On a small dot of land just a mile from the coast sits a creepy off-limits federal research facility established in 1954.

The Plum Island Animal Disease Center, managed by the Department of Homeland Security and located in New York, focuses on researching animal diseases that are easily spread but, according to the government, pose no harm to human health.

However, some fringe theorists, popular podcasters, and even members of Congress have suggested that this facility is also connected to the emergence of Lyme disease, a pervasive illness in the United States.

Lyme disease, first identified in the 1970s in Old Lyme, Connecticut, is a bacterial infection transmitted by ticks. It affects approximately 30,000 individuals annually in the US, and if not treated, it can lead to serious complications, including life-threatening inflammation of the brain and spinal cord.

Now, as summer-time tick populations skyrocket in the northeast and popstar Justin Timberlake reveals this ‘relentlessly debilitating’ Lyme disease diagnosis, the Daily Mail examines the true origins and conspiracies surrounding this dangerous bacterial infection.

‘Turns out there’s a lot of real evidence that Lyme disease was weaponized… It came out of a lab called Plum Island, which was close to Lyme, Connecticut,’ claimed podcaster Joe Rogan during a March 14 interview with comedian Michael Kosta.

‘What they were going to do is develop these fleas and ticks with a disease that spreads rapidly, wipes out the medical system of a community,’ he alleged.

‘So, you could dump them from a plane, everybody gets infected, overwhelms their medical system, and then they’re more vulnerable if you want to attack them.’

On a small dot of land, just a mile from the northeast coast of Long Island, New York, sits the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, an off-limits federal research facility established in 1954. 

Operated by the Department of Homeland Security, the laboratory studies highly transmissible animal diseases that the government says are not a threat to human health. 

Rogan’s remarks appear to be a mash-up of two common, unproven and seemingly debunked claims about Lyme disease.

The theory that the illness originated from Plum Island is most often attributed to Michael Carroll, author of the 2004 book ‘Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory,’ who spoke to the Daily Mail.

‘I spent seven years digging through dusty boxes of documents and spent hundreds of hours interviewing past and present Plum Island employees,’ he claimed. ‘I found that in the mid-1970s, Plum Island was breeding hundreds of thousands of hard and soft ticks in a ‘tick insectary’ for its germ experiments.’

Carroll alleges that Lyme-infected ticks – which he claims were being used to test the effects of foreign disease on animals – escaped the Plum Island lab through small holes in the roof filters, latched on to migratory birds and spread.

‘Plum Island is like a birding paradise,’ he said. ‘And then after that, the next stop on the flyway is the mouth of the Connecticut River, where Old Lyme is.’

The Department of Homeland Security has disputed claims that Lyme disease was ever researched at the Plum Island facility – but that has hardly kept conspiracists at bay.

Other claims have been made by Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy, who interviewed Kris Newby, author of ‘Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons,’ on his podcast last year before he joined the Trump administration.

In the episode, Kennedy claimed that Lyme disease was ‘highly likely to have been a military weapon.’

‘We also know they were experimenting with diseases of the kind, like Lyme disease, at that [Plum Island] lab, and putting them in ticks and then infecting people, testing them with bird vectors, et cetera,’ he said.

During Kennedy’s 2025 Senate confirmation hearings, he was asked about this claim and after initially conceding that he ‘probably did say’ that the spread of Lyme disease was a result of a government attempt to turn ticks and fleas into bioweapons, he later distanced himself from the belief, saying he ‘never believed’ the conspiracy. 

Popstar Justin Timberlake has been diagnosed with the ‘relentlessly debilitating’ Lyme disease

 While ‘Lab 257’ author Michael Carroll does not believe the disease was created by humans nor engineered as a bioweapon, he told the Daily Mail that Kennedy’s comments on Lyme disease ‘cannot and must not be dismissed.’

For years, New Jersey Republican Congressman Chris Smith has led a seeming one-man crusade to get the US Government to investigate these unsupported claims.

‘Whether or not the DOD’s bioweapons research on ticks from 1950 to 1977 was in any way responsible for Lyme disease and other pervasive tick-borne illnesses in the US, Americans need to know and absolutely deserve answers,’ Smith told the Daily Mail. ‘Investigations into the origins of Lyme will only strengthen our understanding of this debilitating disease and our search for a cure.’

Smith attached a 2019 amendment to a defense spending bill that would have triggered an inquiry into ‘whether the Pentagon ever experimented with ticks and… insects regarding use as a biological weapon’ between 1950 and 1975 and ‘whether any ticks or insects used in such an experiment were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experiment design.’

The amendment was eventually removed by the Senate months later. Smith put forward a similar amendment in 2021 and it too never became law.

In fact, while more research into Lyme disease is justified, much is known about the illness.

Swiss researcher Wilhelm Burgdorfer first identified the bacteria that cause Lyme disease – and it was named after him: borrelia burgdorferi. 

Plum Island Animal Disease Center, an off-limits federal research facility established in 1954.

The disease is known for its hallmark bullseye rash. Symptoms include fever, fatigue, and muscle aches, but untreated cases can also lead to complications, such as joint pain or swelling, facial paralysis, heart palpitations, nerve pain, brain fog, or potentially fatal inflammation of the brain and spinal cord.

Most patients – treated with antibiotics – can fully recover within two to four weeks, though some have reported prolonged symptoms that may take months to resolve. And, despite the possibility of severe illness, experts say the disease would make an ineffective bioweapon.

Sam Telford, a professor of Infectious Disease and Global Health at Tufts University, has said that Lyme disease is ‘rarely lethal’ and its ‘week-long incubation period’ is too slow to be effectively used in warfare.

Rather, Telford noted, biowarfare research has focused on agents such as the plague, hemorrhagic fevers and encephalitis – diseases that are ‘very debilitating’ with a high fatality rate.

Burgdorfer was quoted in Newby’s book, seemingly alluding to Lyme disease’s use in biological warfare, but colleagues have said that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease at the time.

‘Willy was not in his best mental health at that time, and there’s absolutely no truth to the accusations that he was involved in any kind of biowarfare activity,’ said his former colleague Durland Fish, a professor emeritus of epidemiology at Yale University, who worked at Plum Island in the 1990s.

Finally, a 2017 study from the Yale School of Public Health has established that the bacteria causing Lyme disease was likely present on the East Coast of the United States long before the Plum Island facility was built.

Researchers sequenced the DNA of 148 samples of the bacteria and produced their entire genomes to ‘piece together a more detailed history.’

In doing so, they found evidence of the bacteria borrelia burgdorferi in the carcasses of long-dead animals, dating back to 1870, which had been preserved in museum collections.

That suggests, the study says, that ‘the ongoing Lyme disease epidemic was not sparked by a recent introduction of the bacterium or an evolutionary change.’

New York Department of Health’s Bureau of Communicable Disease Control has also said there were reports of Native Americans, hundreds of years ago, contracting a disease with symptoms resembling those of Lyme disease. The native populations called the illness ‘Montauk knee.’

Nevertheless, Carroll maintains that he has uncovered ‘inescapable facts’ that are ‘too clear to ignore,’ insisting that Plum Island’s proximity to Old Lyme is too much of a coincidence.

‘We need actual scientific investigators to take a look at this and actually say, hey, this may have happened this way, and that has been completely and entirely ignored for decades,’ he said.

For now, Carroll may benefit from consulting the existing evidence.