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FTR#‘s 1251 and 1252: Pandemics Inc., Parts 1 and 2

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“Polit­i­cal language…is designed to make lies sound truth­ful and mur­der respectable, and to give an appear­ance of solid­i­ty to pure wind.”

— George Orwell, 1946

EVERYTHING MR. EMORY HAS BEEN SAYING ABOUT THE UKRAINE WAR IS ENCAPSULATED IN THIS VIDEO FROM UKRAINE 24

ANOTHER REVEALING VIDEO FROM UKRAINE 24

Mr. Emory has launched a new Patre­on site. Vis­it at: Patreon.com/DaveEmory

FTR#1251 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

FTR#1252 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Munich Re Court­yards.
Pho­to Cred­it: Wikipedia.org

Intro­duc­tion: The first pro­gram begins by not­ing the join­ing of Metabio­ta with Munich Re, which, as we shall see, is work­ing with that firm and an Amer­i­can insur­ance bro­ker to offer pan­dem­ic insur­ance.

The firms are being financed by In-Q-Tel, the CIA and intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty’s ven­ture cap­i­tal wing!

To pro­vide depth and insight to the dis­cus­sion, we review some key aspects of Metabio­ta:

High­lights of the Dis­cus­sion:

  • ” . . . . The com­man­der of the Russ­ian Nuclear, Bio­log­i­cal and Chem­i­cal Pro­tec­tion Forces, claimed there was a ‘scheme of inter­ac­tion between US gov­ern­ment agen­cies and Ukrain­ian bio­log­i­cal objects’ and point­ed to the ‘financ­ing of such activ­i­ties by struc­tures close to the cur­rent US lead­er­ship, in par­tic­u­lar the invest­ment fund Rose­mont Seneca, which is head­ed by Hunter Biden.’. . .”
  • ” . . . . Moscow’s claim that Hunter Biden helped finance a US mil­i­tary ‘bioweapons’ research pro­gram in Ukraine is at least par­tial­ly true, accord­ing to new emails obtained exclu­sive­ly by DailyMail.com. . . .”
  • ” . . . . emails from Hunter’s aban­doned lap­top show he helped secure mil­lions of dol­lars of fund­ing for Metabio­ta, a Depart­ment of Defense con­trac­tor spe­cial­iz­ing in research on pan­dem­ic-caus­ing dis­eases that could be used as bioweapons. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Metabio­ta has been an offi­cial part­ner of Eco­Health Alliance since 2014, accord­ing to its web­site. . . .”
  • ” . . . . He also intro­duced Metabio­ta to an alleged­ly cor­rupt Ukrain­ian gas firm, Buris­ma, for a ‘sci­ence project’ involv­ing high biose­cu­ri­ty lev­el labs in Ukraine . . . .”
  • ” . . . . Emails and defense con­tract data reviewed by DailyMail.com sug­gest that Hunter had a promi­nent role in mak­ing sure Metabio­ta was able to con­duct its pathogen research just a few hun­dred miles from the bor­der with Rus­sia. . . .”
  • ” . . . . 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. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Hunter was also par­tic­u­lar­ly involved in Metabio­ta’s oper­a­tions in Ukraine. Hunter’s pitch­es to investors claimed that they not only orga­nized fund­ing for the firm, they also helped it ‘get new cus­tomers’ includ­ing ‘gov­ern­ment agen­cies in case of Metabio­ta’. . . .”
  • ” . . . . For­mer senior CIA offi­cer Sam Fad­dis, who has reviewed emails on Hunter’s lap­top, told DailyMail.com that the offer to help assert Ukraine’s inde­pen­dence was odd for a biotech exec­u­tive [Metabio­ta vice-pres­i­dent Mary Gut­tieri]. ‘It rais­es the ques­tion, what is the real pur­pose of this ven­ture? It’s very odd,’ he said. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Gut­tieri had a lead­ing role in Metabio­ta’s Ukraine oper­a­tions, meet­ing with oth­er com­pa­ny exec­u­tives and US and Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary offi­cials in Octo­ber 2016 to dis­cuss ‘coop­er­a­tion in sur­veil­lance and pre­ven­tion of espe­cial­ly dan­ger­ous infec­tious dis­eases, includ­ing zoonot­ic dis­eases in Ukraine and neigh­bor­ing coun­tries’ accord­ing to a 2016 report by the Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Cen­ter in Ukraine. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Four days after Gut­tier­i’s April 2014 email, Buris­ma exec­u­tive Vadym Pozharskyi wrote to Hunter reveal­ing that the then-Vice Pres­i­den­t’s son had pitched a ‘sci­ence project’ involv­ing Buris­ma and Metabio­ta in Ukraine. ‘As I under­stand the Metabio­ta was a sub­con­tract to prin­ci­pal con­tac­tor of the DoD B&V [Black & Veatch]. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Fad­dis told DailyMail.com that the attempt to get Metabio­ta to form a part­ner­ship with Buris­ma was a per­plex­ing and wor­ry­ing rev­e­la­tion. 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?’ Fad­dis said. . . .”
  • ” . . . . ‘The DoD posi­tion is that  . . . . this is pan­dem­ic ear­ly warn­ing research. We don’t know for sure that’s all that was going on. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Gov­ern­ment spend­ing records show the Depart­ment of Defense award­ed an $18.4million con­tract to Metabio­ta between Feb­ru­ary 2014 and Novem­ber 2016, with $307,091 ear­marked for ‘Ukraine research projects’. . . .”
  • ” . . . . The US Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA) also com­mis­sioned B&V to build a Bio­log­i­cal Safe­ty Lev­el 3 lab­o­ra­to­ry in Odessa, Ukraine in 2010, which ‘pro­vid­ed enhanced equip­ment and train­ing to effec­tive­ly, safe­ly and secure­ly iden­ti­fy espe­cial­ly dan­ger­ous pathogens’ accord­ing to a com­pa­ny press release. Such labs are used to ‘study infec­tious agents or tox­ins that may be trans­mit­ted through the air and cause poten­tial­ly lethal infec­tions,’ the US Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices says. . . .”
  • ” . . . . In anoth­er sign of the deep ties between Metabio­ta and the Depart­ment of Defense, Hunter’s RSTP busi­ness part­ner Rob Walk­er said he would ‘have a friend reach out to DoD on the down low’, in order to prove the com­pa­ny’s bona fides to top prospec­tive investors Gold­man Sachs and Mor­gan Stan­ley in Octo­ber 2014. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Metabio­ta also has close ties to the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (WIV), sus­pect­ed to be the source of the COVID-19 out­break. WIV was a hotspot for con­tro­ver­sial ‘gain of func­tion’ research that can cre­ate super-strength virus­es. Chi­nese sci­en­tists per­formed gain of func­tion research on coro­n­avirus­es at the WIV, work­ing along­side a US-backed orga­ni­za­tion Eco­Health Alliance that has since drawn intense scruti­ny over its coro­n­avirus research since the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. Researchers from the Wuhan insti­tute, Metabio­ta and Eco­Health Alliance pub­lished a study togeth­er in 2014 on infec­tious dis­eases from bats in Chi­na, which notes that tests were per­formed at the WIV. Shi Zhengli, the WIV Direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Emerg­ing Infec­tious Dis­eases who became dubbed the ‘bat lady’ for her cen­tral role in bat coro­n­avirus research at the lab, was a con­trib­u­tor to the paper. . . .”

Next, we note that Metabiota–which uses AI and social media scrap­ing (among oth­er tools) to gauge the “fear fac­tor” involved with pan­dem­ic readi­ness (and the asso­ci­at­ed pan­dem­ic insur­ance policies)–was gaug­ing the fear fac­tor for mon­key pox, which had man­i­fest­ed some human infec­tions in the Con­go as “low.”

This was in ear­ly 2020. Now, the dis­ease is on the “front burn­er,” so to speak. Peo­ple are afraid of the “new pan­dem­ic.”

Despite only 306 doc­u­ment­ed cas­es in the U.S. (as of 6/28/2022), hun­dreds of thou­sands of vac­cine dos­es are being read­ied for human use.

The dis­ease bears an epi­demi­o­log­i­cal sim­i­lar­i­ty to AIDS: an African mon­key virus infect­ing gay males with mul­ti­ple sex part­ners.

Note that the Wired Mag­a­zine arti­cle that will com­prise the bulk of this pro­gram presents the ludi­crous “chim­panzee” ori­gins of AIDS, which we ana­lyzed in FTR# 557.

