5th Exec Joins Moderna Billionaire Club — as Stock Price Soars Despite Growing Number of Injury Reports
By Megan Redshaw, Children’s Health Defense
For the fifth time since the onset of the COVID pandemic in early 2020, the skyrocketing price of Moderna stock has produced a billionaire.
Moderna President Dr. Stephen Hoge is the company’s latest shareholder and executive to join the “three-comma-club” — with an estimated $1.1 billion fortune.
Other club members are CEO Stéphane Bancel, chairman and cofounder of Noubar Afeyan, founding investor Timothy Springer and cofounder Robert Langer, Forbes reported.
Hoge, 45, joined Moderna in 2012 and owns 0.4% of Moderna stock — worth $365 million — in addition to about $685 million in options. Like the other Moderna shareholders, Hoge frequently sells stock — including $65.5 million worth (pre-tax) between March 2020 and April 2021.
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Hoge is one of more than 40 new billionaires who made 10-figure fortunes with companies involved in the “battle against COVID.”
Activists say this wealth generation highlights the stark inequality that has resulted from the pandemic, CNN reported.
“These billionaires are the human face of the huge profits many pharmaceutical corporations are making from the monopoly they hold on these vaccines,” Anne Marriott, Oxfam’s health policy manager, said in a statement. “These vaccines were funded by public money and should be first and foremost a global public good, not a private profit opportunity.”
Since February 2020, Moderna’s share price has gained more than 700%. Over the past month alone, the company’s stock is up 29%. During this same timeframe, Moderna applied for Emergency Use Authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its COVID vaccine in adolescents, and increased its forecasted production of vaccine in 2021, from 800 million doses to 1 billion.
Taxpayers foot the bill for vaccine research
As The Defender reported previously, Moderna’s COVID vaccine is funded almost entirely by U.S. taxpayers. Through its partnership with the U.S. government, Moderna received nearly $1 billion for research and development of its mRNA vaccine, and up to $1.525 billion for delivering 100 million doses, with an option for another 400 million.
According to Public Citizen, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) owns a 50% stake in Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, which the NIH helped develop under the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), run by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
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As described in The People’s Vaccine, the U.S. government provided millions of dollars to Moderna as early as 2013 to help develop its mRNA technology. The NIH meanwhile was also developing new methods to target COVID spike proteins. When the new coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China, the NIH worked with Moderna to design and test a vaccine.
The U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority provided Moderna an additional $483 million to further develop the vaccine and scale up manufacturing.
Fauci and the NIAID have a financial incentive to push Moderna’s vaccine over competitors’ COVID vaccines — because Fauci personally, and others on staff, have a financial stake in the Moderna vaccine. Fauci and four of his hand-selected deputies will split hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties with Moderna from sales of the vaccine.
Moderna continues to ignore problems with its vaccine
Moderna’s stock has risen steadily, and its top executives have benefited accordingly, despite a growing number of reports of injuries and deaths following the vaccine.
According to the latest data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), between Dec. 14, 2020 and June 4, a total of 329,021 total adverse events were reported following COVID vaccines, including 5,888 deaths and 28,441 serious injury reports.
Of the 329,021 total vaccine injury reports, 152,262 were attributed to Moderna’s COVID vaccine, including 11,454 serious injuries and 2,241 reported deaths.
As The Defender reported this week, Simone Scott, a 19-year-old freshman at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., died June 11 of complications from a heart transplant she underwent after developing what her doctors believe was myocarditis following her second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine.
Sourced from Waking Times
