Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) was a spinoff of Rosemont Capital, a venture capital firm created by Biden and John Kerry’s stepson in 2009. Biden served as a Managing Director.
One of the companies mentioned on archived versions of the firm’s portfolio is Metabiota, a San Francisco-based startup that claims to detect, track, and analyze new infectious diseases, The National Pulse has revealed.
According to financial reports, RSTP led the company’s first round of fundraising, which totaled $30 million. Neil Callahan, the former Managing Director and co-founder of RSTP—a name that frequently shows on Hunter Biden’s hard drive—is also a member of Metabiota’s Board of Advisors.
Metabiota & COVID-19 origin
Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the “PREDICT” initiative of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID), which aims to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.”
As part of this endeavor, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study into bat infectious diseases in China. According to the research, “sensitive and broadly reactive RT-PCR assays were performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.”
Shi Zhengli, the Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Lab, is one of the researchers included in the aforementioned 2014 publication. Peter Daszak, who was recently removed from the Lancet COVID-19 panel due to many conflicts of interest as a “longtime collaborator” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is named as a contributor.
Daszak is also a key figure in COVID-19’s possible origins. His EcoHealth Alliance used public funds to collaborate on bat coronavirus research in Wuhan with Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota researchers have also worked together on presentations on how to “live safely with bats” and studies tying new infectious disease epidemics to wildlife trade facilities, such as “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.
On a 2014 study on henipavirus spillover, a 2014 study on Ebola monitoring, a 2015 study on herpes, and a 2015 study on viral diversity, Metabiota researchers were named with EcoHealth Alliance staff.
Aside from its ties to EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota has also been criticized for “bungling” America’s Ebola response.
Metabiota & the Ebola crisis
“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 investigation into the company found.
According to reports, the corporation exacerbated an “already chaotic situation,” prompting World Health Organization authorities to denounce it:
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.
AP
In April 2021, Joe Biden’s USAID launched a new program to detect emerging infectious illnesses with pandemic potential, coordinated by EcoHealth Alliance. Metabiota, whose researchers have been named as authors on articles linked to coronavirus surveillance in Africa since June 2021, is also cooperating on the taxpayer-funded endeavor.