Most people do not fully understand the devastation that can follow a tick bite. This illness has stolen careers, destroyed families, robbed people of their memories, and left some wondering if they will ever get their lives back. For some, a single bite is followed by years of crushing fatigue, chronic pain, neurological problems, brain fog, and the frightening realization that they are no longer the person they used to be.
Adam Finnegan knows that reality personally. After developing chronic Lyme disease in 2016, he spent seven years trying to answer one question: Why do some people never seem to recover, and why are so many still searching for answers years after the bite itself has been forgotten?
That search became The Sleeper Agent: The Rise of Lyme Disease, Chronic Illness, and the Great Imitator Antigens of Biological Warfare.
In this episode, you’ll learn why Finnegan believes the story of Lyme disease may be much bigger than a tick bite. He explains the science of immune tolerance and why some chronically ill patients may look “normal” on paper while their health continues to deteriorate. He discusses why so many people with persistent symptoms feel abandoned by medicine and why the history of military research into ticks, animal pathogens, and biological warfare led him down a path he never expected to take.
You’ll hear why Erich Traub became one of the central figures in his investigation, why Operation Paperclip matters to this story, and why he believes some of the biggest questions surrounding chronic illness have not been fully answered.
The interview introduces the investigation. The book contains more than 1,000 citations and the deeper historical record.
This episode does not ask you to accept a conclusion. It asks you to look at the evidence, consider the questions, and decide for yourself whether the accepted story explains everything.
Because if one tiny tick can change a life forever, perhaps we still do not understand the full story of what happens next.
Four years ago an article was posted asking if a chronic infection could be behind ME/CFS patients. The answer appears to be yes. A previous study found a link between Cytomegalovirus, EBS, and Human Herpesvirus-6 and ME/CFS. The following also connects Babesia and Bartonella to the condition.
Study uncovers hidden Bartonella and Babesia infections in ME/CFS patients
A new pilot study from North Carolina State University has found molecular evidence of Bartonella or Babesia infection in nearly half of 50 people diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).
The findings suggest that vector‑borne pathogens may play a larger role in chronic illness than previously recognized.
Bartonella and Babesia are both transmitted primarily through arthropods—ticks, fleas, and lice—and have been linked to a range of persistent symptoms.
Improved testing has revealed that Bartonella, once thought to cause only short‑lived infections like cat scratch disease, can be associated with chronic and even neuropsychiatric symptoms. Babesia, best known as a tick‑borne parasite, has also been transmitted through blood transfusions and organ transplants.
For this study, researchers selected 50 participants from a larger group of chronically ill individuals with long‑term fatigue and neurological symptoms such as memory problems, tremors, disorientation, or anxiety.
Using quantitative PCR and DNA sequencing, the team detected:
Babesia in 10 participants
Bartonella in 11
Both pathogens in 2
That’s 23 out of 50 participants showing evidence of infection.
“ME/CFS diagnoses are primarily based on immunological biomarkers that can have numerous influences,” said study author Edward Breitschwerdt, Melanie S. Steele Distinguished Professor of Internal Medicine at NC State.
“Our goal was to detect the DNA of specific pathogenic microorganisms that might contribute to or cause a patient’s chronic illness.”
Breitschwerdt emphasized that the small sample size means the results can’t be generalized to all ME/CFS patients, but the unexpectedly high prevalence highlights the need for further research.
The study, supported in part by the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, appears in Pathogens.
Sayer Ji: Idaho Murder Indictment Highlights ‘Institutional Pattern’ of Refusing to Admit That Vaccines Can Lead to Infant Death
Idaho mother Andrea Shaw is facing murder charges in the deaths of 18-month-old twins because investigators failed to seriously consider a vaccine- and Tylenol-related cause of death, according to health writer Sayer Ji. On his Substack, Ji argued the Shaw case is evidence of a broader institutional refusal to recognize and investigate serious vaccine adverse events.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.
Idaho mother Andrea Shaw is facing murder charges in the deaths of 18-month-old twins because investigators failed to seriously consider a vaccine and Tylenol-related cause of death, according to health writer Sayer Ji.
In a lengthy Substack essay, Ji argued the Shaw case is evidence of a broader institutional refusal to recognize and investigate serious vaccine adverse events.
Eighteen-month-old Dallas and Tyson Shaw received multiple routine childhood vaccinations — including DTaP, flu and hepatitis A vaccines — during an April 2025 pediatric visit.
