Moderna CEO who upped cost of Covid jab fivefold gets 50% pay raise after cashing in $400M in stock

Critics on the left AND right are up in arms over a report that Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel is swimming in sweet, sweet cash, all as Moderna is now reportedly spiking the price of its COVID vaccine.

Broken by The Washington Post, the story begins with the fact that Bancel earned a whopping $393 million in 2022 from stock sales.

The Post further notes that last year the company raised his base salary by 50 percent to $1.5 million, despite him already swimming in so much money.

Now in fairness, Bancel has claimed he intends to donate what he’s earned from stock sales to charity. However, this hasn’t been enough to stop criticism, especially since Moderna has benefited from so much government assistance.

“The firm’s windfall profits have drawn criticism, particularly because it used $1.7 billion in taxpayer funding and assistance from the National Institutes of Health to develop its vaccine,” according to the Post.

“Now, analysts are finding fault with its executive pay and governance, with one influential firm advising shareholders to vote against the company’s compensation plan at its annual meeting on May 3.”

Note that the pay also includes a nearly $1 billion golden parachute:

Moderna has for its part defended Bancel’s raise on the basis that it’s “reflective of merit” and thus “appropriate in light of the increased scope of increasingly global responsibility for Moderna’s executives.”

It’s true that Moderna’s profits have exploded in the past couple of years, rising to a whopping $18.5 million in 2021. That was reportedly 300x more than it’d earned in 2019.

“Moderna’s board is one of just five in the S&P 500 with three directors owning more than $1 billion in company stock, along with household names like Google-parent Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway and Estée Lauder,” the Post notes.

But it’s also true that Bancel’s pay does seem attached to his performance.

“In 2022, when Moderna’s stock fell 29 percent, Bancel’s actual pay equated to a loss – on paper – of $306.2 million, according to a March securities filing. The prior year, when the stock rose 143 percent, his package was actually worth $793 million, according to the company’s estimates,” according to the Post.

Either way, critics aren’t pleased with the pay:

All this comes as Moderna is looking to spike the price of its COVID vaccine.

“The U.S. government paid around $10 billion in the early years of the pandemic to develop and purchase Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine as part of Operation Warp Speed. So far, any American who wants the shot has paid nothing out-of-pocket for it — the federal government has footed the bill,” NPR reported last month.

“But once it’s time to switch to the next version of the vaccine (expected to be tailored to whatever strain of the virus is circulating later this year), individual patients will have to pay for the shot if their health insurance doesn’t cover it. The proposed price: roughly $130 per dose.”

Ouch.

Bancel tried to defend the decision in remarks he made to the Daily Mail back in January.

“It’s going up a little bit because the previous price was massively discounted… we got help from the US Government. When we did the first contract with the US, we proposed an offer to them [with] a big discount,” he said.

“In the US it’s $26 now. That was the discounted price, it’s going to go up. Pfizer said they’re going to price it between $110 and $130. We’d want to be the same ballpark as that,” he added.

Critics say it’s all unfair, given as Moderna got rich off both the pandemic and the federal government.

See more criticism below:

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