Nathan Wolfe

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Person.png Nathan Wolfe LinkedInRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(businessman)
Nathan Wolfe.jpg
NationalityUS
Alma materHarvard University, Stanford University
Member ofGlobal Virome Project, WEF/Young Global Leaders/2010
Interests• Jeffrey Epstein
Founder of biological research company Metabiota, wich operates biological laboratories in Ukraine, with money from the Pentagon and Hunter Biden. Friend of Jeffrey Epstein. WEF Young Global Leader 2010.

Nathan Wolfe is the founder of Metabiota, a biological research company that purports to detect, track, and analyze emerging infectious diseases. It is funded by United States Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to operate biological laboratories in Ukraine.[1] He was selected a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010. He was also awarded the WEF’s Technology Pioneer award in 2021.[2][3]

Career

Wolfe received his doctorate in Immunology & Infectious Diseases from Harvard in 1998. Until 2008 he was a full Professor in Epidemiology at UCLA, after which he founded Metabiota. His work has been published in or covered by Nature, Science, The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes and featured on the covers of Wired and National Geographic. His book, The Viral Storm, has been published in six languages, describes "why modern life has made our species vulnerable to the threat of a global pandemic".[4]

In 2011 he was named as one of the hundred most influential people in the world by Time magazine.[5]

In his 2012 book, “The Viral Storm,” Wolfe thanked friends for their support, including Jeffrey Epstein and Boris Nikolic. Nikolic, a biotech venture capitalist, was named “back-up executor” in Epstein’s will.[6]

Wolfe is a proponent of the theory of a dire risk of zoonotic spread of viruses from animals to people. He is director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. [7]

He is an advisor for e-vaping company JUUL Labs.[8]

Metabiota

Metabiota was a core partner of a United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Pandemic Threat Program called PREDICT, which sought to identify viruses with pandemic potential. PREDICT partnered with the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance to carry out its 9-year effort to catalogue hundreds of thousands of biological samples, “including over 10,000 bats.” Wolfe seems to have diverted government funds from the PREDICT program while he was still running it, to fund this personal side project, which was set up with the intention to collect, identify and catalogue 1 million viruses from wildlife in an effort to predict which ones might cause a human epidemic.[9]

Metabiota investors include In-Q-Tel, a CIA venture capital firm that specializes in high-tech investments that support or benefit the intelligence capacity of U.S. intelligence agencies, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which contracted Metabiota to run operations in U.S.-connected labs in Ukraine; Rosemont Seneca Partners, an investment fund founded in 2009 by Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz, John Kerry’s stepson. Wolfe has also received more than $20 million in research grants from Google, the NIH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[10]

In 2014 Metabiota was awarded $18.4 million federal contracts under the Pentagon’s DTRA program in Georgia and Ukraine for scientific and technical consulting services. Metabiota services include global field-based biological threat research, pathogen discovery, outbreak response and clinical trials.[11]

Between 2012 and 2015, Metabiota was contracted by the Pentagon to perform work for DTRA before and during the Ebola crisis in West Africa and was awarded $3.1 million for work in Sierra Leone.[12]

Further reading

 

Related Quotation

PageQuoteAuthorDate
Global Virome Project“The seeds of the [Global Virome] project were sown between 2009 and 2019, when the US government funded a big push into virus hunting in wildlife in tropical regions through a programme called PREDICT. When this funding came to an end, the main players got together to seek private and charitable funding to continue the work. These included, from government, Dennis Carrol, director of the Emerging Pandemic Threats Division within the United States Agency for International Development; from academia, Jonna Mazet of the University of California at Davis, who had been director of the PREDICT project; from the non-profit world, Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, who became treasurer of the new project; and from the private sector, Nathan Wolfe, founder of the DNA database firm Metabiota.”Matt Ridley
Prasenjit Ray
22 April 2022
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References