Next, we review an excerpt from tes­ti­mo­ny before a House appro­pri­a­tions sub­com­mit­tee that was draw­ing up the defense bud­get for the fol­low­ing year. (The hear­ings were in 1969.) The tes­ti­mo­ny dis­cuss­es the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using genet­ic engi­neer­ing to pro­duce a dis­ease that would be “refrac­to­ry” to the immune sys­tem. This is vir­tu­al­ly the clin­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of AIDS. It is worth not­ing that the project was fund­ed, and just such a disease—AIDS—appeared in just the time frame posit­ed. It is also worth not­ing that, in the 2002 edi­tion of A High­er Form of Killing, this pas­sage is omit­ted!!

We have cov­ered AIDS as a bio­log­i­cal war­fare weapon in numer­ous pro­grams, includ­ing: AFA#16, as well as FTR#‘s 16, 19, 606, 644, 682, 1115, 1123.

The first pro­gram con­cludes with the begin­ning of the read­ing of a long Wired Mag­a­zine arti­cle about the Metabiota/Munich Rein­sur­ance project. The read­ing is com­plet­ed in the sec­ond pro­gram.

Before read­ing the arti­cle as a whole, we high­light two key points of infor­ma­tion:

  • The busi­ness suc­cess of the pan­dem­ic insur­ance would nec­es­sar­i­ly incor­po­rate analy­sis of the “fear fac­tor” of poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens: ” . . . . As sophis­ti­cat­ed as Metabiota’s sys­tem was, how­ev­er, it would need to be even more refined to incor­po­rate into an insur­ance pol­i­cy. The mod­el would need to cap­ture some­thing much more dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy than his­tor­i­cal deaths and med­ical stock­piles: fear. The eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of a scourge, the his­tor­i­cal data showed, were as much a result of society’s response as they were to the virus itself. . . . The Sen­ti­ment Index was built to be, as Oppen­heim put it, ‘a cat­a­log of dread.’ For any giv­en pathogen, it could spit out a score from 0 to 100 accord­ing to how fright­en­ing the pub­lic would find it. . . . Mad­hav and her team, along with Wolfe and Oppen­heim, also researched the broad­er eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of dis­ease out­breaks, mea­sured in the ‘cost per death pre­vent­ed’ incurred by soci­etal inter­ven­tions. ‘Mea­sures that decreased per­son-to-per­son con­tact, includ­ing social dis­tanc­ing, quar­an­tine, and school clo­sures, had the great­est cost per death pre­vent­ed, most like­ly because of the amount of eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion caused by those mea­sures,’ they wrote in a 2018 paper. . . .”
  • More sin­is­ter, still, is the fact that Metabio­ta had ana­lyzed the sce­nario of a nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic two years before it hap­pened. This appears to be the 2018 paper referred to above. Do not fail to note that, at the time that Metabio­ta was run­ning this sce­nario, they were part­nered with Eco­Health Alliance, which was using Pen­ta­gon and USAID mon­ey to research and per­form gain-of-func­tion on these types of coro­n­avirus­es!! ” . . . . As the human and eco­nom­ic dev­as­ta­tion mul­ti­plied in tan­dem across the globe, Metabiota’s employ­ees sud­den­ly found them­selves liv­ing inside their own model’s pro­jec­tions. Just two years ear­li­er, the com­pa­ny had run a large set of sce­nar­ios fore­cast­ing the con­se­quences of a nov­el coro­n­avirus spread­ing around the globe. . . .”

1. The pro­gram begins by not­ing the join­ing of Metabio­ta with Munich Re, which, as we shall see, is work­ing with that firm and an Amer­i­can insur­ance bro­ker to offer pan­dem­ic insur­ance.

The firms are being financed by In-Q-Tel, the CIA and intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty’s ven­ture cap­i­tal wing!

“Munich Re & In-Q-Tel Select Metabio­ta to Gain Deep­er Insights into Epi­dem­ic Risk and Glob­al Pre­pared­ness for Infec­tious Dis­eases;” iqt.org; 8/22/2017.

Metabio­ta Launch­es First Com­mer­cial Risk Mod­el­ing Plat­form and Pre­pared­ness Index to Help Insur­ers Under­stand and Under­write Epi­dem­ic Risk

Today, Metabio­ta, the pio­neer in epi­dem­ic risk mod­el­ing, announced that two mar­ket inno­va­tors, Munich Rein­sur­ance Com­pa­ny, the largest glob­al rein­sur­er and lead­ing expert on glob­al risk solu­tions and In-Q-Tel, Inc. (IQT), the strate­gic investor that accel­er­ates the devel­op­ment of tech­nolo­gies to sup­port the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, have signed strate­gic agree­ments with Metabio­ta.

The news comes as Metabio­ta com­mer­cial­ly launch­es the industry’s first ever plat­form for esti­mat­ing epi­dem­ic pre­pared­ness and risk, includ­ing the fre­quen­cy, sever­i­ty, dura­tion and cost of out­breaks. With a pow­er­ful com­bi­na­tion of epi­dem­ic risk ana­lyt­ics, his­tor­i­cal data, dis­ease sce­nar­ios and insights from pub­lic health ana­lysts and glob­al epi­demi­ol­o­gists, Metabiota’s plat­form is enabling the insur­ance indus­try to offer new epi­dem­ic insur­ance solu­tions by deliv­er­ing capa­bil­i­ties that allow insur­ers to bet­ter under­stand and under­write risk. . . .

2a.  To pro­vide depth and insight to the dis­cus­sion, we review some key aspects of Metabio­ta:

High­lights of the Dis­cus­sion:

