Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that he’s taking on Lyme disease—and boy, did his woo-tinged tendencies emerge fast.
On Monday afternoon, RFK Jr. and HHS hosted a roundtable discussion on Lyme disease policy. And though Kennedy did make a pledge to support the development of better diagnostic tests for the bacterial illness, he also quickly veered into conspiracy, claiming that the previous administration denied the existence of Lyme. RFK Jr. has previously alleged, with no credible evidence, that Lyme was engineered as a military bioweapon using vaccine research.
“There were top officials in this agency who were saying that Lyme disease did not exist,” Kennedy stated at one point.
The trouble with chronic Lyme
Lyme disease is caused by certain Borrelia bacteria (usually B. burgdorferi), which are transmitted by various species of tick. In the U.S., the primary vector of Lyme is the blacklegged, or deer, tick (Ixodes scapularis). Its most well-known symptom is a distinctive rash shaped like a bullseye at the bite site, though not everyone will experience this.
Most cases of Lyme can be readily treated with antibiotics, especially when caught early. But a small percentage of people (10% to 20%) report lingering symptoms, which is known as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome. Though this phenomenon is real, there is a serious disconnect over its etiology, that is, its cause, between some patients and the medical world at large.
Some people have argued that their symptoms are the result of an ongoing, chronic Lyme infection. Many researchers and health agencies have instead posited that the syndrome is linked to immune dysfunction following a cleared infection or, in some cases, an entirely separate cause. Studies testing the chronic Lyme hypothesis, such as giving self-identified patients a prolonged course of antibiotics, have largely failed to find support for it. Other studies have suggested that people who believe they have Lyme without clear evidence often have other medical diagnoses that could better explain their symptoms.
The chronic Lyme community often overlaps with the world of alternative medicine, with many practitioners touting unsupported remedies as effective where modern medical treatments have failed. Some people also promote unverified tests that they claim will diagnose a hidden Lyme infection missed by conventional testing.
Though Kennedy didn’t explicitly reference chronic Lyme in his discussion Monday, it’s likely what he meant when he accused doctors and the federal government of ignoring Lyme disease. At another point during the roundtable, Kennedy stated that the “gaslighting of Lyme patients is over.”
Riddled with conspiracies
Chronic Lyme isn’t the only aspect of this very real infection associated with conspiracy.
For years, some people have argued that Lyme was either a lab accident gone wrong or a deliberately created bioweapon, including RFK Jr. himself. These conspiracy theories often center around the long-running Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York, located near where the disease was officially first discovered in Lyme, Connecticut, during the 1970s.
While governments have certainly pursued dangerous germ research, there doesn’t seem to be any smoking gun indicating that Lyme is the result of it. Though first discovered only decades ago, scientists have since found traces of the bacteria in both ticks and people long before we named it, while genetic evidence has suggested that Lyme existed even before humans had made it to North America. Plum Island doesn’t—and apparently never has—conducted any research on Lyme.
During a podcast of his in 2024, RFK Jr. stated that Lyme “is highly likely to have been a military weapon” (he reaffirmed this belief at a Senate confirmation hearing for the HHS position in early January). At a 2023 panel, he also argued that vaccine research had helped create the Spanish Flu, HIV, and Lyme.
Lyme disease is a genuine and growing public health threat, as are the many other diseases spread by ticks. But as is often the case with RFK Jr., his proposed solutions and crackpot ideas are almost certain to make things worse, not better.
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