NEW ANALYSIS: Trump’s New “Vaccine Czar” Stands to Receive Up To $450K Tax Break Through Divestment Delay
Trump Administration announced that Dr. Slaoui would be donating his profits to “cancer research,” but hasn’t clarified if he will be pocketing the tax deduction
Washington, DC – Today, Patients Over Pharma released the following analysis of Dr. Moncef Slaoui’s divestment of shares from Moderna following his appointment to President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed.” The analysis found that by waiting until this morning to sell his shares instead of divesting on May 14th, the day he took the job as vaccine czar, Dr. Slaoui could personally receive as much as $450,000 if he claimed the charitable tax deduction on the profits he made from the 23% increase in Moderna’s stock price between those two dates.
“We appreciate that Dr. Slaoui has divested the millions of dollars he owned in Moderna, which represented a massive conflict of interest that he initially denied, but the administration should disclose if he plans on pocketing the up to $450,000 tax break he could get simply because he waited to divest until after Moderna’s positive announcement was made,” said Eli Zupnick, spokesman for Patients Over Pharma.
Dr. Slaoui’s Moderna investment increased by more than $1.2 million between market open Thursday and market close on Monday. At the highest tax bracket of 37%, he would be eligible for a tax break of roughly $450,000.
At the press conference announcing his appointment on Friday, Dr. Slaoui previewed Moderna’s Monday announcement, saying, “I have very recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine. And these data made me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020.”
After reports emerged that Dr. Slaoui held millions of dollars in stock options from Moderna, a company that has received $483 million from the federal government to develop its COVID-19 vaccine, Dr. Slaoui initially claimed in a tweet that “there is no conflict of interest, and there never has been” before he deleted the tweet and HHS announced that he will, in fact, fully divest from Moderna.