A San Francisco-based pandemic tracking and response firm and federal government subcontractor for DoD’s Black & Veatch project in Georgia and Ukraine (and perhaps elsewhere) since 2014. Metabiota services include global field-based biological threat research, pathogen discovery, outbreak response and clinical trials. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has outsourced much of this work under the military program to private companies, which are not held accountable to Congress, and which can operate more freely and move around the rule of law.[1] In addition to the Pentagon, Metabiota performs biological research for the CIA, NIH, and various other government agencies.
Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) was a lead financial backer of Metabiota[2] in 2015 with $30 million in funding. In June of 2021, Natalie Winters of The National Pulse detailed the Biden firm’s funding of the San Francisco-based Metabiota. Former Managing Director and co-founder of RSTP Neil Callahan – a name that appears many times on Hunter Biden’s hard drive – also sits on Metabiota’s Board of Advisors. Metabiota Inc. was awarded $18.4 million federal contracts under the Pentagon’s DTRA program in Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia and for scientific and technical consulting services. Currently the lead investor in Metabiota is Pilot Growth Management whose co-founder and CEO is Neil Callahan.
Hunter Biden’s attorney told the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) in 2020 that Biden had divested himself from his holdings in RSTP before a controversial investment in mbloom in late 2015. However, emails reviewed by FOX Business showed that Hunter Biden was in regular communication with RSTP leaders and had investment interests in multiple RSTP funds in 2016 and 2017, despite his attorney claiming he “severed his relationship” with RSTP. Hunter’s laptop also provides proof of biolab funding in Ukraine.
Dr. Andrew Huff, a former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, an Army veteran, and the author of “The Truth about Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History” expounds on Hunter Biden’s relationship with Metabiota in an interview with TGP’s Jim Hoft:
Dr. Andrew Huff: … Metabiota worked with the University of California Davis on this big program called Predict, which was funded by the United States Agency for International Development. And these companies and UC Davis were going around the planet collecting biological samples together.
Jim Hoft: Okay? And so Metabiota was just as involved in this type of research as EcoHealth. And is EcoHealth a much larger organization, a Metabiota? Because we saw some documents that showed that they weren’t really getting a lot of contracts until Hunter Biden came along in 2014. He invested some money into the group and then all of a sudden, they’re getting $23 million in contracts the next year or something. It’s just crazy.
Dr. Huff (02:49): I think where you’re going with this and the part that I didn’t get to was that one of the other interesting things that happened while I worked at Equipment Alliance is that Dr. Peter Daszak and I assembled an investment presentation known as a pitch deck to submit to incitel or to be presented to In-Q-Tel. So In-Q-Tel is the CIA’s venture capital firm. What also happened simultaneously around this time is that these emails were on Hunter Biden’s laptop, is that Metabiota was trying to get investment from In-Q-Tel as well for the same type of work. And Metabiota actually did receive an investment from In-Q-Tel, aka CIA.
Jim Hoft asks about EcoHealth Alliance’s relationship with Metabiota and if it was a close relationship?
Dr. Huff (08:28): Closely with each other. So we’re actually partners on the USAID Predict program, which the funding was somewhere around the 210 to 208,000,000 range over a few years. And so through that process, the State Department, USAID Museum, davis Ecosystem Alliance and Metabiota were partners on this big project. So the organizations work very closely together. Dr. Peter Jasic was frequently communicating with Dr. Wolf at Metabiota.
RSTP’s financing of Metabiota was during the period, 2008 to 2017, when Black & Veatch and DTRA signed contracts for the construction and operation of biolabs in various countries. Under these contracts for biolabs in Georgia and Ukraine Metabiota, Black & Veatch’s subcontractor, signed a $18.4 million federal contract.[2]
In late May 2016, Metabiota hired Andrew C. Weber, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, to head up its Global Partnerships. Between 2009 and 2014, Weber served as assistant secretary of defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense under then-president Obama.
Weber is credited with creating the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) — a combat support agency within the U.S. DoD, specializing in countering weapons of mass destruction, including biological weapons24,25 — and the DTRA has reportedly funded Metabiota to operate U.S.-funded biological research labs in Ukraine.
