"CEO of vaccine maker Emergent sold $10 million in stock before company ruined Johnson & Johnson doses" by Jon Swaine Washington Post, April 25, 2021
That's nothing new for the $elf-$erving hopes of humanity, and they are literally untouchable.
The stock price of government contractor Emergent BioSolutions has fallen sharply since the disclosure at the end of March that production problems at the firm’s plant in Baltimore had ruined 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine. Since then, AstraZeneca moved production of its own vaccine out of the facility, and Emergent temporarily halted new production there altogether.
Those developments came after Emergent’s stock price had tumbled on Feb. 19, following the company’s published financial results. Emergent stock has fallen since mid-February to about $62 a share from $125 a share, or just more than 50 percent, but the decline has had less of an impact than it might have on the personal finances of Emergent’s chief executive, Robert G. Kramer, who sold more than $10 million worth of his stock in the company in January and early February, securities filings show. Based on the market price, the stocks that Kramer sold would now fetch about $5.5 million.
The transactions were Kramer’s first substantive sales of Emergent stock since April 2016, according to a review of securities filings by The Washington Post.
Those 2016 sales by Kramer, along with sales by other Emergent executives around the same time, were the subject of a lawsuit brought by investors who alleged that executives offloaded stocks after making misleading claims about the scale of an upcoming order from the government for an anthrax vaccine. When the order turned out to be smaller than analysts anticipated, the share price fell. Emergent denied the allegations, but the parties later agreed to a settlement in which Emergent paid the investors $6.5 million.
Kramer made his recent sales by exercising stock options that Emergent had awarded him as part of his compensation package in past years. Those options allowed him to buy the stocks for about $2.5 million, and he then sold them at market price. Kramer’s remaining stake in Emergent is worth about $10.1 million, according to securities filings, and he has almost 60,000 stock options that he may begin exercising next year.
Kramer’s sales were made as part of a trading plan that he adopted on Nov. 13, according to securities filings. Such plans, which establish in advance when stocks are to be bought and sold, are intended to protect company insiders from suggestions that they traded on the basis of confidential information that would influence the stock price, which is unlawful.
Citing internal logs, the New York Times reported this month that one batch of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine that was being prepared at Emergent’s plant was discarded in October 2020 because of suspected contamination, and that a quantity of Johnson & Johnson vaccine was discarded at some point in November following an error by workers involving a gas line.
Months earlier, in April 2020, a Food and Drug Administration inspector discovered violations at the Baltimore site, including inadequate training and a failure to follow testing procedures, The Post recently reported.
Kramer did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Emergent spokeswoman Nina DeLorenzo did not directly respond to questions from The Post about whether Kramer was aware of problems in Emergent’s coronavirus vaccine production or information from upcoming financial results when he adopted his trading plan.....
Related:
"The French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi said Monday that it will help manufacture up to 200 million doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, starting in September. Sanofi, one of the world’s biggest vaccine makers, has signed a deal with Cambridge-based Moderna to fill vials and finish packaging, the final stage of the production process, at Sanofi’s plant in Ridgefield, N.J. The doses are intended to boost the supply of the vaccine in the United States. Moderna makes some of its messenger RNA vaccine at a sprawling factory in Norwood for its US market. It also has an agreement with a Swiss contract manufacturing partner, Lonza Group, which makes vaccine doses in Portsmouth, N.H. Moderna and Pfizer have deals with the US government for each to supply 300 million doses of their two-dose vaccines. The 600 million doses are enough for 300 million people, or most of the country....."
The vaccine was said to produce strong immune responses in a midstage study, and it's not like Sanofi would ever destroy contradictory evidence or anything:
"French drug maker Sanofi destroyed internal e-mails tied to a 2019 recall of the heartburn medication Zantac, according to lawyers for more than 70,000 former patients who sued the company in the United States. The deleted e-mails, including those of Michael Bailey, the head of regulatory affairs for the company’s US Consumer Healthcare division, will make it more difficult for consumers to show Sanofi and other drug makers allowed a suspected carcinogen to taint Zantac, an over-the-counter medication, according to a May 7 court filing. Sanofi officials began an internal probe about the email destruction and are scheduled to deliver a report to a judge overseeing Zantac cases in August, the filings show. “Although Sanofi has already provided hundreds of thousands of pages of relevant discovery to the plaintiffs, Sanofi has voluntarily disclosed that certain e-mails requested by plaintiffs were not preserved as intended,” Ashleigh Koss, a US-based spokeswoman, said in an e-mail Tuesday. “There was no intentional destruction of data,” Koss said."
Yeah, it wasn't intentional, uh-huh.
Oddly, they are the epitome of evil that has reemerged in our world this past year as they “hope this study’s results will be positive, [because they] know firsthand that promising drugs can fail in Phase 3 studies.”