  • ” . . . . The com­man­der of the Russ­ian Nuclear, Bio­log­i­cal and Chem­i­cal Pro­tec­tion Forces, claimed there was a ‘scheme of inter­ac­tion between US gov­ern­ment agen­cies and Ukrain­ian bio­log­i­cal objects’ and point­ed to the ‘financ­ing of such activ­i­ties by struc­tures close to the cur­rent US lead­er­ship, in par­tic­u­lar the invest­ment fund Rose­mont Seneca, which is head­ed by Hunter Biden.’. . .”
  • ” . . . . Moscow’s claim that Hunter Biden helped finance a US mil­i­tary ‘bioweapons’ research pro­gram in Ukraine is at least par­tial­ly true, accord­ing to new emails obtained exclu­sive­ly by DailyMail.com. . . .”
  • ” . . . . emails from Hunter’s aban­doned lap­top show he helped secure mil­lions of dol­lars of fund­ing for Metabio­ta, a Depart­ment of Defense con­trac­tor spe­cial­iz­ing in research on pan­dem­ic-caus­ing dis­eases that could be used as bioweapons. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Metabio­ta has been an offi­cial part­ner of Eco­Health Alliance since 2014, accord­ing to its web­site. . . .”
  • ” . . . . He also intro­duced Metabio­ta to an alleged­ly cor­rupt Ukrain­ian gas firm, Buris­ma, for a ‘sci­ence project’ involv­ing high biose­cu­ri­ty lev­el labs in Ukraine . . . .”
  • ” . . . . Emails and defense con­tract data reviewed by DailyMail.com sug­gest that Hunter had a promi­nent role in mak­ing sure Metabio­ta was able to con­duct its pathogen research just a few hun­dred miles from the bor­der with Rus­sia. . . .”
  • ” . . . . 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. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Hunter was also par­tic­u­lar­ly involved in Metabio­ta’s oper­a­tions in Ukraine. Hunter’s pitch­es to investors claimed that they not only orga­nized fund­ing for the firm, they also helped it ‘get new cus­tomers’ includ­ing ‘gov­ern­ment agen­cies in case of Metabio­ta’. . . .”
  • ” . . . . For­mer senior CIA offi­cer Sam Fad­dis, who has reviewed emails on Hunter’s lap­top, told DailyMail.com that the offer to help assert Ukraine’s inde­pen­dence was odd for a biotech exec­u­tive [Metabio­ta vice-pres­i­dent Mary Gut­tieri]. ‘It rais­es the ques­tion, what is the real pur­pose of this ven­ture? It’s very odd,’ he said. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Gut­tieri had a lead­ing role in Metabio­ta’s Ukraine oper­a­tions, meet­ing with oth­er com­pa­ny exec­u­tives and US and Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary offi­cials in Octo­ber 2016 to dis­cuss ‘coop­er­a­tion in sur­veil­lance and pre­ven­tion of espe­cial­ly dan­ger­ous infec­tious dis­eases, includ­ing zoonot­ic dis­eases in Ukraine and neigh­bor­ing coun­tries’ accord­ing to a 2016 report by the Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Cen­ter in Ukraine. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Four days after Gut­tier­i’s April 2014 email, Buris­ma exec­u­tive Vadym Pozharskyi wrote to Hunter reveal­ing that the then-Vice Pres­i­den­t’s son had pitched a ‘sci­ence project’ involv­ing Buris­ma and Metabio­ta in Ukraine. ‘As I under­stand the Metabio­ta was a sub­con­tract to prin­ci­pal con­tac­tor of the DoD B&V [Black & Veatch]. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Fad­dis told DailyMail.com that the attempt to get Metabio­ta to form a part­ner­ship with Buris­ma was a per­plex­ing and wor­ry­ing rev­e­la­tion. 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?’ Fad­dis said. . . .”
  • ” . . . . ‘The DoD posi­tion is that  . . . . this is pan­dem­ic ear­ly warn­ing research. We don’t know for sure that’s all that was going on. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Gov­ern­ment spend­ing records show the Depart­ment of Defense award­ed an $18.4million con­tract to Metabio­ta between Feb­ru­ary 2014 and Novem­ber 2016, with $307,091 ear­marked for ‘Ukraine research projects’. . . .”
  • ” . . . . The US Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA) also com­mis­sioned B&V to build a Bio­log­i­cal Safe­ty Lev­el 3 lab­o­ra­to­ry in Odessa, Ukraine in 2010, which ‘pro­vid­ed enhanced equip­ment and train­ing to effec­tive­ly, safe­ly and secure­ly iden­ti­fy espe­cial­ly dan­ger­ous pathogens’ accord­ing to a com­pa­ny press release. Such labs are used to ‘study infec­tious agents or tox­ins that may be trans­mit­ted through the air and cause poten­tial­ly lethal infec­tions,’ the US Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices says. . . .”
  • ” . . . . In anoth­er sign of the deep ties between Metabio­ta and the Depart­ment of Defense, Hunter’s RSTP busi­ness part­ner Rob Walk­er said he would ‘have a friend reach out to DoD on the down low’, in order to prove the com­pa­ny’s bona fides to top prospec­tive investors Gold­man Sachs and Mor­gan Stan­ley in Octo­ber 2014. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Metabio­ta also has close ties to the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (WIV), sus­pect­ed to be the source of the COVID-19 out­break. WIV was a hotspot for con­tro­ver­sial ‘gain of func­tion’ research that can cre­ate super-strength virus­es. Chi­nese sci­en­tists per­formed gain of func­tion research on coro­n­avirus­es at the WIV, work­ing along­side a US-backed orga­ni­za­tion Eco­Health Alliance that has since drawn intense scruti­ny over its coro­n­avirus research since the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. Researchers from the Wuhan insti­tute, Metabio­ta and Eco­Health Alliance pub­lished a study togeth­er in 2014 on infec­tious dis­eases from bats in Chi­na, which notes that tests were per­formed at the WIV. Shi Zhengli, the WIV Direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Emerg­ing Infec­tious Dis­eases who became dubbed the ‘bat lady’ for her cen­tral role in bat coro­n­avirus research at the lab, was a con­trib­u­tor to the paper. . . .”

“EXCLUSIVE: Hunter Biden DID help secure mil­lions in fund­ing for US con­trac­tor in Ukraine spe­cial­iz­ing in dead­ly pathogen research, lap­top emails reveal, rais­ing more ques­tions about the dis­graced son of then vice pres­i­dent” by JOSH BOSWELL; Dai­ly Mail [UK]; 3/25/2022.

2b. Next, we note that Metabiota–which uses AI and social media scrap­ing (among oth­er tools) to gauge the “fear fac­tor” involved with pan­dem­ic readi­ness (and the asso­ci­at­ed pan­dem­ic insur­ance policies)–was gaug­ing the fear fac­tor for mon­key pox, which had man­i­fest­ed some human infec­tions in the Con­go as “low.”

This was in ear­ly 2020. Now, the dis­ease is on the “front burn­er,” so to speak. Peo­ple are afraid of the “new pan­dem­ic.”

Despite only 306 doc­u­ment­ed cas­es in the U.S. (as of 6/28/2022), hun­dreds of thou­sands of vac­cine dos­es are being read­ied for human use.

The dis­ease bears an epi­demi­o­log­i­cal sim­i­lar­i­ty to AIDS: an African mon­key virus infect­ing gay males with mul­ti­ple sex part­ners.

“How AI is bat­tling the coro­n­avirus out­break” by Rebec­ca Heil­weil; Vox; 01/28/2020.

. . . . Sim­i­lar­ly, the epi­dem­ic-mon­i­tor­ing com­pa­ny Metabio­ta deter­mined that Thai­land, South Korea, Japan, and Tai­wan had the high­est risk of see­ing the virus show up more than a week before cas­es in those coun­tries were actu­al­ly report­ed, par­tial­ly by look­ing to flight data. Metabio­ta, like Blue­Dot, uses nat­ur­al-lan­guage pro­cess­ing to eval­u­ate online reports about a poten­tial dis­ease, and it’s also work­ing on devel­op­ing the same tech­nol­o­gy for social media data.

Mark Gal­li­van, Metabiota’s data sci­ence direc­tor, explains that online plat­forms and forums can also give an indi­ca­tion that there’s a risk of an epi­dem­ic. Metabio­ta also claims it can esti­mate the risk of a disease’s spread caus­ing social and polit­i­cal dis­rup­tion, based on infor­ma­tion like an illness’s symp­toms, mor­tal­i­ty rate, and the avail­abil­i­ty of treat­ment. For instance, at the time of this article’s pub­li­ca­tion, Metabio­ta rat­ed the risk of the nov­el coro­n­avirus caus­ing pub­lic anx­i­ety as “high” in the US and Chi­na, but it rat­ed this risk for the mon­key­pox virus in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of the Con­go (where there have been report­ed cas­es of that virus) as “medi­um.”

It’s hard to know just how accu­rate this rat­ing sys­tem or the plat­form itself can be, but Gal­li­van says the com­pa­ny is work­ing with the US intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty and the Defense Depart­ment on issues relat­ed to the coro­n­avirus. This is part of Metabiota’s work with In-Q-Tel, the non­prof­it ven­ture firm asso­ci­at­ed with the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency. But gov­ern­ment agen­cies aren’t the only poten­tial clients of these sys­tems. Metabio­ta also adver­tis­es its plat­form to rein­sur­ance com­pa­nies — rein­sur­ance is essen­tial­ly insur­ance for insur­ance com­pa­nies — that might want to man­age the finan­cial risks asso­ci­at­ed with a disease’s poten­tial spread. . . .

2c. Note that the Wired Mag­a­zine arti­cle that will com­prise the bulk of this pro­gram presents the ludi­crous “chim­panzee” ori­gins of AIDS, which we ana­lyzed in FTR# 557.

“We Can Pro­tect the Econ­o­my From Pan­demics. Why Didn’t We?” by Evan Ratliff; Wired; 06/16/2020.

. . . . That night Wolfe told me he was form­ing a net­work of research out­posts around the globe, in hot spots where poten­tial­ly dev­as­tat­ing virus­es were poised to make the jump: Cameroon, where HIV like­ly passed from chim­panzees into local hunters; the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of Con­go, which had seen human out­breaks of mon­key­pox . . . .

3a. The pro­gram reviews an excerpt from tes­ti­mo­ny before a House appro­pri­a­tions sub­com­mit­tee that was draw­ing up the defense bud­get for the fol­low­ing year. (The hear­ings were in 1969.) The tes­ti­mo­ny dis­cuss­es the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using genet­ic engi­neer­ing to pro­duce a dis­ease that would be “refrac­to­ry” to the immune sys­tem. This is vir­tu­al­ly the clin­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of AIDS. It is worth not­ing that the project was fund­ed, and just such a disease—AIDS—appeared in just the time frame posit­ed. It is also worth not­ing that, in the 2002 edi­tion of A High­er Form of Killing, this pas­sage is omit­ted!!