According to court documents, Andrea and her mother-in-law told the pediatrician that the children’s father had previously experienced an adverse reaction to a flu vaccine. But the pediatrician dismissed their concerns, and a nurse administered the shots.
Within a day, the twins developed fevers, lethargy, difficulty walking, blue lips, sunken eyes and diarrhea. They didn’t want to eat. Emergency department physicians documented a “post-immunization reaction” before discharging the children with instructions to treat their symptoms with children’s Tylenol and popsicles.
Prosecutors said investigators ruled out other possible causes of death — including heat exposure, carbon monoxide poisoning, poisoning and vaccines. They concluded the only “conceivable explanation” was that the twins were suffocated.
But the unusual nature of the deaths should have prompted a more thorough examination of potential medical causes rather than an assumption of criminal conduct, Ji said.
So far, prosecutors, doctors and other experts have refused to examine all the evidence, according to Ji, who wrote:
“What the state of Idaho refuses to see is that the etiology of these deaths is not obscure, not speculative, and not novel. It is, in fact, the most extensively documented — and most systematically suppressed — pediatric toxicology pattern of the past eighty years. …
“This is not a whodunit. It is a why-won’t-we-look. And it is the inevitable, engineered consequence of a public-health apparatus that has spent forty years insisting — against a mountain of its own peer-reviewed evidence — that all childhood vaccines are ‘safe and effective’ for all children.
“When the medicine kills, the mother must have.”
Other recently vaccinated twins died from SIDS
The prosecutors’ assertion that murder can be the only explanation for why “both would die at the same time, on the same night, in the same room, in the same bed,” is “exactly backwards,” according to Ji.
Case reports dating back to the mid-20th century include eight other cases involving healthy twins who became ill shortly after immunization and died within hours to 10 days.
In a 1946 case, the U.S. Institute of Medicine concluded that the vaccines led to anaphylaxis in one set of twins. In another case, the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Istanbul, Turkey, ruled that twin infants who received vaccines, then became ill and were treated with Tylenol and then suffered simultaneous deaths “consistent with SIDS,” sudden infant death syndrome.
The Shaw twins’ deaths fit a previously observed clinical pattern rather than representing an unprecedented event, he argued.
Possible biological mechanism connecting vaccines and infant death
Vaccines can directly cause infant deaths, including SIDS, through a specific, traceable biological chain, not simply through correlation, Ji said. He laid out three types of evidence:
The immune/nervous system pathway: Vaccines trigger an immune response that releases inflammatory molecules known as cytokines. In infants, these molecules can cross into the brain and disrupt a part of the brainstem that controls breathing and the ability to wake up and gasp during oxygen deprivation — the same disruption researchers have found in autopsies of SIDS cases.
Specific autopsy findings: Pathologists at the University of Milan examined infants who died shortly after vaccination and found underdeveloped brainstem structures and heart-conduction abnormalities. They argue this shows a physical mechanism related to vaccines, not just developmental abnormalities.
Statistical/database signals: Several analyses, including one by von Kries in Germany, an Italian case study series, and Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)-based studies by Goldman and Miller and Miller, report elevated death rates in windows shortly after vaccination and a strong correlation between the number of vaccine doses a country requires and its infant mortality rate.
This evidence offers a solid explanation for vaccine-induced death and would be consistent with the eight-day gap between the Shaw twins’ vaccination and their deaths, Ji said.
“The picture that emerges is not ambiguous. It is a coherent, cross-decade, cross-methodology body of work spanning pathology, epidemiology, VAERS analysis, ecological correlation, and pharmacovigilance signal detection,” he wrote.
Tylenol depletes body’s principal antioxidant defenses
While some researchers have for decades suggested there is a link between vaccines and infant deaths, Ji presents new evidence — not widely discussed until recently — that acetaminophen, or Tylenol, acts as an “amplifier” to the vaccine mechanism that can be deadly for some infants.
The Shaw twins, like many children who experience post-vaccination fevers, were treated with Tylenol on the advice of their doctor.
Drawing on recent work by William Parker, Ph.D., Ji argued that acetaminophen depletes glutathione, one of the body’s principal antioxidant defenses, at the same time that vaccines increase oxidative stress through immune activation.
The combination of vaccination-induced inflammation and acetaminophen-related glutathione depletion created what Ji described as a synergistic toxic reaction capable of damaging vulnerable regions of the brainstem.
He pointed to evidence from a 2008 study, which found that children given acetaminophen after the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine were about eight times more likely to develop autism compared to children given ibuprofen or no analgesic.
