Salon: Pharma execs dumped millions in stock for huge profit last month after getting Trump admin contracts

Pharmaceutical executives continued to dump millions of dollars in stock in August despite criticism that they were profiting from big taxpayer-funded contracts awarded amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Stock prices have soared for pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, which is developing a leading vaccine candidate, in no small part thanks to contracts awarded by the Trump administration. The top five executives at Moderna sold more than $89 million in stock in the first five months of the year, with about three times as many stock transactions as in all of 2019, according to Stat News.

“It certainly doesn’t inspire much confidence to see drug company executives feverishly dumping their stock options and cashing out fortunes for themselves after stock prices were inflated by the billions of dollars the Trump administration shoveled into drug company coffers,” Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for the progressive watchdog group Accountable Pharma, told Salon.