A High­er Form of Killing; Robert Har­ris and Jere­my Pax­man; Hill and Wang [SC]; ISBN 0–8090-5471‑X; p. 241 (p. 266 in e‑book).

. . . As long ago as 1962, forty sci­en­tists were employed at the U.S. Army bio­log­i­cal war­fare lab­o­ra­to­ries on full-time genet­ics research. ‘Many oth­ers,’ it was said, ‘appre­ci­ate the impli­ca­tions of genet­ics for their own work.’ The impli­ca­tions were made more spe­cif­ic that genet­ic engi­neer­ing could solve one of the major dis­ad­van­tages of bio­log­i­cal war­fare, that it is lim­it­ed to dis­eases which occur nat­u­ral­ly some­where in the world. ‘With­in the next 5 to 10 years, it would prob­a­bly be pos­si­ble to make a new infec­tive micro-organ­ism which could dif­fer in cer­tain impor­tant respects from any known dis­ease-caus­ing organ­isms. Most impor­tant of these is that it might be refrac­to­ry to the immuno­log­i­cal and ther­a­peu­tic process­es upon which we depend to main­tain our rel­a­tive free­dom from infec­tious dis­ease.’ [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.] The pos­si­bil­i­ty that such a ‘super germ’ may have been suc­cess­ful­ly pro­duced in a lab­o­ra­to­ry some­where in the world in the years since that assess­ment was made is one which should not be too read­i­ly cast aside. . . .

4. The pro­gram con­cludes with the begin­ning of the read­ing of a long Wired Mag­a­zine arti­cle about the Metabiota/Munich Rein­sur­ance project.

For the con­ve­nience of the audi­ence, the entire arti­cle is pre­sent­ed in print form in this descrip­tion. The read­ing will be con­tin­ued in the next pro­gram in this series.

Before read­ing the arti­cle as a whole, we high­light two key points of infor­ma­tion:

  • The busi­ness suc­cess of the pan­dem­ic insur­ance would nec­es­sar­i­ly incor­po­rate analy­sis of the “fear fac­tor” of poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens: ” . . . . As sophis­ti­cat­ed as Metabiota’s sys­tem was, how­ev­er, it would need to be even more refined to incor­po­rate into an insur­ance pol­i­cy. The mod­el would need to cap­ture some­thing much more dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy than his­tor­i­cal deaths and med­ical stock­piles: fear. The eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of a scourge, the his­tor­i­cal data showed, were as much a result of society’s response as they were to the virus itself. . . . The Sen­ti­ment Index was built to be, as Oppen­heim put it, ‘a cat­a­log of dread.’ For any giv­en pathogen, it could spit out a score from 0 to 100 accord­ing to how fright­en­ing the pub­lic would find it. . . . Mad­hav and her team, along with Wolfe and Oppen­heim, also researched the broad­er eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of dis­ease out­breaks, mea­sured in the ‘cost per death pre­vent­ed’ incurred by soci­etal inter­ven­tions. ‘Mea­sures that decreased per­son-to-per­son con­tact, includ­ing social dis­tanc­ing, quar­an­tine, and school clo­sures, had the great­est cost per death pre­vent­ed, most like­ly because of the amount of eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion caused by those mea­sures,’ they wrote in a 2018 paper. . . .”
  • More sin­is­ter, still, is the fact that Metabio­ta had ana­lyzed the sce­nario of a nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic two years before it hap­pened. This appears to be the 2018 paper referred to above. Do not fail to note that, at the time that Metabio­ta was run­ning this sce­nario, they were part­nered with Eco­Health Alliance, which was using Pen­ta­gon and USAID mon­ey to research and per­form gain-of-func­tion on these types of coro­n­avirus­es!! ” . . . . As the human and eco­nom­ic dev­as­ta­tion mul­ti­plied in tan­dem across the globe, Metabiota’s employ­ees sud­den­ly found them­selves liv­ing inside their own model’s pro­jec­tions. Just two years ear­li­er, the com­pa­ny had run a large set of sce­nar­ios fore­cast­ing the con­se­quences of a nov­el coro­n­avirus spread­ing around the globe. . . .”

“We Can Pro­tect the Econ­o­my From Pan­demics. Why Didn’t We?” by Evan Ratliff; Wired; 06/16/2020

“It’s real­ly a 100-year thing,” Nathan Wolfe said. It was 2006, and Wolfe, then a 36-year-old virol­o­gist with an unruly nest of curly hair, was sit­ting across a table from me at a bustling restau­rant in Yaoundé, the cap­i­tal of Cameroon. An epi­demi­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at UCLA, he had been liv­ing in West Africa for six years, estab­lish­ing a research cen­ter to iden­ti­fy and study virus­es as they crossed over from wild ani­mals into humans.

That night Wolfe told me he was form­ing a net­work of research out­posts around the globe, in hot spots where poten­tial­ly dev­as­tat­ing virus­es were poised to make the jump: Cameroon, where HIV like­ly passed from chim­panzees into local hunters; the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of Con­go, which had seen human out­breaks of mon­key­pox; Malaysia, home to a 1998 emer­gence of the Nipah virus; and Chi­na, where SARS-CoV had crossed over, like­ly from bats, in 2002. Wolfe’s hope was that by under­stand­ing what he called the “viral chat­ter” of such places, it would be pos­si­ble not only to react more quick­ly to out­breaks but to fore­cast their arrival and stop them before they spread. The “100-year thing” he was think­ing about was a glob­al pan­dem­ic, and how his­to­ry would judge humanity’s efforts to pre­pare for it. His biggest fear, he said, was a virus unknown to human immune defens­es start­ing a human-to-human trans­mis­sion chain that would encir­cle the globe.

As we knocked back Cameroon­ian beers and talked between sets of a local band, he admit­ted his project could fail. “It could be that we look at this and it’s stochastic—you can’t pre­dict it,” he said. “Or, it could be that we are on the edge of a par­a­digm shift.” The ulti­mate ques­tion, Wolfe added, was “Will peo­ple look back and say you did a good job respond­ing to epi­demics, but you didn’t do any­thing to pre­vent them?” The 100-year notion so cap­ti­vat­ed me that I used it as the last line of a sto­ry I wrote in 2007, in this mag­a­zine.

Thir­teen years lat­er, as the SARS-CoV­‑2 virus burned across the globe this March, it appeared that the 100-year judg­ment had arrived. We’d failed both at pre­vent­ing the exact dan­ger Wolfe had warned us about and at respond­ing when it emerged. He wasn’t the only pan­dem­ic Cas­san­dra, of course. Not even close. Sci­en­tists, jour­nal­ists, and pub­lic health experts had sound­ed the alarm for decades, fill­ing jour­nals, gov­ern­ment reports, and pop­u­lar books with their pleas. There were con­fer­ences, com­mis­sions, hear­ings, exer­cis­es, con­sor­tiums. Every few years anoth­er near-miss epi­dem­ic emerged that cried out for long-term prepa­ra­tion.

But Wolfe was the Cas­san­dra I’d known, and I couldn’t help won­der­ing what it felt like to be liv­ing through the pan­dem­ic you pre­dict­ed. We had cor­re­spond­ed a few times since 2007, and I’d fol­lowed his career spo­rad­i­cal­ly as he start­ed a com­pa­ny called Metabio­ta. As best I could gath­er, he had trans­ferred his orig­i­nal idea of a dis­ease sur­veil­lance net­work into a kind of epi­demi­o­log­i­cal data com­pa­ny.

I dug up his email and wrote to him. “It must be a strange sen­sa­tion,” I said, “to have been ter­ri­bly right about some­thing you didn’t want to be right about.”

Nor was he par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in cast­ing blame—in offer­ing an I‑told-you-so from the intre­pid virus hunter. “Plen­ty of peo­ple can speak to that,” he said. “It’s like Good Vibra­tions: I don’t want to play that any­more. I have a new record.” Now 49, Wolfe had trad­ed the Cameroon­ian jun­gle for the con­fer­ence rooms of Sil­i­con Val­ley. When I saw him on Zoom, his shoul­der-length locks were gone, and his quar­an­tine beard was shot through with gray. But he had the same glow of enthu­si­asm I remem­bered. His new pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, he told me, was pan­dem­ic insur­ance.

