Horowitz: Hunter Biden’s role in Ukrainian biolabs raises serious questions about gain of function and Ukraine policy



Recent emails unearthed by the U.K. Daily Mail and the National Pulse reveal that during the last decade, Hunter Biden seemed to have a keen interest in pathogen research in Ukraine and using it as a tool for geopolitical affairs in that country. It just so happens to be that a pathogen connected to gain-of-function research destroyed the world, and then the next “big current thing” on the geopolitical stage was none other than Ukraine. Shouldn’t the American people get some answers as to why our government was so heavily involved – via the vice president’s son – in both pathogen research and Ukraine and to make sure Ukraine is not Wuhan 2.0?

Earlier this month, I detailed the known connections between biotech firm Metabiota Inc., responsible for the pathogen research in Ukraine, the DOD, and EcoHealth Alliance, along with the Wuhan lab most likely responsible for the leak of SARS-CoV-2. I also noted that Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), a subsidiary of the Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz-founded Rosemont Capital, gave Metabiota, a company accused of dangerous lab protocols during the African Ebola pandemic, its first infusion of cash a decade ago. Now, new emails from Hunter’s laptop demonstrate that his involvement in Metabiota and pathogen research in Ukraine was much deeper than just an initial investment.

On April 4, 2014, Metabiota vice president Mary Guttieri wrote an email to the younger Biden outlining how they could “assert Ukraine's cultural and economic independence from Russia'” with their joint venture, according to an email from Hunter’s laptop obtained by the U.K. Daily Mail. That is quite a curious goal for a company that supposedly does scientific research and analysis about emerging pandemics.

The outlet also posted another email dated April 8, 2014, from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi referring to a “science project” Hunter had pitched to him involving Burisma and Metabiota in Ukraine. “Please find few initial points to be discussed for the purposes of analyzing the potential of this as you called, 'Science Ukraine' project,” Pozharskyi wrote. Hunter sits on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company owned by corrupt billionaire Mikolay Zlochevsky, who fled to Monaco after he was put under investigation.

Hunter’s dad, as vice president, was in charge of our foreign policy with Ukraine in 2014 when all of this was occurring and when the U.S. government was backing the color revolution that led to the ouster of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych. It was at this time that the Defense Department began funding the Metabiota operations in Ukraine.

After receiving 18.4 million from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) between February 2014 and November 2016, with $307,091 earmarked for “Ukraine research projects,” “Metabiota has worked in Ukraine for Black & Veatch, a US defense contractor with deep ties to military intelligence agencies, which built secure labs in Ukraine that analyzed killer diseases and bioweapons,” according to the Daily Mail.

“It raises the question, what is the real purpose of this venture? It's very odd,” said former senior CIA officer Sam Faddis in an interview with the Daily Mail. “His father was the Vice President of the United States and in charge of relations with Ukraine. So why was Hunter not only on the board of a suspect Ukrainian gas firm, but also hooked them up with a company working on bioweapons research?”

Biden was so involved in Metabiota that one email written that same month in 2014 reveals that he and his business partner Eric Schwerin discussed subletting their office space to the San-Francisco-based biotech firm.

So, what exactly were they working on? Last week, the National Pulse reported that a feature in the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine’s 2016 Annual Report recounts an October 2016 meeting involving U.S. military officials and their Ukrainian counterparts together with Black & Veatch and Metabiota staff to discuss the lab work. The discussion centered around “existing frameworks, regulatory coordination, and ongoing cooperative projects in research, surveillance and diagnostics of a number of dangerous zoonotic diseases, such as avian influenza, leptospirosis, Crimea Congo hemorrhagic fever, and brucellosis.”

The National Pulse cites a 2019 paper authored by researchers from Metabiota and three Ukraine-based institutes and funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency sharing how they isolated a form of African swine flu using a pig from Ukraine in 2016. They also detail their research on Anthrax in animals in Ukraine.

