Pfizer CEO Sold Millions In Stock After Coronavirus Vaccine News, Raising Questions



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Albert Bourla, chairman and CEO of Pfizer, sold millions of dollars’ worth of company stock on Monday as part of a preset plan. But NPR found irregularities about when the CEO entered into that plan.

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Zach Gibson/Bloomberg via Getty Images


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The next day, Aug. 20, Pfizer issued a press release featuring «additional Phase 1 safety and immunogenicity data,» and confirming that Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech were «on track to seek regulatory review» for its vaccine candidate by October 2020.

The financial news channels Fox Business News, CNBC, and Bloomberg all covered the August news, with CNBC noting that the stock appeared to be «moving sharply higher today on an optimistic vaccine timeline.»

Daniel Taylor, an expert in insider trading and an associate professor of accounting at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has closely monitored stock trades by executives at companies developing coronavirus vaccines. He told NPR that the close timing between the adoption of Bourla’s stock plan and the press release looked «very suspicious.»

«It’s wholly inappropriate for executives at pharmaceutical companies to be implementing or modifying 10b5-1 plans the business day before they announce data or results from drug trials,» Taylor said.

A spokesperson for Pfizer told NPR that the company did not believe the company’s Aug. 20 press release contained material nonpublic information, and that a stock plan administrator had previously vetted the implementation of the CEO’s 10b5-1 plan. The spokesperson noted that the company had previously announced that it expected to seek regulatory approval for its coronavirus vaccine candidate by October, and the August press release merely confirmed that timeline. In addition, the press release contained information from an academic study of Pfizer’s vaccine, the spokesperson said, and the company did not control the timing or the content of that study.


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«The sale of these shares is part of Dr. Bourla’s personal financial planning and a pre-established (10b5-1) plan,» Pfizer said in a statement. «Through our stock plan administrator, Dr. Bourla authorized the sale of these shares in February and renewed that authorization in August with the same price and volume terms.»

The company spokesperson said Bourla’s plan authorized stock sales when the share price hit a certain target.

Though Bourla’s stock sale on Monday was significant, the company stated that he still held «approximately nine times his salary in Pfizer stock.»

Taylor, of the Wharton business school, said the stock sales by Pfizer’s CEO brought to mind similar concerns with another coronavirus vaccine maker, Moderna. As NPR reported in September, multiple executives at Moderna adopted or modified their stock trading plans just before key announcements about the company’s vaccine. Those executives have sold tens of millions of dollars in Moderna stock, even though the company has not completed its vaccine trials.

«It’s troubling to me that the general counsel or the internal controls of these companies would consider it legitimate to adopt a 10b5-1 plan one day before a major vaccine announcement,» said Taylor. «If this isn’t a wake-up call for the SEC and a wake-up call that we need to reform these 10b5-1 plans, I don’t know what it is.»

Billions of dollars in taxpayer funding are at stake in the race for a safe, effective and widely available coronavirus vaccine. The U.S. government has guaranteed roughly $2.5 billion to the development and manufacture of Moderna’s vaccine, for example, and has promised to buy nearly $2 billion worth of Pfizer’s vaccine, if it receives regulatory approval.

  • coronavirus vaccine trials
  • Stock Sales
  • coronavirus vaccine
  • COVID-19
  • pfizer
  • Pfizer Inc.



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