I’ll con­fess this didn’t imme­di­ate­ly pique my inter­est. The word insur­ance evokes in me feel­ings of tedi­um and loathing. Like many Amer­i­cans, my per­son­al inter­face with the indus­try has, let’s just say, been less than pos­i­tive. But then Wolfe began to explain the unex­pect­ed direc­tion his career had tak­en. After years of think­ing about epi­demics in terms of the symp­to­matic and the dead, he’d begun con­sid­er­ing their eco­nom­ic ram­i­fi­ca­tions. A glob­al pan­dem­ic, and the steps we would take to stop it, would mean busi­ness clos­ingslay­offs, and mass unem­ploy­ment. Prepar­ing to face an out­break, he’d come to believe, required antic­i­pat­ing those impacts.

This was where insur­ance came in, specif­i­cal­ly a kind of pan­dem­ic insur­ance policy—for busi­ness­es, and per­haps even for countries—that would pay out as soon as an epi­dem­ic reached a cer­tain thresh­old. In 2015, Metabio­ta had part­nered with Ger­man rein­sur­ance giant Munich Re and Amer­i­can insur­ance bro­ker­age Marsh to devel­op and sell a pol­i­cy specif­i­cal­ly to guard large busi­ness­es against pandemics—to stanch the finan­cial loss­es and keep them afloat. They’d launched it in mid-2018, a year and a half before the first Covid-19 cas­es appeared in Chi­na.

My sense of tedi­um evap­o­rat­ed. As Wolfe and I were talk­ing, a total eco­nom­ic lock­down was in place, with mil­lions of jobs dis­ap­pear­ing by the week and lines at food pantries stretch­ing by the hour. And here he was say­ing that they had come up with a kind of finan­cial vac­cine for exact­ly this sce­nario, released not long before the worst pan­dem­ic in a cen­tu­ry. It wouldn’t stop the virus, of course, but it could help alle­vi­ate some of the mis­ery that flowed from it.

How must those CEOs feel, I won­dered aloud, who had the fore­sight to buy the world’s first pan­dem­ic busi­ness insur­ance? What a sto­ry they would have to tell.

There was just one prob­lem. “By and large we failed,” Wolfe said. “Not because we didn’t do the mod­els well. We enabled the first busi­ness-dis­rup­tion insur­ance for pan­demics. But nobody bought it.”

I was so stunned I called him up a few days lat­er to ask him again. Did he mean lit­er­al­ly nobody bought it?

“As far as I know, nobody bought the pol­i­cy,” he said.

It was a life insur­ance quandary that first got Gun­ther Kraut think­ing about pan­demics, near­ly a decade ago. A math­e­mati­cian by train­ing, Kraut was work­ing at Munich Re, one of the world’s largest rein­sur­ers. As it sounds, rein­sur­ance is the busi­ness of insur­ing insur­ers. The local and nation­al insur­ance com­pa­nies that you and I buy life or auto cov­er­age from—the Geicos and All­states of the world—need their own pro­tec­tion against rare but cat­a­stroph­ic events that might cre­ate enough claims to bank­rupt them. Rein­sur­ance com­pa­nies pro­vide that back­stop on insur­ance for every­thing from homes and infra­struc­ture projects to busi­ness loss­es and indi­vid­ual lives. Rein­sur­ance is a stag­ger­ing­ly lucra­tive endeav­or: Munich Re had $56 bil­lion in rev­enue and $3 bil­lion in prof­it last year. The mar­ket is large enough that its peren­ni­al com­peti­tor, Swiss Re, took in $49 bil­lion itself.

Kraut, sandy-haired and still slight­ly boy­ish-look­ing at 39, grew up near Munich, where the epony­mous com­pa­ny has dom­i­nat­ed the eco­nom­ic land­scape since its found­ing in 1880. He talks about the intri­ca­cies of under­writ­ing with a friend­ly patience that implies he has done so count­less times before, none of which have dimmed his pas­sion. He grav­i­tat­ed toward math at uni­ver­si­ty, and, he told me, “it’s hard to study math­e­mat­ics in Munich with­out ever learn­ing about the exis­tence of rein­sur­ance com­pa­nies.” After com­plet­ing his PhD in risk man­age­ment and insur­ance at Lud­wig-Max­i­m­il­ians Uni­ver­si­ty, he took a job as a quan­ti­ta­tive ana­lyst in Munich Re’s life insur­ance divi­sion in 2007. “Rein­sur­ance is some­times called the busi­ness of a hun­dred pro­fes­sions,” he said. “Because you don’t just have math­e­mati­cians and lawyers and busi­ness­men. You have for­mer min­ing engi­neers. You have for­mer cap­tains who steered ships across the ocean. You have art experts who are spe­cial­ized in art insur­ance. It is, if you like, always close to life. Admit­ted­ly with a lit­tle bit of this neg­a­tive view on it.”

Munich Re—a com­pa­ny built to absorb the risk of others—had a risk prob­lem of its own: name­ly, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a glob­al pan­dem­ic. Insur­ance is essen­tial­ly the busi­ness of quan­ti­fy­ing risk and then smooth­ing it out. But for a world­wide out­break, the math in its life insur­ance port­fo­lio looked wor­ry­ing even to Kraut and his col­leagues, who spent their careers pon­der­ing the dark­est risks. In late 2011, Kraut’s team decid­ed to try to do some­thing about it.

“Let’s take the exam­ple of Munich and car insur­ance,” Kraut told me. “That’s a very, very sta­ble busi­ness.” A local com­pa­ny might insure tens of thou­sands of cars, each with a cer­tain prob­a­bil­i­ty of hav­ing a small acci­dent. “You can pre­dict very well how much mon­ey you will have to pay on the claim set­tle­ments, and hence how much pre­mi­um you will need to col­lect,” he said. But let’s say that one year there is a freak­ish­ly large hail­storm in Bavaria, dam­ag­ing half the cars in the port­fo­lio. The result­ing claims could be an extinc­tion-lev­el event for an insur­ance com­pa­ny. Such storms may occur sta­tis­ti­cal­ly only once every three decades—a one-in-30-year event, in risk parlance—but every car insur­ance com­pa­ny would have to keep enough cash on hand to pay out on claims on half its cars, just in case. “That’s a lot of mon­ey you need to put aside for some­thing that hap­pens very rarely,” Kraut said.

Now con­sid­er an auto insur­er in Paris with the same prob­lem: a fleet of cars, a pre­dictable num­ber of acci­dents, the threat of a one-in-30-year hail­storm event. Here­in lies the math­e­mat­i­cal advan­tage of rein­sur­ance. If Munich Re pledges to cov­er both com­pa­nies against freak­ish hail­storms, “what we can assume with a high chance is that there will be hail­storms in Paris, there will be hail­storms in Munich, but most like­ly they will not hap­pen in the same year,” Kraut said. That means Munich Re can set aside less mon­ey to pre­pare for a rare event. Even bet­ter: The more car insur­ers that Munich Re adds to its port­fo­lio, in more geo­graph­i­cal regions, the more it can con­vert a rare and expen­sive risk into a pre­dictable and cheap­er one for itself. In insur­ance it’s called diver­si­fi­ca­tion. “The more that you can spread the risk, the bet­ter for mak­ing it insur­able,” Kraut said. “That’s why rein­sur­ance com­pa­nies are glob­al com­pa­nies.”

The math applies to oth­er insur­ance “per­ils,” as they’re known—earthquakes, floods, wild­fires. And ordi­nary deaths, most of the time. But there­in lay the prob­lem for Kraut, who was part­ly respon­si­ble for mak­ing sure the company’s life insur­ance divi­sion didn’t shoul­der unsus­tain­able risks. Local dis­ease out­breaks were like the hail­storms of life insur­ance: rare and dev­as­tat­ing region­al events that could be count­ed on to hap­pen at dif­fer­ent times in dif­fer­ent locales. “Now you quick­ly see the prob­lem with insur­ing pan­dem­ic risk, because a pan­dem­ic is by def­i­n­i­tion a glob­al event,” Kraut said. Imag­ine a hail­storm spread­ing from town to town, across the globe, in a cat­a­clysmic chain: “The whole con­cept of glob­al diver­si­fi­ca­tion doesn’t work out any­more.” An out­break on the scale of the 1918 flu—50 mil­lion dead worldwide—might be a one-in-500-year risk, an event way out on the tail of a prob­a­bil­i­ty curve. But a pan­dem­ic at that scale, or even one con­sid­er­ably small­er, could not only over­whelm life insur­ance com­pa­nies but Munich Re too.