A National Institutes of Health-funded study that measured acetaminophen in umbilical cord blood also found infants with higher levels had a 3.6 times greater risk of being diagnosed with autism.
Since the 1980s, physicians have routinely recommended acetaminophen following childhood vaccinations without recognizing what Ji argues are potentially dangerous interactions between the drug and vaccine-induced immune responses.
‘The institutional pattern is not accidental’
The possibility that vaccines could be linked to infant death has been systematically minimized and ignored by public health agencies and the medical establishment, according to Ji.
Decades of published research documenting adverse neurological and inflammatory reactions following vaccination have received little attention because to acknowledge even rare fatal complications would undermine public confidence in vaccination programs, Ji said.
That’s why he believes investigators usually begin with the assumption that vaccines cannot be responsible — which leaves homicide as the only remaining explanation when no obvious other cause is identified.
“The institutional pattern is not accidental,” he wrote. “It is the same governance-by-classification that has characterized every major pharmaceutical harm suppression of the past century — from thalidomide to Vioxx to opioids.”
The elimination in 1979 of medical classification codes that medical examiners can use to classify a death as related to vaccines has institutionalized this practice by effectively eliminating vaccines as a recordable cause of death — even though the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has continued to recognize the link between vaccines and infant deaths.
It remains unknown whether the coroner in the Shaw case looked for signs of vaccine-induced death in the post-mortem examination. Did the coroner examine each section of the brainstem, look for cytokine expression, examine the cardiac conduction system or measure cerebral glutathione?
The finding of “pulmonary vascular congestion” that prosecutors cited “is consistent with mechanical suffocation — but it is equally consistent with central respiratory arrest from any cause, including vaccine + acetaminophen-induced brainstem failure,” Ji wrote.
‘Entire edifice of universal childhood vaccination as a moral imperative collapses’
Ji compared the Shaw case to several high-profile cases in the United Kingdom, including that of Angela Cannings, whose conviction for murdering her two infant sons in the 1990s was overturned after experts concluded that natural causes couldn’t be ruled out.
The Shaw prosecution similarly relies on statistical assumptions about the improbability of two children dying naturally rather than on definitive forensic evidence demonstrating homicide, Ji said.
Ultimately, Ji frames the Shaw prosecution as more than an isolated criminal case.
He wrote that Andrea “is the predictable output of a public-health information architecture that requires — as a matter of institutional survival — that vaccine deaths not exist.”
Were that fact to be taken seriously, “the entire edifice of universal childhood vaccination as a moral imperative collapses.”
Instead, risk-benefit decisions about whether to receive vaccines would have to be made on a case-by-case basis with full disclosure of the different types of risks. Blanket safety claims would have to be abandoned.
Ji called for a new forensic review to look at evidence of vaccine- and Tylenol-induced death by a pathologist with appropriate expertise. He called for disclosure of the lot numbers of the vaccines the twins received, and a dismissal of Shaw’s murder indictment.
FBI Pressured U.S. Customs to Ditch Plan to Question Key Fauci Aide on Return Trip From Wuhan
The FBI intervened to prevent U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from questioning “virus hunter” Peter Daszak, Ph.D., on a return trip from Wuhan, China, according to documents released this week by Sen. Rand Paul. Three days before Daszak was scheduled to arrive in New York, a CBP Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison wrote, “Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.
The FBI intervened to prevent U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from questioning “virus hunter” Peter Daszak, Ph.D., on a return trip from Wuhan, China, according to documents released this week by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
The documents show that in February 2021, Daszak, a key aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-president of the EcoHealth Alliance, traveled to Wuhan as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
CBP planned to stop and question Daszak on his return to the U.S. that month. But in an email dated Feb. 2, 2021 — three days before Daszak was scheduled to arrive in New York — a CBP Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison wrote, “Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject.”
The CBP Tactical Terrorism Response Team was prepared to question Daszak about the business he conducted in China, his contacts at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and whether he collected or was carrying any samples of viruses or other pathogens.
One document states that CBP viewed Daszak as “an extremely high person of interest” due to his longstanding ties with the Wuhan laboratory.
A Jan. 11, 2021, CBP email flagged Daszak’s participation in the WHO’s team investigating the pandemic’s origins in Wuhan as a potential “conflict of interest.”
A Feb. 2, 2021, email noted that much of the funding Daszak was receiving was “put toward gain of function research.”
Notably, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security email contained within the documents, which provided background information on Daszak’s research activity, referenced an article The Defender published in January 2021.