Well, where else have we heard of Metabiota partners working on gain-of-function research of pathogens that typically are in animals? Oh yes, EcoHealth Alliance in Wuhan. In the past, Metabiota has worked with EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The zoonotic projects being described in Ukraine sound awfully similar to the gain-of-function work EcoHealth was involved with in Wuhan. In Feb. 2016, EcoHealth’s founder, Peter Daszak, explained the company’s zoonotic pathogen work as follows:

So as an example, first of all, we are only looking at viral families that include those that have gone into people from animals. So we narrow it down straight away. Then when you get a sequence of a virus and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS, we found other Corona viruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein, the protein that attaches to cells. Then we, well, I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work, you create the pseudo-particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses [to see if they] bind to human cells. And each step you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people. So you narrow down the field, you reduce the cost and you end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers. (C-Span, 1:16:22.)

Sure sounds a lot like the coronavirus that actually broke out several years ago and destroyed the world as we know it. Less than a month later, Ralph Baric, the UNC Chapel Hill biologist who spearheaded the gain-of-function projects for Daszak, co-authored a paper warning with certitude of the emergence of this disease. “The results indicate that viruses using WIV1-CoV spike are poised to emerge in human populations due to efficient replication in primary human airway epithelial cell cultures,” concluded the authors.

How did they know? And doesn’t anyone have a concern that the same players were up to no good in Ukraine, especially given Hunter Biden’s ethical problems and the fact that his dad, the vice president and now the president, was overseeing Ukrainian affairs during that time?

Recently, the National Pulse found, based on EcoHealth’s 990 filings and analysis by ProPublica, that the company’s investment income surged by 342% in the year of the pandemic. EcoHealth received millions of dollars from Fauci’s NIAD to work on “killer” viruses with the Wuhan Institute, creating “chimeric” viruses that spread in humans at rates “equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”

Now consider the fact that Metabiota’s CEO, Nathan Wolfe, penned an article in Time on Aug. 1, 2014, detailing his opinion on the Ebola outbreak in Africa and then literally predicted coronavirus as the next outbreak:

While Ebola virus won’t be the next global Andromeda strain, there are viruses out there that could be. Coronaviruses (like SARS) and influenza viruses (like the H1N1 virus of 1918) for example, show that some viruses truly can spread around the world in ways that will blindside and impact our entire planet. It is notable that a novel coronavirus, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and a novel influenzavirus, the H7N9 virus, receive very little attention from the international media. Perhaps as importantly, there are millions of still unidentified viruses in animal reservoirs, among which, almost certainly is a virus that we’d have no capacity to understand or stop were it to suddenly emerge today.
If we didn’t have a pandemic likely created by similar research – possibly by the same players – killing millions globally and injuring tens of millions of others, I wouldn’t be too concerned with these research projects in Ukraine. But given what has occurred, why is there zero concern from the media or the politicians about what we have been doing in Ukraine and elsewhere? And how does it shape our entire geopolitical worldview on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict? Inquiring minds would like to know.

The truth about those US-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine



In case you haven't noticed, there has been quite the controversy in the last week about whether Ukraine does or does not have biological research facilities that were funded, at least in part, by the United States military. The accusation has been the subject of some absurd fact-checks by our corporate media and accusations of "Russian disinformation" from our government.

The truth is: Yes, there are indeed biological research facilities in Ukraine that have been funded by our government. We don't have any way to know whether these facilities were conducting research that was intended to produce weapons or not, but we do know that if the pathogens housed in these facilities escaped, they would be just as deadly as as an intentionally produced bioweapon.

The controversy began when the Russian government tweeted the following accusation:

@mod_russia: During the course of the special military operation evidence of an emergency clean-up performed by the Kiev regime was found - aimed at eradicating traces of the military-biological programme, in Ukraine, financed by @DeptofDefense. \n\n https://disk.yandex.ru/d/dyWUEF3tDZGauw\u00a0\u2026pic.twitter.com/rldp9UMAkx
— MFA Russia \ud83c\uddf7\ud83c\uddfa (@MFA Russia \ud83c\uddf7\ud83c\uddfa) 1646591544

Specifically, the Russian government stated that it found evidence of a "military-biological programme" that was funded by the United States Department of Defense and that was being cleaned up during the course of the invasion.

Promptly, the United States government leapt into action to dispute this contention with the assertion that the United States military does not, and never has, funded a "biological weapons" program and claimed that this accusation was part of a "Russian disinformation" campaign. This assertion was dutifully repeated by the government's stenographers in the corporate media.

