Regeneron Board Member And Executive Sell $1 million In Stock After Trump Promotes Treatment

0
1423
A logo sign outside of the headquarters of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., in Tarrytown, New York on November 21, 2015. Photo by Kristoffer Tripplaar *** Please Use Credit from Credit Field ***

A Regeneron executive and one of its directors sold $1 million worth of stocks two days after President Donald Trump announced he was taking their therapeutic, recent filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission reveal.

Last Friday night, the White House announced that as part of Trump’s treatment for coronavirus, he had received Regeneron’s experimental antibody cocktail that has not passed formal trials or been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

One day later, the president appeared in a video posted to his Twitter account about his treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“They gave me Regeneron,” he said, saying the company name instead of the treatment’s name, REGN-COV2. “It was like, unbelievable. I felt good immediately. I felt as good three days ago as I do now.”

At another point in the video he said that the therapeutics he was given were “miracles…we have things happening that look like their miracles coming down from God.”

“I think this was a blessing from God that I caught [the virus], I think it was a blessing in disguise,” Trump said in the video. “I caught it, I heard about this drug, I said, ‘Let me take it’ … and it was incredible the way it worked.”

“I call that a cure,” he said. “It’s a cure.”

After the video posted, Regeneron’s stock jumped over 3 percent in after-hours trading.

On Monday, when markets opened, Regeneron stock prices surged from $564 to over $600 a share. That day, Joseph Goldstein, who sits on the company’s board of directors, and SVP and Head of Commercial Marion McCourt exercised stock options that let them sell a total of 10,200 shares for a net profit of over $1 million. According to filings, that netted about $740,000 for Goldstein and $260,000 for McCourt.

Company executives have been selling shares at the company on a regular basis, but insider sales activity jumped at the same time the coronavirus took hold in the United States, starting the second quarter of 2020, according to data collected by MarketBeat. The year isn’t over and already $100 million more in stock has been sold compared to 2019 and 2018 — $248 million vs $142 million and $143 million, respectively — a 70 percent increase. The company’s stock price has climbed from $400 to $600 a share from the beginning of the year, a 50 percent increase.

The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday evening.

The New York Times reported that Trump’s financial documents reveal the president’s three family trusts held investments in Regeneron as well as pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, which itself is a major shareholder in Regeneron. His 2017 filing with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics disclosed shares in Regeneron, but they did not appear on his 2020 filing.