First it wasn’t a conflict, then it was.
Either way, President Trump’s vaccine czar Moncef Slaoui agreed Monday to forgo millions in stock options in the Boston biotech firm that claimed blockbuster early progress in its trial of a coronavirus vaccine.
“Dr. Slaoui is divesting all of his equity interest in Moderna so that there is no conflict of interest with Dr. Slaoui in his new role,” the company said in a statement after the News reported Slaoui’s massive windfall.
The statement said Slaoui plans to donate the outsized profits to cancer charity.
Slaoui added a whopping $3.4 million to his bottom line as Moderna Therapeutics’ stock soared by more than 30% in early trading Monday. It closed up a more modest 20%.
Slaoui, a former director of the company who was named Trump’s vaccine czar last week, apparently had a change of heart Monday about the ethics of pocketing the cash.
A morning tweet from his account said: “There is not a conflict of interest and there has never been,” reported Business Insider. He later deleted the tweet.
Slaoui, a veteran Big Pharma exec, holds 156,000 stock options that increased in value by more than $3 million on the Monday morning news.
Ethics experts called the lucrative morning for Slaoui a prime example of why he should not be making decisions about winners and losers in the coronavirus vaccine race.
“You could hurt or kill millions of people,” said Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen, a watchdog group. “A better vaccine might not be created or it might not be distributed to the widest number of people.”
Slaoui, a former GlaxoSmithKline executive, spoke glowingly last week about Trump’s goal of producing a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year.
Slaoui slyly suggested that he had heard great news about one company’s vaccine effort, a possible reference to Moderna. He did not mention his financial interest in the company.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren slammed the lucrative stock options as a blatant conflict of interest for Slaoui, who will be involved in selecting which vaccine trials get government backing.
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