Amazingly, the seminal "fact-check," written by USA Today, argued that there were no "biolabs" funded by the military, even while acknowledging the existence of such labs. The "fact-check" notes that the United States and Ukraine did have such labs, but that they were to "prevent the proliferation of dangerous pathogens and related expertise and to minimize potential biological threats" and further explicitly stated that the United States was providing funding to those labs, albeit for the purpose of "making repairs, updating equipment and purchasing supplies" at those laboratories.

At the risk of overstating the obvious, if the military is "purchasing supplies" at these laboratories, to say nothing of "updating equipment" or "making repairs" at these laboratories, it is funding them.

In a remarkable off-camera briefing held last week, the Defense Department further spoke about these claims. In that briefing, an unidentified "senior Department of Defense official" said, among other things:

A few key points about the Department of Defense's Cooperative Threat Reduction Program Biological Threat Reduction Program activities in Ukraine this is part of the Department of Defense's Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. Through that program, we have invested approximately $200 million in Ukraine since 2005, supporting 46 Ukrainian labs, health facilities, and diagnostic sites. DOD's CTR program began its biological work with Ukraine to eliminate the remnants of the Soviet Union's illegal biological weapons program left in the Soviet successor states after the USSR fell. There are no DOD bioweapon labs in Ukraine or anywhere else in the world.

The first and most obvious point to make about this statement is that it is an admission that: a) these laboratories exist, and b) we have given them a lot of money. Now, the unnamed senior official follows this up with two red herrings. First, the senior official asserted that our cooperation with Ukraine on this project began as an effort to eliminate the bioweapons program that was being carried on by the Soviet Union. Assuming that is true, it has nothing to do with our efforts that began in 2005, some 14 years after the Soviet Union fell. Second, the official asserted that "there are no DOD bioweapon labs" anywhere in the world.

Let's assume that this assertion is true, because it seems to be all that either the DOD or the press is focusing on. Assume that nowhere in Ukraine is a laboratory that has the express purpose of creating or proliferating a bioweapon. Fine. The assertion is simply not responsive to the charge that was actually made by the Russian government, which was that they found evidence of a "military-biological programme" that was funded by the United States Department of Defense. That assertion is demonstrably true and has been confirmed as true by our government. Now, our government says, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that the purpose of those labs was not to create a bioweapon. But that doesn't mean, in this case, that what the Russian government said was false.

We know some of what the government was doing in Ukraine from documents that were released by Wikileaks. In a 2008 cable, it was revealed that Andrew Weber of the OSD/CTR (the same Department of Defense agency referred to in last week's briefing) held a discussion with Ukrainian officials about the need to create one central laboratory in Ukraine that would house its most dangerous pathogens because, among other reasons, "the U.S. seeks to consolidate the strains/pathogens that could be used by terrorists on human or agricultural targets."

This illustrates the problem with the government's straw man protestations that it does not fund bioweapon labs. Unlike other potential weapons of mass destruction, there is no functional difference between the danger associated with biological materials that are collected for peaceful purposes and materials that are collected for illicit, non-peaceful purposes. If a terrorist breaks into a nuclear power plant, they can't make off with a functioning nuclear bomb. However, if they break into a biological research facility that houses a dangerous pathogen that is being kept for the purpose of, say, vaccine development, they now have a fully functioning dangerous pathogen.

It probably (hopefully) is true that the Ukrainians are not housing dangerous pathogens in order to develop bioweapons on the U.S. taxpayer's dime. However, after we have just come through a two-year pandemic that has taken millions of lives and may well have been started due to a leak from a laboratory that was trying to develop a coronavirus vaccine, that may come as cold comfort to people who are justifiably concerned about the safety of those pathogens during the course of the scorched-earth campaign the Russian military is now conducting.

By the way, the initial Russian accusation did not just say the program existed, it said that there was an "emergency cleanup" under way that was trying to eradicate the program. This is, frankly, good news. It's exactly what should be happening.

Absolutely no one would begrudge the Ukrainians an aggressive research program into chemical and biological agents, given Russia's nasty history with poisons and pathogens — a history that includes the probable attempted assassination of Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko by the Russian government in 2004. And, given that the Russian military is now carpeting Ukraine with explosive devices, with apparently little care or ability to deliver those devices with precision, it is entirely appropriate for a cleanup operation to be under way to ensure that those pathogens are not inadvertently released.

But the United States government should be saying that, in order to ensure that our credibility remains intact on the world stage after the sad and senseless invasion of Ukraine is over.