I have been looking again at Lyme disease — not simply as a tick-borne infection, but as part of a much wider post-COVID pattern. Lyme appears to be rising again, and I do not think we should view that only through the narrow lens of outdoor exposure, deer ticks, and antibiotics.
Those things matter. Lyme is caused by Borrelia bacteria carried by infected ticks, usually picked up in wooded or grassy areas. Remove the tick early and the risk falls. If infection takes hold, it can produce the classic bullseye rash, fever, fatigue, muscle and joint pain, neurological symptoms, and sometimes cardiac involvement.
But that is only the first layer.
The deeper question is why so many people now describe chronic inflammatory symptoms after COVID — and why some of those symptoms look so much like Lyme, Epstein-Barr reactivation, shingles, autoimmune flares, and other conditions that had previously gone quiet.
That is the pattern I want to focus on.
The Vaccine Tells Us Something Important
Pfizer and Valneva have been developing a new Lyme vaccine. The recent phase three results suggested around 73% efficacy after four doses, which sounds encouraging. But the detail matters.
This is not an mRNA vaccine. It is a protein-based vaccine targeting a bacterial surface protein called OspA, and the strategy is very different from how most people imagine vaccines working.
