You can subscribe to RSS feed from Spitfirelist.com HERE.
You can subscribe to the comments made on programs and posts–an excellent source of information in, and of, itself, HERE.
WFMU-FM is podcasting For The Record–You can subscribe to the podcast HERE.
Mr. Emory’s entire life’s work is available on a 32GB flash drive, available for a contribution of $65.00 or more (to KFJC). Click Here to obtain Dave’s 40+ years’ work, complete through Late Fall of 2021 (through FTR #1215).
“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.
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!
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. . . .”
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!!
. . . 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 closings, layoffs, 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 Storm. It 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.
…
————
Discussion
No comments for “FTR#‘s 1251 and 1252: Pandemics Inc., Parts 1 and 2”