To tack­le Munich Re’s expo­sure, Kraut’s team began attempt­ing to quan­ti­fy and price this incred­i­bly remote, unpre­dictable risk. If they man­aged to do that, they would then need to sell part of that risk—to find some­one will­ing to insure the rein­sur­er. “No one real­ly had tried to do a trans­ac­tion at a one-in-500-year return peri­od,” Kraut said. His boss gave it a 50–50 chance of suc­cess.

But over the course of two years, the group grad­u­al­ly built up a list of poten­tial buy­ers. It turned out that there were a few large insti­tu­tion­al investors look­ing to diver­si­fy their own port­fo­lios, and a lit­tle bit of pan­dem­ic risk was just the thing. Munich Re would pro­vide them with annu­al pay­ments, year after year. In the rare event of a pan­dem­ic, they would have to cov­er Munich Re’s loss­es. One inter­est­ed class of investor—if a macabre one—was pen­sion funds, which typ­i­cal­ly grap­ple with some­thing called longevi­ty risk: the chance that peo­ple will live longer than expect­ed. “It’s not real­ly good ter­mi­nol­o­gy to call it a ‘risk,’ ” Kraut said. “It’s a good thing, tech­ni­cal­ly! But if peo­ple live a lot longer than expect­ed, then a pen­sion fund needs to pay out a lot more pen­sions than they orig­i­nal­ly cal­cu­lat­ed.” A dead­ly pan­dem­ic that takes the lives of pen­sion­ers, to put it in the most clin­i­cal terms, means few­er years of pen­sion pay­outs, can­cel­ing some of the longevi­ty risk. Should no pan­dem­ic arise, they would pock­et pay­ments from Munich Re. By 2013, Kraut and his team had put togeth­er enough investors—starting with a large Aus­tralian pen­sion fund—to take some of the pan­dem­ic prob­lem off of Munich Re’s books. But he soon encoun­tered an unex­pect­ed hitch: The mech­a­nisms writ­ten to trig­ger the deal relied on a series of “pan­dem­ic phas­es” mon­i­tored by the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion. (Phase 1: Virus is cir­cu­lat­ing in ani­mals. Phase 2: Reports of human infec­tion. Phase 3: Human-to-human trans­mis­sion. And so on up to Phase 6: Sus­tained out­breaks in mul­ti­ple regions.) Some­time in 2013, how­ev­er, the WHO aban­doned this sys­tem for a less spe­cif­ic four phas­es. Kraut sud­den­ly need­ed some oth­er orga­ni­za­tion to delin­eate the stages of epi­demics reli­ably enough to write into an insur­ance pol­i­cy. And he need­ed some­one to mon­i­tor epi­demics close­ly, to know when they hit agreed upon triggers—illnesses, deaths, spread. “But you can’t just hire the WHO,” he said.

In study­ing up on the world of epi­demi­ol­o­gy, Kraut hap­pened to have picked up a book called The Viral StormIt was writ­ten by Nathan Wolfe. Part mem­oir, part pre­scrip­tion, the book laid out a vision for how to counter the threat that nov­el virus­es rep­re­sent to humans. Kraut looked up Wolfe and saw that he’d formed a com­pa­ny. “I thought, oh, maybe these guys actu­al­ly can do it,” he said. He sent an email to info@metabiota.com. “Hel­lo, have you ever heard of a rein­sur­ance com­pa­ny? I might have a good rea­son to talk to you.”

As it hap­pened, Wolfe was already think­ing about the busi­ness shocks of pan­demics when Kraut’s email arrived in Metabiota’s inbox in 2013. By this time, Wolfe’s pub­lic pro­file as an Indi­ana Jones-like virus hunter had been well estab­lished. He’d been fea­tured on CNN and had giv­en the oblig­a­tory TED talks. He’d walked away from his tenured posi­tion at UCLA, moved to San Fran­cis­co, and found­ed Metabio­ta. Wolfe lever­aged his aca­d­e­m­ic work into the pri­vate sec­tor, using the data from his net­work of research sta­tions to con­duct dis­ease sur­veil­lance for clients. For years, the com­pa­ny sub­sist­ed large­ly on gov­ern­ment con­tracts, includ­ing more than $20 mil­lion from the Depart­ment of Defense and aid agen­cies involved in man­ag­ing epi­dem­ic out­breaks. Metabio­ta also part­nered with the for­eign assis­tance agency USAID on a project called Pre­dict, help­ing to build a data­base cat­a­loging virus­es in their ani­mal reser­voirs and fore­cast­ing which ones might jump to humans. “There was some suc­cess,” Wolfe told me. “Some mon­ey was put into pre­dic­tion and pre­ven­tion. Not enough, obvi­ous­ly.”

As Wolfe start­ed to appear on stages along­side busi­ness lead­ers, he became con­vinced that the com­mer­cial sec­tor had seri­ous­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed epi­dem­ic risk. In 2010 he sat on a pan­el at Davos called “Pre­pare for a Pan­dem­ic.” In advance of the talk, the orga­niz­ers cir­cu­lat­ed a sur­vey show­ing that while 60 per­cent of CEOs believed the threat of a glob­al out­break was real, only 20 per­cent had an emer­gency plan in place. That same year he’d been invit­ed to a cruise indus­try con­fer­ence. He’d tried, with­out luck, to con­vince exec­u­tives that Metabio­ta could help them avoid the hav­oc of an epi­dem­ic. “I felt like nobody was pay­ing atten­tion to it,” he said.

Then Gun­ther Kraut’s email arrived. Kraut and Wolfe met up at a con­fer­ence in Munich and began riff­ing. Soon Metabio­ta was pro­vid­ing dis­ease mon­i­tor­ing for Munich Re’s life insur­ance divi­sion.

Kraut, how­ev­er, had an even more ambi­tious idea in mind. What if, instead of sim­ply hedg­ing its own life insur­ance busi­ness in the case of a pan­dem­ic, Munich Re could use the same con­cept to insure oth­er busi­ness­es against them? Busi­ness inter­rup­tion insur­ance, the poli­cies that pro­tect com­pa­nies against income loss­es from dis­as­ters like fires or hur­ri­canes, often explic­it­ly exclud­ed dis­ease. (And when it didn’t, insur­ers could still use the ambi­gu­i­ty to deny claims.) The risk was thought to be too large, too unpre­dictable to quan­ti­fy. But Munich Re had already proven it could cov­er its own life insur­ance risk in pan­demics, and now it had a part­ner in Metabio­ta that spe­cial­ized in seem­ing­ly unpre­dictable out­breaks. What if they could cre­ate and sell a busi­ness inter­rup­tion insur­ance pol­i­cy that cov­ered epi­demics, start­ing with acute­ly vul­ner­a­ble indus­tries like trav­el and hos­pi­tal­i­ty? They could then pass on the pay­out risk from those poli­cies to the same types of investors who had bought their life risk. “There is a bit of finan­cial alche­my to the whole thing,” Wolfe told me lat­er. “You real­ly are cre­at­ing some­thing from noth­ing.”

At the same time, Wolfe had been work­ing to oper­ate Metabio­ta more like a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny. In 2015, he hired Nita Mad­hav, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist who’d spent 10 years mod­el­ing cat­a­stro­phes at a com­pa­ny called AIR World­wide, one of a hand­ful of firms the insur­ance indus­try relies on to com­pute extreme risks. (Munich Re, in fact, had worked with AIR epi­demi­o­log­i­cal mod­els in its life insur­ance cal­cu­la­tions.) Madhav’s man­date at Metabio­ta was to build the industry’s most com­pre­hen­sive pan­dem­ic mod­el. Her team, which even­tu­al­ly grew to include data sci­en­tists, epi­demi­ol­o­gists, pro­gram­mers, actu­ar­ies, and social sci­en­tists, began by painstak­ing­ly gath­er­ing his­tor­i­cal data on thou­sands of major dis­ease out­breaks dat­ing back to the 1918 flu. Her col­leagues had recent­ly cre­at­ed what they called the Epi­dem­ic Pre­pared­ness Index, an assess­ment of 188 coun­tries’ capac­i­ty to respond to out­breaks. Togeth­er, the two efforts informed an infec­tious dis­ease mod­el and soft­ware plat­form. A user could begin with a set of para­me­ters around a hypo­thet­i­cal virus—its geo­graph­ic ori­gin point, how eas­i­ly it was trans­mit­ted, its virulence—and then run sce­nar­ios explor­ing how the dis­ease spread around the world. The goal was a mod­el that could, for exam­ple, help a man­u­fac­tur­er under­stand how a dis­ease might impact its sup­ply chain or a drug com­pa­ny plan for how a treat­ment would need to be dis­trib­uted.

