by Megan Redshaw at The Defender
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.
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.
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.
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