fixed it for you
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He had information relating to the pandemic and the government’s working efforts to control it that had not yet been made public. So any stock purchases related to the pandemic could certainly count as insider trading.
Not to mention the undisclosed financial conflict of interest at play here. We are only just learning that Rand Paul stood to personally profit from a government response that focused on treatment for the disease rather than prevention.
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So, because the investment didn’t pay out very much, it’s no biggie? Remdesivir happens to be a mediocre treatment for COVID - but what if it had been used on millions of people? That would have put it in the blockbuster drug category and sent Gilead’s stock price tripling and quadrupling.
The STOCK law doesn’t have the caveat “only report successful investments.” That would be like a law that only punishes successful bank robberies.
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Ethics Schmtics!
“The recent prevalence of STOCK Act violations shows that merely the threat of a fine is not deterring members of Congress from breaking the law.” Fines for violating the STOCK Act are as low as $200"
“After a January 2020 Senate briefing on the emerging Covid-19 pandemic, multiple senators traded stocks worth millions of dollars, including shares in biotech companies and those making personal protective equipment. None of the senators were charged with insider trading.”
And I’m guessing that they all kept whatever monies they made from the trades.
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Or what if he had been in a position to ensure it would be used on millions of people? The Senate has a lot of influence on who gets a piece of all that emergency COVID money being thrown around. That’s one reason legislators aren’t supposed to have undisclosed financial conflicts of interest.
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Cough, cough… President Jair Bolsonaro
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I wonder how much of the right-wing attempts to peddle useless drug “treatments” for covid are because the individuals pushing them are financially invested. A certain amount of it is just part of the general dismissal of covid (“It isn’t serious, you just need to take a drug to fix it.”). I rather suspect a great deal of it is the financial interest, however, and part of downplaying the seriousness of covid is actually part of that, rather than the other way around. So you have Republican politicians pushing harmful lies and policies that kill Americans because a) it politically benefits them and b) it financially benefits them. I’m not sure which is worse.
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Well there’s this asshole:
In 2016: “Trump owns shares of drug developer Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ:GILD) in two of his five investment accounts. Per the filing, Trump owns between $100,001 and $250,000 worth of Gilead stock in a Deutsche asset management account and between $250,001 and $500,000 in an account with Oppenheimer .” -MotleyFool
In 2020: “The US has bought up virtually all the stocks for the next three months of one of the two drugs (Remdesivir) proven to work against Covid-19, leaving none for the UK, Europe or most of the rest of the world.” -TheGuardian
eta:
I’m starting to wonder how Mrs Paul didn’t make a profit.
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It is small potatoes, which is why the petty opportunism, flouting of rules and ideological gating of them is so awestriking.
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Came to say the same thing. I bet she had no idea what the company did - that it was a vaccine maker - and just liked the name because of its connotations.
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To be fair, they only invested in Gilead because they watched The Handmaid’s Tale and thought it was a documentary.
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Well, that doesn’t seem right…
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I mean, how do you expect him to pay for the recurring perms his hair requires?
My wife works for the US Geological Survey, and as a Federal worker got a long list of companies that neither she or I are allowed to have more than $4k worth of stock in, due to potential conflict of interest. In my retirement portfolio I had about $10k worth of company stock that I was forced to sell. My company is a huge entertainment-focused company that really has nothing at all to do with mines or mineral extraction, and has almost no involvement with the USGS, so I was really struggling to see any conflict at all. But it turns out they’ve got some kind of small-scale natural gas collection going on somewhere on land they own in Florida. So I guess the government is worried that, as a company employee I’m going to have my wife (who works in the earthquake division of the USGS) help get some natural gas permits approved and therefore increase my company stock price by 0.000001%. That’s small potatoes.
Rand Paul’s wife went out of her way to make what she (or Rand) believed to be a strategic investment based on world events that Rand was (and continues to be) personally involved in addressing, and that should always be prohibited, with or without disclosure.
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