By Isaac Shadpour
Published October 23, 2025

              It was a beautiful July Sunday. I packed my fishing rod, bait, and tackle, eager to take my kids to one of New Jersey’s best fishing spots. The plan was to spend a quiet afternoon by the water, away from the traffic and noise of everyday life. But before heading out, I checked the area’s trail reports—and that’s when I saw it: multiple warnings about ticks and the risk of Lyme disease exposure. The thought of coming home with bites—and possibly a lifetime illness—was enough to cancel the trip altogether.

              That decision, as it turns out, connects to a growing frustration shared by countless New Jersey families—and one that Congressman Chris Smith has spent more than three decades trying to fix.

              “This is a huge problem, and it’s only getting worse,” Congressman Smith told The Voice in an interview. “I started pushing for action on Lyme disease back in 1992, after a meeting in Wall Township with advocates who demanded answers.”

              That meeting, he says, set him on a path that would span over three decades and multiple administrations. Smith went on to draft the Lyme Disease Initiative of 1998 and helped create the first federal commission to study chronic Lyme disease—an effort that finally gained traction in the 2016 21st Century Cures Act. “We shattered one myth after another,” Smith said, crediting the commission with legitimizing the experiences of long-term Lyme disease sufferers who had long been dismissed by parts of the medical establishment.

              Now, Congressman Smith’s latest legislative success digs even deeper—into the disease’s origins themselves.

              The House of Representatives recently passed Smith’s amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), directing the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate whether the U.S. Department of Defense once used ticks as biological weapons during the Cold War.

              The amendment orders a review of research conducted between 1945 and 1972 by military and federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and Department of Agriculture, to determine whether experiments involving tick-borne pathogens such as Spirochaetales and Rickettsiales may have been part of a weapons program.

              Smith’s interest in the topic was piqued after reading Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, in which author Kris Newby interviews Dr. Willy Burgdorfer—the scientist credited with discovering Lyme disease—who also worked as a government bio-weapons specialist. “The evidence is compelling,” Smith said. “These experts were experimenting with pathogens inside ticks, possibly to inflict disease and disability in enemy populations.”

              In a June 2024 interview with Corporate Crime Reporter, Newby states that her book "doesn’t say that the Lyme bacterium – Borrelia burgdorferi – was weaponized. Instead, it presents evidence that ticks and other tick-borne microbes were weaponized, and this may be contributing to the tick-borne disease epidemic that we’re seeing.”

              “By weaponization, I mean that the military was stuffing fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes with combinations of deadly and incapacitating bacteria and viruses. Their goal was to create the perfect stealth weapon to drop on enemies. So, on the one hand, the NIH was trying to save lives from deadly diseases, on the other hand, they were creating new, more deadly franken-germs, in what I’d call crude gain-of-function experiments.”

              New Jersey’s connection to the story is more than historical curiosity. Smith noted that Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst—partly within his congressional district—hosts training for thousands of National Guard members each summer, right in the middle of tick season. “Troops would come from across the country, train in these areas, and go home sick—sometimes without even realizing it was Lyme disease,” he said. “Our soldiers and our residents deserve answers.”

              This isn’t the first time Smith has tried. Similar amendments passed the House in 2019 and 2021 but stalled in the Senate. Now, he hopes bipartisan attention and mounting concern over chronic Lyme will finally push it through. “The hundreds of thousands of Americans suffering from Lyme disease in New Jersey—in addition to the millions across the country—have the right to know the truth about the origins of their illness,” Smith said. “A greater understanding of how the disease came to be so pervasive will only assist in finding effective treatments and a potential cure.”

              Smith, who chaired key subcommittees on global health and veterans affairs, likened his battle against Lyme disease to earlier fights he led on behalf of Agent Orange victims and Gulf War veterans. “Every time, there were powerful people denying that the problem existed for these victims—saying it’s anxiety, saying it’s nothing,” he recalled. “But the truth finally came out years later. We can’t wait that long again.”

              He pointed out that New Jersey ranks among the highest states for Lyme infections, with confirmed cases in all 21 counties. “We’re talking about half a million new cases a year nationally,” he said. “This is not fringe science—it’s a public health crisis.”

              Smith’s amendment was adopted as part of the $892.6 billion defense bill that also funds pay raises for service members and improvements to military housing, childcare, and schools. But for Smith, the most significant part is what it could uncover.

              “We need answers as to what really happened,” he said. “If this disease came from reckless experimentation, we need to expose it—and if not, we’ll at least have a better foundation for finding a real cure.”

              For now, my fishing pole remains in storage. But if Congressman Smith succeeds in bringing answers—and maybe even a cure—perhaps one day New Jersey families can head outdoors again without fear of what might be crawling in the grass.


This article was published on October 23, 2025 and can be found online at: https://thevoiceoflakewood.com/current-issue/