Paul released the documents as part of his ongoing congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19. In a post on X earlier this week, he said the documents challenge the narrative that a lab leak was implausible.
“The American people can finally judge the evidence for themselves,” Paul wrote.
Speaking to The National Desk on Tuesday, Paul said the documents showed that figures in the federal government “wanted to protect” the narrative that COVID-19 originated in, and escaped from, a lab, so they “used whatever means necessary to do it.”
“It’s no surprise that they would use the law enforcement enterprise to achieve that,” Paul said.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, said the documents confirm the “worst versions of what we’ve suspected” and provide “more empirical evidence than ever” of a concerted effort by figures in the federal government to conceal a lab leak in Wuhan.
“There was a high-level plan to protect the virus creators as part of a longer-term scheme to deploy both pathogens and countermeasures, likely for the purpose of political manipulation, as incredible as that sounds,” Tucker said.
NIH asked Daszak to bring SARS-CoV-2 specimen to the U.S.
The documents contained evidence that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked Daszak to obtain the original type specimen of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, and bring it to the U.S.
Fox News reported that Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance had collaborated with the Wuhan lab for over 15 years, including with the lab’s lead researcher, Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., widely known as the “bat lady.”
Daszak was also principal investigator on NIH grants that funded bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab.
The documents were released just days before Fauci is set to testify before the U.S. Congress on July 29, as part of Paul’s investigation.
The document release also came a month after two NIH researchers with ties to Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance were arrested and charged with smuggling mpox samples into the U.S.
Documents Paul released last month revealed that Fauci received a U.S. intelligence report in August 2021 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in Chinese and U.S. labs as a bat vaccine, that it later leaked from the Wuhan lab and that it contained characteristics that would make it resistant to mRNA vaccines.
Last year, Daszak became president of Nature.Health.Global — a nonprofit organization that performs research on public health and pandemic prevention. The group employs Dr. David Morens, a former top aide to Fauci.
In April, a federal grand jury indicted Morens on charges related to conspiracy to hide federal records on COVID-19’s origins.
Self-Reported Observations of Unusual White Fibrous Structures in Embalmed Corpses: Multi-Year Survey Results from Embalmers in Five Countries, 2022–2025
Thomas F. Haviland*·Laura Kasner·Daniel SantiagoiD
Background: Beginning in 2020–2021, embalmers in multiple countries reported observing large, tough, rubbery white or off-white fibrous structures in the veins and arteries of embalmed corpses, which they described as distinct from classic postmortem clots.
Methods: We conducted four annual cross-sectional surveys (2022–2025) of active embalmers in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand using SurveyMonkey. A dual distribution strategy (professional associations and direct emails to funeral homes) was used. Core questions assessed observation of unusual white fibrous structures and estimated percentage of corpses affected.
Results: Across 808 total responses, the proportion of embalmers reporting observation of these structures ranged from 66% to 83%. Weighted average prevalence in affected corpses ranged from 19% to 27%. The 2022 survey showed a marked increase in first observations beginning in 2020 and accelerating in 2021.
Conclusions: Multiple years of surveys document consistent self-reported observations by experienced embalmers of unusual white fibrous structures in a substantial fraction of corpses, with a clear increase noted around 2020–2021. These findings constitute a potential safety signal that warrants independent investigation by forensic pathologists and biomedical researchers to characterize the structures and determine their etiology.
(Click on top link for full article and pictures)
New White Fibrous Clots Publication
Dr. John Campbell
July 23, 2026
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**Comment**
For the ‘science’ skeptics out there, this is what research looks like when no ‘external’ funding or grants are received. Hence the use of SurveyMonkey.
Researchers know that when they study a topic that doesn’t fit the narrative, they are entirely on their own. No large NIH grants should be expected because our government is completely in bed with Big Pharma, who literally couldn’t care less if you live or die.
Lymeland has been in this lovely parallel universe for nigh on 40 years. Any research that moves the needle forward at all is independently funded and since research has become so incredibly expensive, cheap tools like SurveyMonkey are utilized.
In the case of Lyme/MSIDS, it is often called “Big Data,’ and relies on patient surveys. If you haven’t done it already, make sure to fill out the MyLymeData Project which allows patients to pool their health information through a secure website. “Big data” projects use advanced technology to gather and analyze huge amounts of patient data, which can assist researchers in studying disease patterns and answering important questions such as why do some people recover from Lyme disease, while others remain ill?
For more on the clots found in the COVID injected:
Madison Area Lyme Support Group 