Tornado Alley (PROG)

[DragonBear]

The Trump administration quietly spent billions in hospital funds on Operation Warp Speed

The real stench is this Dr. Slaoui, and his GlaxoSmithKline stock holdings. Sanofi and GSK’s adjuvanted protein-based technology vaccine gave results in early Feb 2021 - weak results. Yet in July 2020 the gov gave the 2 companies a $2.1B contract. Does it have to be approved by a given date? No. By the time it gets approval there will likely be no need for it in the US. It's competitor for adjuvanted protein-based vaccines is ahead of GSK. But the US gov is on the hook for $2.1B regardless.

Between Mar--> Jun 2020, the GSK stock went up 33%. Nice time for Slaoui to sell, and then plead innocent to conflict of interest.

This

article

brings up another point:

Operation Warp Speed's investment is "virtually unheard of" in the pharmaceutical industry, Sarpatwari says. The government is funding the manufacturing and purchase of the vaccines before knowing whether those vaccines are safe and effective, so the taxpayer is also assuming all the risk. Therefore, he says he'd like to see some kind of explicit price restrictions in the contract that go beyond the immediate pandemic.

Whatever happened to the conservative view, the gov shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers? It isn't as though Pfizer wouldn't have gone ahead with vaccine development without a gov guaranteed contract. Or a Moderna. It wasn't as though a monster Pharma like GSK couldn't assume the risk of being too late into the market. However, a Slaoui could ensure he would profit from his GSK stock.