As sophis­ti­cat­ed as Metabiota’s sys­tem was, how­ev­er, it would need to be even more refined to incor­po­rate into an insur­ance pol­i­cy. The mod­el would need to cap­ture some­thing much more dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy than his­tor­i­cal deaths and med­ical stock­piles: fear. The eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of a scourge, the his­tor­i­cal data showed, were as much a result of society’s response as they were to the virus itself.

The group start­ed build­ing what became known as the Sen­ti­ment Index. Ben Oppen­heim, head of the prod­uct team and a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist, had stud­ied the work of Paul Slovic, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Ore­gon psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor who stud­ied how human beings per­ceive and respond to risk. Inspired by Slovic’s data-dri­ven approach, they gath­ered their own infor­ma­tion from around the world on how much var­i­ous symp­toms fright­ened peo­ple. To val­i­date their mea­sures, they also began track­ing and study­ing how media cov­er­age evolved around dif­fer­ent types of out­breaks. Scari­er dis­eases tend­ed to gen­er­ate more news sto­ries.

The Sen­ti­ment Index was built to be, as Oppen­heim put it, “a cat­a­log of dread.” For any giv­en pathogen, it could spit out a score from 0 to 100 accord­ing to how fright­en­ing the pub­lic would find it. That num­ber could then be used to help cal­cu­late the pos­si­ble finan­cial loss­es from an epi­dem­ic, every­thing from emp­ty hotels to post­poned min­ing projects. Mad­hav and her team, along with Wolfe and Oppen­heim, also researched the broad­er eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of dis­ease out­breaks, mea­sured in the “cost per death pre­vent­ed” incurred by soci­etal inter­ven­tions. “Mea­sures that decreased per­son-to-per­son con­tact, includ­ing social dis­tanc­ing, quar­an­tine, and school clo­sures, had the great­est cost per death pre­vent­ed, most like­ly because of the amount of eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion caused by those mea­sures,” they wrote in a 2018 paper.

By then, the Sen­ti­ment Index had been test­ed against Metabiota’s data­base of his­tor­i­cal pan­demics, and Munich Re began incor­po­rat­ing it into a busi­ness inter­rup­tion pol­i­cy. Gun­ther Kraut’s group was then oper­at­ing as a stand-alone unit called Epi­dem­ic Risk Solu­tions, with groups in Sin­ga­pore, Munich, and Lon­don. The promise, for both com­pa­nies, was enor­mous. Metabio­ta had raised $30 mil­lion via ven­ture fund­ing in 2015, part­ly on the idea that pro­vid­ing the tech­nol­o­gy behind pan­dem­ic cov­er­age could be a growth busi­ness. There was, after all, only so much a gov­ern­ment agency might pay Metabio­ta for dis­ease sur­veil­lance; the uni­verse of large busi­ness­es that could suf­fer loss­es from a major pan­dem­ic, how­ev­er, was near­ly lim­it­less. Munich Re had a chance to cre­ate an entire­ly new seg­ment of the insur­ance mar­ket, for a risk that exist­ed in lit­er­al­ly every part of the globe.

Munich Re wasn’t the only com­pa­ny look­ing for a bit of finan­cial alche­my. The US insur­ance firm Marsh had been grap­pling with the same ques­tion for its cus­tomers. Like Oppen­heim at Metabio­ta, Chris­t­ian Ryan had per­son­al rea­sons to be struck by the finan­cial con­se­quences of the Zika out­break. “My father was a hote­lier down in Brazil,” said Ryan, the head of Marsh’s hos­pi­tal­i­ty, sports, and gam­ing divi­sion. When the dis­ease began spread­ing in 2016, his dad lost a sig­nif­i­cant amount of his busi­ness and even­tu­al­ly sold the hotel for a frac­tion of the price he once could have got­ten. “It just showed how frag­ile hos­pi­tal­i­ty was. Because it’s pred­i­cat­ed on peo­ple con­tin­u­ing to show up and feel safe and feel secure.”

Ryan and his col­leagues went look­ing for some­one who might have mod­eled out the risk, and like Munich Re, they end­ed up on Metabiota’s doorstep. Soon Marsh had formed a three-way part­ner­ship with Wolfe’s com­pa­ny and Munich Re. Marsh would sell the insur­ance under the name Pathogen­RX. (Munich Re set up sim­i­lar sales rela­tion­ships in oth­er parts of the world.) The poli­cies would be tai­lored for each com­pa­ny, but most would con­tain what’s called a para­met­ric solu­tion: a pre­set amount of cov­er­age that could auto­mat­i­cal­ly pay out when the epi­dem­ic reached cer­tain thresh­olds, giv­ing com­pa­nies an infu­sion of cash with­out the delays of fil­ing a claim.

The mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als for the pol­i­cy now read like a let­ter from 2020. To the air­line and hos­pi­tal­i­ty indus­tries, they warned that “these out­breaks have had wide­spread impact on per­son­al and busi­ness trav­el.” For sports teams and leagues, they cau­tioned, “indi­vid­u­als must be able to par­tic­i­pate in and attend events with­out fear for their safe­ty and health. Pan­dem­ic out­breaks can dis­rupt pub­lic con­fi­dence, and in turn, make or break many com­pa­nies.”

But sell­ing the insur­ance meant first per­suad­ing risk man­agers and chief risk officers—the fig­ures respon­si­ble for insur­ance cov­er­age at large corporations—that pan­demics were a risk worth hedg­ing. Then the risk man­agers would need to per­suade their bosses—the CFOs and CEOs—to pony up for a new expense that wasn’t going to help the company’s quar­ter­ly bot­tom line.

On Decem­ber 31, 2019, Nita Mad­hav was in Port­land, Ore­gon, attend­ing a cousin’s wed­ding. That sum­mer, after four years lead­ing the infec­tious dis­ease data sci­ence team, she’d tak­en over as CEO of Metabio­ta. Now she was enjoy­ing a hol­i­day away from the stress of run­ning a 60-plus-employ­ee com­pa­ny. Her extend­ed fam­i­ly had trav­eled from around the US and beyond to cel­e­brate the wed­ding and count down the last moments of 2019 togeth­er. But that morn­ing, before the cer­e­mo­ny, Mad­hav began get­ting texts from Oppen­heim telling her about a clus­ter of unusu­al pneu­mo­nia-­like infec­tions in Wuhan, Chi­na. The company’s ear­ly detec­tion sys­tem, which includ­ed an algo­rithm for pars­ing and high­light­ing news sto­ries about out­breaks, was flag­ging Wuhan as a poten­tial hot spot. The team typ­i­cal­ly looked at hun­dreds of media reports a week and approached new ones cau­tious­ly. At the recep­tion, Mad­hav mes­saged with Oppen­heim and won­dered: If it was res­pi­ra­to­ry, could the source be more like H7N9, the avian flu? A coro­n­avirus like SARS-CoV?

As the human and eco­nom­ic dev­as­ta­tion mul­ti­plied in tan­dem across the globe, Metabiota’s employ­ees sud­den­ly found them­selves liv­ing inside their own model’s pro­jec­tions. Just two years ear­li­er, the com­pa­ny had run a large set of sce­nar­ios fore­cast­ing the con­se­quences of a nov­el coro­n­avirus spread­ing around the globe. [!!!!—D.E.] “I guess part of what I’m strug­gling with emo­tion­al­ly is that it’s almost like we’ve been attacked by a cliché,” Oppen­heim told me lat­er. “No one can pre­dict the exact tim­ing and loca­tion and dynam­ics, but the broad con­tours are a sto­ry that peo­ple have walked through specif­i­cal­ly before.”

