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Ironically, our government used Ukraine to distract from the atrocities committed at home with the creation of Covid and the response to it. However, it appears that the focus on Ukraine might very well bring attention right back to the origins of the last catalysing global event they seek to erase from our memory.  Regardless of what happens with the war, we need to know if Ukraine is the new Wuhan, wrote Daniel Horowitz.

This is Part 2 of a three-part series.  Part 1 can be read HERE. 

In Part 1 we explained what products and services Metabiota sells, who their customers are and how badly they handled the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-2015.

Metabiota made a series of costly mistakes during the 2014 Ebola outbreak that swept across West Africa, a 2016 Associated Press investigation found.

At the time, Metabiota and its non-profit sister company Global Viral had received millions in funding from USAID, Google and the Skoll Foundation, among others. The Department of Defence alone had granted more than $18 million worth of contracts to the company.

Additionally, according to investigative journalist George Webb from 2008 to 2017, Black & Veatch and DTRA signed contracts, estimated at $215.6 million on construction and operation of biolabs in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Thailand, Ethiopia, Vietnam and Armenia.  Under the program in Georgia and Ukraine, Black & Veatch subcontractor, Metabiota, signed an $18.4 million federal contract.

Metabiota and PREDICT

Launched in 2009 and funded by USAID, PREDICT was an early warning system for new and emerging diseases in 21 countries.  It was led by the University of California’s (“UC”) Davis One Health Institute and core partners included EcoHealth Alliance (“EHA”), Metabiota, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Smithsonian Institution. PREDICT was a forerunner of the more ambitious Global Virome Project.

PREDICT partnered with the non-profit EHA to carry out its 9-year effort to catalogue hundreds of thousands of biological samples, “including over 10,000 bats.” A PREDICT-funded 2015 study on “diversity of coronavirus in bats” also included Peter Daszak, president of EHA, among its participants.

(Related: Virus hunters Meet the scientists searching for Disease X)

Metabiota sponsored Dr. Charles Chiu’s work on PREDICT’s viral surveillance program for the period January 2014 to January 2017. We were unable to obtain details on the work he carried out as the “Visit project website” is now a dead link.  However, Dr. Chiu is shown as an author for PREDICT-1, a project that ran during the years 2009 to 2014, but is not shown as an author for PREDICT-2, a project that ran for the years 2014 to 2020.  So, although it’s not clear what work Metabiota was sponsoring Dr. Chiu to perform, we know it related to PREDICT-1.

On his Global Projects profile Dr. Chiu is described as a Global Health Sciences Faculty Affiliate and on his UC profile it shows he is Professor of Laboratory Medicine at the School of Medicine.  On his UC profile Dr. Chiu’s research for PREDICT is not listed.

However, his UC profile shows, interestingly, a few months before starting work on PREDICT, he had been researching the development of diagnostic assays for rapid diagnosis of NIAID Category A-C virus infections, to “greatly assist efforts to investigate outbreaks or bioterrorist events.”

And over the same period Dr. Chiu was working on PREDICT he was also the principal investigator on 7 research projects all funded by NIH, including: to assess state-of-the-art diagnostic technologies, the Virochip, and massively parallel deep sequencing; digital PCR; and real-time pathogen detection.

In 2017 a USAID-funded PREDICT study, ‘Global patterns in coronavirus diversity’, was published in Virus Evolution. A study of which used PCR assays to detect both known and novel coronaviruses.

“Results of a five-year study in 20 countries on three continents have found that bats harbour a large diversity of coronaviruses (CoV), the family of viruses that cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS),” Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health wrote.

Ten out of the 16 authors emanated from UC Davis One Health Institute, Metabiota or EHA, and included: Nathan Wolf, Metabiota; Peter Daszak and William Karesh, EHA; and, the PREDICT Consortium.  The authors declared no conflicts of interests.

Nathan Wolfe is the founder of Metabiota and non-profit Global Viral. He spent over eight years conducting biomedical research in both sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.  Unsurprisingly, Wolfe is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.  More notably, since 2008 he had been a member of DARPA’s DSRC, Defence Science Research Council, until it was disbanded.

William Karesh, EHA’s Executive Vice President, links directly back to the very top of the US biodefence establishment.  EHA is listed as a partner of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (“WIV”) on archived pages of its website and was mentioned as a one of the institute’s “strategic partners” by the WIV’s Deputy Director General in 2018.

Notably, the relationship between the WIV and the American Biodefence establishment was advanced by EHA policy advisor, David R. Franz, former commander at US bioweapons lab at Fort Detrick.

WIV’s Dr. Shi Zhengli, a.k.a. “Batwoman,” had also worked with EHA’s Daszak on bat-related studies. As far back as 2005, Daszak and Zhengli were conducting research on SARS-like coronaviruses in bats. Several PREDICT-funded studies on SARS-like coronaviruses and Swine Flu count with both Zhengli’s and Daszak’s contributions. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these is a 2015 PREDICT and NIH-funded study she co-authored entitled: ‘A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence’.

(Read more: DARPA’s Man in Wuhan)

Former VP at EHA and whistle-blower Andrew Huff said highly dangerous gain-of-function (“GoF”) research was being conducted and the funding managed by EHA.  EHA partners with and receives funding from a variety of sources, not only NIH and NIAID but, other government agencies and private entities or foundations such as Google, Wellcome Trust, and the Gates Foundation.

