and –strangest of all –physically experiences whatever is said.”
http://www.acponline.org/about_acp/chapters/ri/steere.pdf
[43] One doctor had told her, "You know, Mrs. Murray, sometimes people subconsciously want to be sick." Unlike Steere, Murray knew that antibiotics would work against the disease. After being accused of being a hypochondriac by one doctor she thought to herself: “If the disease is psychosomatic, then why do my symptoms improve soon after a course of penicillin?” Murray, p. 58.
[44] The EIS has used its influence with state health departments, both to rescue vaccines and to pull vaccines that turned out to be deadly. According to the American Journal of Public Health: “Forty-three years after an EIS investigation of vaccine-associated polio cases helped to rescue the first national polio vaccine program, EIS Officers played a critical role in identifying another vaccine-related epidemic. On August 31, 1998, the first rotavirus vaccine was licensed in the United States for use in infants. Rotavirus, the most common cause of infectious diarrhea in small children in this country, causes 20–40 deaths and more than 50,000 hospitalizations annually. After receiving reports of intussusception among infants who had been vaccinated, CDC recommended suspending use of the vaccine on July 16, 1999, and immediately launched a nationwide study to examine the association between rotavirus vaccine and intussusception. EIS Officers assigned to state health departments were mobilized in 12 states that had received large quantities of the vaccine, and officers from Atlanta were sent to three other states.”
Langmuir A.D., Andrews J.M. “Biological warfare defense. 2. The Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Communicable Disease Center.” Am J Public Health 1952;42:235–8.