The DTRA has also issued a number of grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, totaling at least $37.5 million,26,27 including a 2017 grant for $6.5 million to “understand the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.”28 According to a December 2020 report by The Defender,29 EcoHealth Alliance had tried to hide most of the Pentagon funding that it had received between 2013 and 2020, most of which came from the DTRA.
During a 2016 meeting in Lviv, Ukraine, representatives of Black & Veatch and Metabiota discussed biological security, safety and surveillance with representatives of Ukraine, Poland and the United States. It was amid these clandestine projects, in 2015, Google-funded Metabiota to the tune of $1 million and RSTP was Metabiota’s lead financer.
Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “PREDICT” project, which sought to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.” As part of this effort, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance (Anthony Fauci’s launderer for funding gain-of-function), and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study relating to bat coronavirus infectious diseases in China. “Sensitive and broadly reactive RT-PCR assays were performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,” the paper notes. Among the researchers listed is Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan lab director. Peter Daszak is also listed as an author. PREDICT was a forerunner of the more ambitious Global Virome Project (“GVP”).
The PREDICT program, directed by Dennis Carroll, appears to have served as a proof of concept for the Global Virome Project that Carroll founded. According to a recent investigation by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK),2 Carroll appears to have diverted government funds from the PREDICT program while he was still running it, to fund this personal side project, which was set up with the intention to collect, identify and catalogue 1 million viruses from wildlife in an effort to predict which ones might cause a human epidemic.
Metabiota’s founder, “virus hunter” Nathan Wolfe, also sits on the board of Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance (since 2004) and is a WEF’s Young Global Leaders alumni and a member of DARPA’s Defense Science Research Council (since 2008). Wolfe’s projects have received funding from the NIH, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Geographic Society in addition to the previously detailed Google and DOD financing. Metabiota was awarded Technology Pioneer by WEF in 2021.
According to his biography on University of Houston, he has received research support totaling over $20 million in grants and contracts from the Google.org, The Skoll Foundation, NIH, the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Geographic Society, Merck Research Laboratories and various branches of the US Department of Defense.
In 2012, Wolfe wrote a book titled, “The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age,” where he thanked friends including deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the biotech venture capitalist who was named as the “successor executor” on Epstein’s will upon his death, Boris Nikolic. Referred to by mainstream media as the “Indiana Jones” of virus hunting, Wolfe has been photographed hanging out with Ghislaine Maxwell on multiple occasions.
Always nice to see a name from Epstein/Maxwell associate Nathan Wolfe’s CIA funded company Metabiota—as the first name on an article related to dangerous virus collection tactics/research in China https://t.co/b3ib1VWF3p pic.twitter.com/qgDVbfNgRu
— HashTigre🌼DayLite (@hash_tigre) June 19, 2021
Wolfe also founded the non-profit Global Viral and is director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (“GVFI”). In 2008, GVFI received $5.5 million from Google and $5.5 million from Skoll Foundation “to detect early evidence of future pandemics.” “We want to stop viruses dead in their tracks – their animal tracks – before they jump to humans,” noted Dr. Mark Smolinski, Google.org’s Threat Detective.[3]
Although Wolfe was one of initiators of GVP in 2018, on their website he isn’t shown as being directly involved. However, Edward Rubin, Metabiota’s Chief Scientific Officer, is a board member of GVP. And it was Rubin who, in 2016, attended a Rockefeller Foundation forum alongside Daszak to discuss the GVP.
In an interesting twitter thread – linking Wolfe and Metabiota to EcoHealth, DARPA, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and World Economic Forum – HashTigre shared an image of page from a book Wolfe wrote in 2012 titled, “The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age,” where he thanked friends including deceased paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and biotech venture capitalist Boris Nikolic.
Nikolic was named as the “back-up executor” on Epstein’s will and Wolfe has been photographed hanging out with Ghislaine Maxwell on multiple occasions.
“Always nice to see a name from Epstein/Maxwell associate Nathan Wolfe’s CIA funded company Metabiota—as the first name on an article related to dangerous virus collection tactics/research in China,” HashTigre tweeted.
