Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), an investment fund founded jointly by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz, and Devon Archer, was one of the major investors in the Metabiota – a company that focused on predicting, tracking and working out ways to respond to pandemics, The National Pulse online media outlet reported.
The outlet cited archived copies of the RSTP's online portfolio as indicating that the fund, led by Hunter Biden, financially backed the pandemic-prevention company, investing some $30 million. RSTP's then managing director and co-founder also held a seat on Metabiota's board of advisors.
It is unclear, when exactly the Biden-run RSTP started funding Metabiota. However, such an investment raises questions considering Metabiota's reported blunder during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea. The company was employed by the World Health Organisation and the Sierra Leonean government to respond to the outbreak and prevent the disease's spread. But according to the AP's investigation, the company's involvement brought more chaos to the process than help as employees clashed with medical staff and misdiagnosed Ebola cases, miscalculating the trajectories of the virus' spreading and failing to track the samples taken.
Metabiota's chief executive at the time, Nathan Wolfe, rejected the report's claims as "overblown" and praised the efforts his team undertook to respond to the Ebola outbreak.
The pandemic prediction and prevention company also reportedly worked with the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) on a project, whose goal was to "predict and prevent global emerging disease threats". As a part of the project, Metabiota cooperated, among other things, with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on a study related to bat infectious diseases, The National Pulse reported.
Years after the project's launch, the US government started to suspect the Wuhan institute of being involved in starting the global coronavirus pandemic. The Trump administration accused the Wuhan laboratory outright of accidentally leaking the pathogen, although at the time these claims were considered unfounded by most of the media and medical specialists. The allegations were partially revived recently after new US President Joe Biden ordered the country's intelligence community to investigate these allegations thoroughly after a newspaper story claiming that three employees at the institute had fallen ill with COVID-19-like symptoms just a month before the first coronavirus cases were registered in the nearby city of Wuhan.
Beijing strongly denies any allegations of its laboratory being responsible for releasing or somehow engineering the virus. Furthermore, the last foreign scientist to work at the lab ahead of the pandemic, Australian virologist Danielle Anderson, recently issued a statement saying that the way some media are trying to portray the Wuhan lab is incorrect. She made much of the high-containment standards at the lab and shared that she never heard about any of the institute workers falling ill in November 2019.