At the same time Metabio­ta was watch­ing the night­mare that its mod­els had antic­i­pat­ed unfold, Gun­ther Kraut was in Sin­ga­pore fac­ing a dif­fer­ent prob­lem. Where Munich Re’s epi­dem­ic solu­tions divi­sion had been strug­gling to get trac­tion with poten­tial cus­tomers, now, in ear­ly Jan­u­ary, buy­ers were bang­ing at the door. “That’s just the nature of human psy­chol­o­gy,” he said. “When­ev­er a cat­a­stro­phe arrives, peo­ple imme­di­ate­ly want insur­ance for that cat­a­stro­phe.” The virus was still con­fined to Chi­na and Kraut faced a grim cal­cu­la­tion: Should the com­pa­ny write busi­ness inter­rup­tion poli­cies that would cov­er SARS-CoV­‑2, out­side of Asia? “You clear­ly have the human tragedy,” he said. “On the oth­er hand you are in charge of the busi­ness unit.” But there were too many warn­ing signs—too much risk for Munich Re. It would have been like sell­ing fire insur­ance for a house already in flames. Kraut made the deci­sion not to sell.

In a sense, Munich Re had dodged a bul­let: Had the com­pa­ny suc­ceed­ed at sell­ing pan­dem­ic pro­tec­tion to cor­po­rate giants start­ing 19 months before, it would have col­lect­ed almost no pre­mi­ums and now be pay­ing out on every sin­gle one. Kraut acknowl­edged as much, but offered that if insur­ers nev­er pay out, “then you lose the rea­son of exis­tence.”

On the after­noon of April 10, as the world­wide death toll crossed 100,000, the data sci­ence and prod­uct teams gath­ered on a Zoom call to dis­cuss a new Covid-19 sce­nario tool. The goal was to help an inter­na­tion­al aid agency con­cerned about the pos­si­ble tra­jec­to­ries for devel­op­ing coun­tries. Metabiota’s mod­els are built for long-term under­stand­ing rather than real-time analy­sis, but as clients turned to them for infor­ma­tion, they scram­bled to adapt. With home and office life now ful­ly merged—“Was Ben going to join this one?” Mad­hav asked. “No, I think he’s on child­care,” came the response—everyone turned off their video to save band­width for the screen­share. One data sci­en­tist kicked off the call by show­ing a rough ver­sion of the new tool, pag­ing through alter­nate­ly dis­heart­en­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing graphs illus­trat­ing the best- and worst-case results for 16 coun­tries, depend­ing on how the virus was con­tained. The for­mer showed hun­dreds of thou­sands of addi­tion­al deaths from late March onward. In the lat­ter, reflect­ing a total break­down in con­tain­ment, the deaths reached into the tens of mil­lions.

“Nobody bought the pol­i­cy.” I couldn’t stop think­ing about what Wolfe had told me, back when I recon­nect­ed with him in March. It wasn’t quite nobody, as it turned out. Kraut told me that one com­pa­ny in the health care indus­try in the US had bought some lev­el of pan­dem­ic pro­tec­tion, although the insur­er that sold it had lat­er quit sell­ing the poli­cies due to lack of inter­est. For con­fi­den­tial­i­ty rea­sons, Kraut wouldn’t say who the end client was or whether it had received pay­ment.

There are some large cor­po­rate insur­ance poli­cies that do cov­er dis­ease-relat­ed loss­es, such as event can­cel­la­tion cov­er­age; both Munich Re and Swiss Re announced that they poten­tial­ly faced hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in claims con­nect­ed to sus­pen­sion of the Olympics and oth­er events. In April, news sur­faced that the Wim­ble­don ten­nis tour­na­ment was set to col­lect $140 mil­lion from an insur­ance pol­i­cy in which it had demand­ed a pan­dem­ic pro­tec­tion clause 17 years earlier—after the SARS out­break in 2003. And even as late as Feb­ru­ary, when the virus was already world­wide news, hedge fund man­ag­er Bill Ack­man man­aged to find a tak­er on a $27 mil­lion invest­ment bet that the virus could crash the stock mar­ket. It was essen­tial­ly an insur­ance pol­i­cy for his port­fo­lio. When he cashed it in to the tune of $2.6 bil­lion in March, after going on TV and warn­ing of the poten­tial dev­as­ta­tion the virus could cause, he felt the need to take to Twit­ter and defend him­self against accu­sa­tions of prof­it­ing off human mis­ery.

But now, as we swing wild­ly through the pan­ic end of the pendulum—justified pan­ic, as hun­dreds of thou­sands die and the inter­na­tion­al econ­o­my collapses—there’s no longer a need to explain to air­lines or hotel chains or sports fran­chis­es how even a small amount of pan­dem­ic insur­ance might help them. Gun­ther Kraut and his group find them­selves del­uged with hun­dreds of requests for the busi­ness inter­rup­tion poli­cies on the next out­break. Now their chal­lenge is vol­ume, tak­ing a pol­i­cy meant to be cus­tomized for each client and con­vert­ing it into a com­mod­i­ty that can be sold to many of them at once.

With­out a doubt, insur­ance will fac­tor into think­ing about the eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of pan­demics going for­ward. Already sev­er­al promi­nent US restau­rants have sued to try to force the issuers of their cur­rent busi­ness inter­rup­tion poli­cies to cov­er coro­n­avirus loss­es. (Where poli­cies don’t specif­i­cal­ly include or exclude dis­ease, insur­ers have just denied any Covid-relat­ed claims from small busi­ness­es, leav­ing them with no relief.) Some in the insur­ance indus­try spec­u­late that banks may now make busi­ness loans in some indus­tries, like trav­el and hos­pi­tal­i­ty, con­tin­gent on hav­ing epi­dem­ic insur­ance. Or gov­ern­ments may sim­ply man­date such cov­er­age. In any case, the demand for dis­ease-based insur­ance may quick­ly out­strip even the rein­sur­ers’ and oth­er investors’ abil­i­ty to cov­er the poli­cies.

Nation­al gov­ern­ments may end up the ulti­mate pan­dem­ic rein­sur­ers, step­ping in to prop up the insur­ance mar­ket, as the US did after 9/11 with the 2002 Ter­ror­ism Risk Insur­ance Act. By late May, there were already mul­ti­ple pro­pos­als in Con­gress do just that. “I think it’s very fair to think 9/11 is to ter­ror­ism as Covid-19 is to epi­dem­ic risk,” Wolfe said.

From a cer­tain angle, it will always appear ghoul­ish for insur­ers to cap­i­tal­ize on the risk of mis­ery. Insur­ance trig­gers are them­selves inher­ent­ly cold, emo­tion­less calculations—a num­ber of sick or dead, or a lev­el of fear on a Sen­ti­ment Index. Both Metabio­ta and Munich Re have explored the pos­si­bil­i­ty that coun­tries them­selves, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the devel­op­ing world, could be insured against epi­demics and pan­demics. But one pan­dem­ic-insur­ance-like prod­uct on the mar­ket, a $425 mil­lion “pan­dem­ic bond” set up by the World Bank in con­sul­ta­tion with Munich Re and Swiss Re, has been heav­i­ly crit­i­cized for fail­ing to pay out quick­ly enough. While the bond did even­tu­al­ly deliv­er the part that cov­ered coro­n­avirus­es in April, the World Bank was accused of mak­ing the trig­gers need­less­ly com­plex and then dawdling while bod­ies were pil­ing up.

Even if and when pan­dem­ic insur­ance poli­cies become wide­spread, they aren’t a panacea for the kind of eco­nom­ic ruin we are cur­rent­ly liv­ing through. One only has to look to the 2008 mort­gage cri­sis to see how finan­cial alche­my can go wrong. There will be small busi­ness­es priced out of cov­er­age, insur­ers who exploit every loop­hole to avoid claims, and cor­po­rate exec­u­tives who enrich them­selves and not their work­ers when they do receive pay­ments. But if SARS-CoV­‑2 has shown any­thing, it’s that we need every pre­ven­tive weapon in the arse­nal. Even a mar­gin­al amount of pan­dem­ic insur­ance could have meant few­er lay­offs, dilut­ing the eco­nom­ic pain. “Right now, tax­pay­ers are going to soak up 100 per­cent of the risk,” Wolfe said of the coro­n­avirus impacts. As of late May, the US eco­nom­ic bailout alone amount­ed to $2 tril­lion and count­ing. Pan­dem­ic insur­ance would shift at least some of that bur­den onto investors who’d will­ing­ly tak­en on the risk. “How much risk will the pri­vate sec­tor be able to take? I’m an opti­mist on that. More than it’s cur­rent­ly tak­ing. I don’t think any­body would say it’s not at least 5 to 10 per­cent,” Wolfe said. Five per­cent of the bailout would amount to $100 bil­lion lift­ed off the books of the tax­pay­ers and onto investors who had gam­bled on the risk.

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