Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners – an investment firm led by Hunter Biden – was a lead financial backer of Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that has partnered with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) was an offshoot of Rosemont Capital, an investment fund founded by Biden and John Kerry’s stepson in 2009, that counted Biden as a Managing Director.
Among the companies listed on archived versions of the firm’s portfolio is Metabiota, a San Francisco-based company that purports to detect, track, and analyze emerging infectious diseases, The National Pulse can reveal.
Financial reports reveal that RSTP led the company’s first round of funding, which amounted to $30 million. 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.
Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “PREDICT” project, which seeks to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.”
As part of this effort, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study relating to bat 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.
The proximity between Hunter Biden and COVID-19’s origins are almost too convenient.
Among the researchers listed on the aforementioned 2014 paper are “bat lady” Shi Zhengli, the Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Lab. The disgraced Peter Daszak – recently recused from the Lancet COVID-19 commission due to several conflicts of interest as a “longtime collaborator” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology – is also listed as an author.
Daszak is also a figure central to the potential origins of COVID-19. His EcoHealth Alliance funneled taxpayer dollars from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to collaborate on bat coronavirus research in Wuhan.
Researchers from EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota have also collaborated on presentations on how to “live safely with bats” and studies linking emerging infectious disease outbreaks to wildlife trade facilities including “wet markets.”
“Wildlife trade can facilitate zoonotic disease transmission and represents a threat to human health and economies in Asia, highlighted by the 2003 SARS coronavirus outbreak, where a Chinese wildlife market facilitated pathogen transmission,” the 2016 paper notes.
Researchers from Metabiota have also been listed alongside EcoHealth Alliance personnel on a 2014 study on henipavirus spillover, 2014 study on Ebola monitoring, 2015 study focusing on herpes, and 2015 study on viral diversity.
Beyond the ties to EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota has also been embroiled in controversy for “bungling” America’s response to Ebola.
“An American company that bills itself as a pioneer in tracking emerging epidemics made a series of costly mistakes during the 2014 Ebola outbreak that swept across West Africa — with employees feuding with fellow responders, contributing to misdiagnosed Ebola cases and repeatedly misreading the trajectory of the virus,” an Associated Press (AP) investigation into the company found.
The company reportedly made the “already chaotic situation worse,” prompting World Health Organization officials to criticize the company:
Emails obtained by AP and interviews with aid workers on the ground show that some of the company’s actions made an already chaotic situation worse.
WHO outbreak expert Dr. Eric Bertherat wrote to colleagues in a July 17, 2014, email about misdiagnoses and “total confusion” at the Sierra Leone government lab Metabiota shared with Tulane University in the city of Kenema. He said 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.
In April 2021, Joe Biden’s USAID announced a new initiative spearheaded by EcoHealth Alliance to track emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential. Also collaborating on the taxpayer-funded venture is Metabiota, whose researchers have been listed as authors on papers from June 2021 relating to coronavirus surveillance in Africa.
