An investment firm directed by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden was a leading financial backer of a pandemic tracking and response firm that collaborated on bird flu research in Ukrainian laboratories, receiving funds from the Obama administration’s Department of Defense in the process.
Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) – a subsidiary of the Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz-founded Rosemont Capital – counted both Biden and Heinz as managing directors. Heinz is also the stepson of former U.S. Secretary of State and current Climate czar John Kerry. Amongst the companies listed on archived versions of the RSTP website’s portfolio is Metabiota – a San Francisco-based company that purported to detect, track, and analyze emerging infectious diseases before being acquired by a Cameroon-based non-profit.
Financial reports reveal that RSTP led Metabiota’s first round of funding in 2015, amounting to $30 million. Former managing director and co-founder of RSTP Neil Callahan – a name that also appears many times on Hunter Biden’s infamous hard drive – sits on Metabiota’s Board of Advisors alongside former Clinton official Rob Walker who discussed, in another unearthed Hunter Biden hard drive e-mail, reaching out to the Obama Department of Defense with regard to Metabiota.
As I previously revealed in an exclusive story for The National Pulse in March 2022, an official connection exists between the Biden-linked pandemic firm and biological laboratories based in Ukraine. These labs were flagged by media outlets at the time for handling "especially dangerous pathogens” through programs funded by the U.S. government.
War Room can now reveal that it appears much of this work was focused on avian influenza, the virus behind the allegedly surging bird flu pandemic. Internal documents detailing the U.S. government-funded work of Metabiota mention “avian influenza” by name.
A feature in the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine’s (STCU) 2016 Annual Report recounts a "Trilateral Meeting with Ukraine, Poland, and the United States Regional Collaboration on Biological Security, Safety, and Surveillance.”
The article describes an October 2016 meeting involving U.S. military officials and their Ukrainian counterparts discussing "cooperation in surveillance and prevention of especially dangerous infectious diseases, including zoonotic diseases in Ukraine and neighboring countries.”
"The meeting focused on existing frameworks, regulatory coordination, and ongoing cooperative projects in research, surveillance and diagnostics of a number of dangerous zoonotic diseases, such as avian influenza,” explains the summary.
In attendance were representatives from the Biden-linked Metabiota, roughly one year after Hunter’s investment funds put cash into the company. Per the document, attendees also included:
- US Department of Defense [Defense Threat Reduction Agency] (DTRA) (K. Garrett, G. Braunstein, W. Sosnowski, and J. Wintrol);
- Black & Veatch and Metabiota corporations (D. Mustra, Dr. M. Guttieri, S. Anderson, T. Borth and others);
- Curtis "BJ” Bjelajac, Executive Director, and Vlada Pashynska, Senior Specialist represented the STCU.
Government contracts also corroborate the working relationship between Metabiota, Ukrainian laboratories, and the U.S. Defense Department, with the firm receiving an $18.4 million grant from the U.S. agency in 2014. A total of $307,091, allocated to Metabiota on September 25th, was itemized for "Ukraine research projects.” Additional information on what research Metabiota conducted or the Biden family’s involvement remains scarce, though several research papers addressing avian influenza have been attributed to Metabiota researchers.
The founder of Metabiota, Nathan Wolfe, also has a robust media footprint discussing bird flu, including penning op-eds for CNN and participating in interviews with the World Economic Forum (WEF).
In a 2013 article for CNN – “From ducks to chickens to deadly virus” – Wolfe discusses Metabiota’s work on various forms of influenza including avian influenza.
“Together with our Chinese colleagues at the Guangdong Institute of Public Health, for example, we work to monitor new influenza and other viruses among people working in markets and other environments in precisely the regions where these viruses are emerging. The work represents a partnership with USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats Predict program, which supports these and other similar activities throughout the viral hotspots of the world,” he wrote.
Similarly, in an interview with the WEF, Wolfe was asked how “likely is it that we will see something on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic this century,” prompting him to respond “very likely” before noting how bird flu “kills about 30 to 40%, even by conservative estimates, of those infected.”
A November 2021 research paper – “Phylogenetic Analysis of H5N8 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Viruses in Ukraine, 2016–2017” – involved researchers from Metabiota. In the paper’s acknowledgments section it extended thanks to “scientific staff at BV/Metabiota (Kyiv, Ukraine) for critical reading and assistance with preparation of the article.”
“Outbreaks of HPAI in Ukraine highlight the continual need for biosurveillance and genomic sequencing of avian influenza viruses along wild bird flyways and interfaces with domestic poultry in Eurasia,” concluded the paper.
The paper was also funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), the National Institutes of Health agency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
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