This is not about your feelings toward Putin or Ukraine. It’s about the ethics, morality, and trust of our own government. Last Tuesday, undersecretary of state for political affairs Victoria Nuland told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "Ukraine has biological research facilities, which in fact we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach." Now the World Health Organization is calling on Ukrainian officials to “destroy high-threat pathogens to prevent any potential spills,” due the ongoing risk of explosions during the war. Given that millions of Americans have been killed or injured long-term by a virus that was likely created by gain-of-function research in a similar lab in Wuhan, isn’t it important that we have a full accounting of how many other gain-of-function labs our government holds, in which countries, and what exactly they are doing with them? This is not about justifying Putin’s invasion as somehow the savior of humanity against biowarfare. It’s about understanding the origin of the virus that clearly was not natural and destroyed our lives and how to ensure this won’t happen again. So, who runs these labs? Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, a Bulgarian journalist, identified biotech company Metabiota Inc., which is heavily supported by Google, in an extremely detailed article back in 2019 as the main player in the Ukrainian labs. It’s a company that tracks the trajectory of outbreaks and sells pandemic insurance, but also seems to have its hand in the actual labs that, as we painfully learned the past two years, might be the source of some of these outbreaks. The US Company Metabiota Inc. has been 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. Metabiota Inc. had been contracted by the Pentagon to perform work for DTRA before and during the Ebola crisis in West Africa and was awarded $3.1 million (2012-2015) for work in Sierra Leone – one of the countries at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak. Indeed, in August 2018, Metabiota, which was created in 2008, announced it had been awarded a subcontract from Black & Veatch (B&V) to support the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s (DTRA) Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) in Iraq. Black and Veatch is the Kansas City-based engineering firm that is listed as the contractor on one of the DOD-funded veterinarian biolabs tasked with working on “pathogens,” among the documents recovered by NewsPunch from the U.S. embassy in Kiev. More at link.