The only people who doubt that a vaccine is close at hand are people working at the vaccine company

by philg

Our decision to shut down is looking ever smarter because a vaccine will be available imminently:

Are there any doubters?

From CNN: “Moderna unveiled encouraging coronavirus vaccine results. Then top execs dumped nearly $30 million of stock”

(Supposedly the stock sales were planned in advance, but if these top managers and researchers believed that they’ll be selling 8 billion vaccine doses starting in September, wouldn’t they call their brokers to say “Hey, let’s hold off on those sales”?)

8 thoughts on “The only people who doubt that a vaccine is close at hand are people working at the vaccine company”

  1. They might not have been allowed to. Let’s not forget that under US “insider trading” laws, it’s illegal to make an informed decision in the stock market.

    • Not only in the US. The EC has its Directives (154/155) to compel the member states to eliminate “insider trading”. Both varieties are arguably “bad laws”. The US one is unarguably the worst.

    • I don’t think a failure to execute a trade can be considered “insider trading” under U.S. laws. You can’t be busted for holding onto whatever you have.

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b5-1 says “After Rule 10b5-1 was enacted, the SEC staff publicly took the position that canceling a planned trade made under the safe harbor does not constitute insider trading, even if the person was aware of the inside information when canceling the trade. The SEC stated that, despite the fact that 10b5-1(c) requires trades to be irrevocable, there can be no liability for insider trading under Rule 10b-5 without an actual securities transaction, based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U.S. 723 (1975).”

    • oops, I did not read carefully. Cancellation would not be an offense under the current incoherent inside trading laws as you pointed out. The original article seems to have implied dumping stock based on some inside info although the sale appears to have been kosher.

      “Optics are terrible”. What an expression ! About five years ago, I remember an Irish friend not believing me that the expression was really used by upper management when speaking English. I had to sneak him in to one of those meetings to hear it directly from the horse’s (CTO) mouth. Not being a native speaker, I was more accepting of the linguistic innovation.

    • @Ivan: The etymology in connection with American politics dates back to at least the Carter years. William Safire (speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew who coined “nattering nabobs of negativism”) noted its use in his last “On Language” column for the New York Times in September, 2009 — but it’s at least 30 years older than that. As the Boston Globe noted in 2008 “…odd thing about the new optic is that its point of view has switched; optics used to be a property of the visual instrument, but now they belong to the lookee.”

      http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/18/optic_nerve/

      The Guardian manages to trace it all the way back to the Carter years. The British always were keen about keeping track of the Mother Tongue:

      https://www.theguardian.com/media/blog/2011/mar/22/optics-new-military-war-buzzword

      “The word, Jan Freeman wrote, “invokes a whole set of tech-and-science terms like ‘physics,’ ‘statistics’ and ‘tectonics’, as well as Greek-derived high-concept nouns like ‘hermeneutics’, ‘aesthetics’ and ‘pragmatics’, all with an aura of brainy precision.”

      Wait until someone asks about “teledildonics.” Ted “hypertext” Nelson, 1975!
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

      Thus by May, 1978 one could compose tales of ribaldry with sentences like:

      “I hypertexted her about the optics of our teledildonics spilling into the tabloids long before Amazon was a glint in the eye of Jeff Bezos or the National Enquirer.”

  2. Getting rich at Warp Factor Nine. It’s legal as long as the 10b5-1 plan was legal, and we will see more of these in the not-too-distant future. What’s really interesting about Moderna is that they’ve never sold a product! You and I have, in reality, have done as much work to heal the sick as Moderna.

    Critics have charged that they’re nothing more than investment firm that dabbles in trying to develop something that might work. Let’s hope their vaccine works. Otherwise they’re just the immunological Theranos.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna

    “The company has a reputation for secrecy and little of its work has ever been published, and none peer-reviewed or scientifically validated,[6][7] an approach that was compared to Theranos by Nature.[12][5] In May 2020, Moderna was valued at $30 billion but none of its mRNA molecules had reached large clinical trials, and several had failed due to side-effects.[5]”

    “…Bancel told the President that Moderna could have a vaccine ready in a few months, materially undercutting the next fastest projection in the room. On the basis of Bancel’s verbal commitment to Trump, Moderna received funding of $483 million from the Trump Administration. CNN reported that medical authorities including Dr. Anthony Fauci tried to rationally curb the enthusiasm toward any unproven technologies in this meeting, which Trump ran “like an episode of Shark Tank”. In April 2020, Trump appointed Moderna board member Moncef Slaoui to “Operation Warp Speed”.[5]”

    Bancel is quite a character. He’s a good salesman, and he has a customer who is literally fighting for his life! They teach this at the good schools.

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