Huff tweeted an image on 15 February of a list of US Department of Defence (“DoD”) funding to EHA: “Rumour is that the DoD has been lying to Congress about funding EHA.”

Huff believes Daszak works with the CIA and could in fact be “a double agent working on behalf of the Chinese government.”  He believes EHA is basically “a CIA front organisation.”

In a twitter thread posted on 23 January, Huff explained “not only is EcoHealth Alliance a CIA front organisation, but the United States of America is primarily responsible for Covid, not China. Covid was a US scientific R&D program where Covid was transferred to China.”

(Read more: Gain-Of-Function Research: The EcoHealth Alliance Intelligence Collection Scam)

Metabiota in Ukraine

Given the suspicion that EHA created SARS-CoV-2 out of a similar repository and “microbial museum,” not in the US but as an “enterprise” around the world, we should probably be suspicious of what Metabiota is doing in Ukraine.

In 2017, the Serbian newspaper Pecat published an article “Why is the US turning Ukraine into a biological bomb?”  The article states that from 2014 to 2017, 15 US military biological laboratories were built in Ukraine:

“They employ exclusively Americans, and they are financed entirely from the budget of the US Department of Defence. Local authorities have pledged not to interfere in their work. These military laboratories, where they are mainly engaged in the study and production of viruses and bacteria, are located in the following cities: Odessa, Vinnitsa, Uzhgorod, Lviv (three), Kharkov, Kyiv (three), Kherson, Ternopil. There are several such laboratories near Crimea and the Lugansk People’s Republic.

“All the heads of these military laboratories are from the ranks of intelligence officers, US military personnel, or proven American politicians. Also, these laboratories are often run by experts in biological weapons and biological terrorism.”

This information was picked up by Russian and Bulgarian media. The latter conducted their own investigation in 2018 and they counted 11 secret laboratories in Ukraine through which dangerous diseases spread.

(Read more: U.S. biolaboratories in Ukraine: Deadly viruses and threat for population)

In 2018, News Front, a website based in Crimea, published an article ‘CyberBerkut: USA taking control over biological research in Ukraine’. The article states:

“The USA is gaining total control over biological research facilities, researchers and stocks of deadly viruses in Ukraine. This will allow the USA to control epidemiological situation in the region, get access to every development in the sphere and manipulate population size while increasing American pharmaceutical corporations’ profit.

“The Pentagon has got access to Ukrainian biological research facilities under the plausible pretext of preventing the proliferation of biological weapons. The biological projects are sponsored and supervised by the U.S. Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is operating through its office in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, headed by Joanna Wintrol.

“The American engineering firm Black & Veatch is covering construction and maintenance of biological facilities and conducting biological researches under special projects. By a lucky chance, Metabiota, a subcontractor, is sharing the building with Black & Veatch in Kyiv.”

From 2008 to 2017, Black & Veatch and DTRA signed contracts, estimated at $215.6 million, on construction and operation of biolabs in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Thailand, Ethiopia, Vietnam and Armenia. Under the program in Georgia and Ukraine, the company Metabiota, Black & Veatch subcontractor, signed a $18.4 million federal contract.

The News Front article goes on to describe visits in March, May and June 2018 by a US delegation to Odessa, Kharkiv and Lviv respectively. The US delegation comprised US Embassy delegates and representatives of Black & Veatch subcontractors. The purpose was to implement a “system of pathogens control management” during which Black & Veatch gained access to “especially dangerous pathogens” at the disposal of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.

(Read more: CyberBerkut: USA taking control over biological research in Ukraine)

A few months earlier, in January 2018, then Vice President Joe Biden boasted about pushing the Ukraine to remove Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. Shokin was investigating Ukrainian company Burisma at the time. “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion,’” Biden said. “I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money’.”

Biden had been placed in charge of managing US relations in Ukraine by President Barack Obama. Shortly afterwards, in 2014, his son Hunter Biden became a board member of Burisma Holdings, in which Ihor Kolomoyskyi, reportedly, has a controlling interest. The same Kolomoyskyi who is behind the rise of Volodymyr Zelensky from comedian to President of Ukraine.

In an article, ‘Ukraine as Biden’s Sacrificed Pawn’, Prof. Dr. Masahiro Matsumura argues Biden’s response to the Ukraine conflict has been inadequate and wilfully negligent and had Donald Trump been re-elected the outcome would have been very different.  Prof Matsumura wrote:

“Biden made six official visits to Ukraine during his US Vice Presidency, as he took primary charge of Ukrainian affairs under the Obama administration … The records attest to Biden’s extensive contacts with Ukraine’s political and business circles.

“President Biden has been a protagonist in US policy toward Ukraine that has led Ukraine to solidify its NATO accession policy through constitutional amendment, yet without making necessary military commitments to the defence of Ukraine.

“The current Russia-Ukraine war has been consequent on the globalist mismanagement of the US hegemonic decline in which President Biden has continually played a central role for more than a decade.”

(Read more: Ukraine as Biden’s Sacrificed Pawn, A Mismanagement Under the Declining U.S. Hegemony)

In Part 3 we highlight who Metabiota’s investors are.