The Metabiota founder’s wife is a liberal playwright who incorporates left-wing activism into her shows and hosted an anti-Trump viewing on the night of the 2016 election with proceeds going to Planned Parenthood.
Two market innovators, Munich Reinsurance Company, the largest global reinsurer and leading expert on global risk solutions and In-Q-Tel, Inc. (IQT), the strategic CIA-front investment firm that accelerates the development of technologies to support the U.S. intelligence community, signed strategic agreements with Metabiota in August 2017. Metabiota and Black & Veatch even share an office in Kiev, according to a job advertisement posted by Black & Veatch.
In a 2016 meeting in Lviv, Ukraine, representatives of Black & Veatch and Metabiota discussed biological security, safety and surveillance with representatives of Ukraine, Poland and the United States. In 2015, amid many clandestine projects, Google-funded Metabiota to the tune of $1 million.
In 2016, EHA president Peter Daszak attended a Rockefeller Foundation forum alongside Metabiota’s chief scientific officer Edward Rubin to discuss The Global Virome Project, which promotes an international database and tracking system “akin to the Human Genome Project.”
GVP is a founding member of The Trinity Challenge, a £10m challenge to protect the world against future pandemics in collaboration with global business and academic leaders. In 2020 Dame Sally Davis, UK Special Envoy on Antimicrobial Resistance, “was immensely proud to launch The Trinity Challenge” together with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization.
In 2021, thanks to Joe Biden, the USAID once again sought the help of EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota for a taxpayer-funded investigation into what may cause the next pandemic.
Metabiota’s Bungled Ebola Response
In 2016, CBS News published a scathing critique of Metabiota’s response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa.30 Metabiota had been hired by the WHO and the local government of Sierra Leone to monitor the spread of the epidemic, but according to an investigation by The Associated Press, “some of the company’s actions made an already chaotic situation worse.”
In a July 17, 2014, email obtained by AP, Dr. Eric Bertherat, medical officer at the WHO’s Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response, complained about misdiagnoses and “total confusion” at the small laboratory Metabiota shared with Tulane University in Kenema, Sierra Leone.
According to Bertherat, there was “no tracking of the samples” and “absolutely no control on what is being done.” “This is a situation that WHO can no longer endorse,” he wrote. Similarly, Sylvia Blyden, special executive assistant to the president of Sierra Leone, told AP Metabiota’s response was a disaster:31
“’They messed up the entire region,’ she said. She called Metabiota’s attempt to claim credit for its Ebola work ‘an insult for the memories of thousands of Africans who have died.’”
U.S. health official Austin Demby, who evaluated Metabiota’s and Tulane’s lab work at the request of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the government of Sierra Leone, was also critical.
In one email, Demby noted used needles were left out and there was no ultraviolet light for decontamination. The space was also too small to safely process blood samples. “The cross-contamination potential is huge and quite frankly unacceptable,” he wrote.
Anja Wolz, an emergency coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, told AP she witnessed Metabiota workers entering homes of suspected Ebola patients without protective gear, and leaving high-risk areas without performing any kind of decontamination procedure. She also accused Metabiota of miscalculating the severity of the outbreak, while insisting that they had the situation under control when clearly, they didn’t.
Tulane microbiology professor Bob Garry was also critical of Metabiota’s choice to have Dr. Jean-Paul Gonzalez run the operation, as Gonzalez, in 1994, had accidentally gotten infected with a rare hemorrhagic fever while working in a Yale University lab.
He failed to notify anyone about the exposure for more than a week, a delay that put more than 100 other people at risk. Gonzalez was ordered to take a remedial safety course, but according to Garry, such carelessness was a red flag, and he didn’t think Gonzalez was the right man to teach Sierra Leoneans about Ebola.
“Do you really want the person who infected himself with hemorrhagic fever going around explaining to people how to be safe?” Garry asked in an email to a Metabiota media representative. Wolfe defended his company, saying there was no evidence they’d done anything wrong. Some of the problems he blamed on misunderstandings, and others on commercial rivalry.
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