President on Drugs: Update

Note: I keep updating this.

"Night singer of shares" from the South Sea Bubble, Amsterdam 1720, via Wikipedia. 

Of course it's possible that Trump knew exactly what he was doing, just as he did with the oil futures a while back or the hydroxychloroquine market more recently, in a classic little pump-'n'-dump scheme.

Scientists at Cedars-Sinai are developing an ultraviolet light that is inserted into the lungs of coronavirus patients to kill the virus living there.

Trump was right again about "inserting UV light."

It's called the #Healight

Watch: pic.twitter.com/naGETF2Mfo

— Mark Dice (@MarkDice) April 24, 2020

But as far as Trump goes looks like he mainly goosed the stock price of Aytu Bioscience 18% in one day and somebody made a pot of money. pic.twitter.com/upqWhCMlK6

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 25, 2020

Or rather than being involved in some insider trading on his own, perhaps, he took a few millions to do it for somebody else and he was too high to read his lines coherently. He's been using his presidency the whole time the way Arthur Godfrey used radio back when Trump was a kid, shilling his own properties and those of others. But I don't know why, in any of these cases, he would have explained later to reporters that

“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” Trump said.

Katherine Eban/Vanity Fair has a gripping piece on the administration's crazed work to bypass the regulations and hustle the hydroxychloroquine out to the market from his first TV mention of the drug on March 19, but with no explanation of why they were doing it other than that they were trying to make Trump's words true:

“We have millions and millions of doses of it—29 million to be exact,” he said [4 April], as the official tally of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. topped 260,000 and governors across the country pleaded for federal support to acquire tests, ventilators, and protective gear for health care workers. “We’re just hearing really positive stories, and we’re continuing to collect the data.” That evening, according to emails obtained by Vanity Fair, Trump’s political appointees would ramp up the pressure on career health officials to make good on the president’s extravagant promises, despite clear warnings from federal clinicians about the risks and unproven benefits of chloroquine-based treatments for COVID-19.

Except to note that the original impetus was a donation from the German pharma giant Bayer—

Even before Trump began making public statements from the podium, his political appointees had begun rallying around the idea of amassing chloroquine drugs to treat COVID-19, despite the paucity of evidence for their benefits. On March 18, according to records obtained by Vanity Fair, the German drug manufacturer Bayer first petitioned the FDA to let it donate millions of doses of a chloroquine drug called Resochin. Normally such a move would be prohibited since the FDA had never inspected the plant in Karachi, Pakistan, where Resochin is made. But the FDA set aside its usual safeguards and approved the donation, after sampling and testing the drugs to make sure they met U.S. standards. On March 19, Bayer issued a press release to announce that it was “working with appropriate agencies on an Emergency Use Authorization for the drug’s use in the U.S.”

The next day Trump first spoke of hydroxychloroquine from the White House podium, citing its “very, very encouraging early results. And we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.” Because the drug had “been around for a long time,” he added, “if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody.”

And Bayer just happens to have had an interesting relationship with the president since before the inauguration, not long after its acquisition of the US chemical company Monsanto, when it announced plans to invest $8 billion in US R&D, not through its own PR department, but through the Trump transition team, in the form of Sean Spicer:

"The reason for this commitment and expansion is because of the president-elect's focus on creating a better business climate here in the United States, which has already increased consumer small biz confidence since the election," Spicer said.

And going on through at least last August, when Trump's EPA stopped California from requiring warning labels on Monsanto's possibly cancer-causing weed killer Roundup.

Bayer botched the acquisition of Monsanto and has been in serious trouble with its own shareholders since last April, when they voted no confidence in the company's board, and is now under attack from American shareholders in New York court, along with another German company associated with Trump:

The lawsuits have been filed by two small US-based shareholders in the companies. The plaintiffs are not seeking damages for themselves but are demanding that the board members compensate Deutsche and Bayer for the alleged harm caused by their actions. “The lack of proper governance at Bayer and Deutsche Bank allowed management and the supervisory board to saddle the companies and their shareholders with billions of dollars in losses,” said Michelle Ciccarelli Lerach, plaintiff attorney in both cases. In Deutsche case, the lawyers point to an “unprecedented litany of wrongdoing by Deutsche Bank’s managers and supervisors” which left the lender’s finances “gravely impaired and its long-term survival in doubt”. The lawsuit also mentions “price fixing, sanctions violations, money laundering, critical deficiencies in its capital planning practices, financial reporting failures, inadequate . . . controls and procedures, bribery and . . . other breaches of fiduciary duties”. (Financial Times)

The overarching story of the Trump administration may end up being one of such vast corporate malfeasance that Trump himself may be seen as having played a relatively small part.

Oh, and this is a weird notification:

For "violating community standards". As far as I can tell the video is back up. All the company's material suggests to me that the company's team at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles was at the very earliest stages of developing an idea for killing bacteria in the colon, not viruses in the trachea and lungs, and never imagined the latter, in the four years they've been working on the project, until a couple of weeks ago. Or anything related to Covid-19, though they have recently started selling Covid serological antibody tests that may or may not actually work:

“We were not in the COVID business, so to say,”  [CEO Josh] Disbrow said. “We have had to call a bit of an audible, and it's enabled us to actually broaden our distribution reach. We had not been previously calling on municipalities, state governments, first responders and so forth. We also have orders from corporations that we hadn't previously dealt with.”

Aytu, which is based in Englewood, Colo., works with a company in Hong Kong to acquire tests developed in China, which are then imported and sold in the U.S. The tests are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, in the traditional sense. Instead, the FDA allows their sale under an “emergency use authorization” process. 

(See comments for more references.)

They announced the license agreement with Cedars-Sinai to apply the (as yet imaginary) Healight technology to Covid-19 on 21 April, four days after an announcement on 17 April that they were under (private) investigation for securities fraud on those serological tests:

This morning, before the markets opened, NBC News issued a report entitled “Unapproved Chinese coronavirus antibody tests being used in at least 2 states.” This article reported that Aytu has been distributing tests from unapproved Chinese manufacturers, citing health officials and FDA filings. The report noted that these tests were shipped to the US after the FDA relaxed its guidelines for tests in mid-March. According to the article, unreliable tests can produce false results. The stock has already dropped significantly in premarket trading.

If you purchased or acquired shares of Aytu common stock and have questions about your legal rights or possess information relevant to this matter, please contact Block & Leviton attorneys at (617) 398-5600, or via email at cases@blockesq.com, or at https://shareholder.law/aytu.

The leap at 7 March from 34 cents to $2.05 was when the license agreement for the antibody test was approved; the low point of $1.19 was 23 April, the day Trump made his weird comments  

Meanwhile, a lawsuit against Trump and his three oldest children, over promotion on The Apprentice of a multilevel marketing operation, ACN Opportunity LLC, is proceeding:

According to the 2018 lawsuit, Trump and his three oldest children promoted ACN from 2005 and 2015 without disclosing that they were being paid millions of dollars to do so. The plaintiffs say they invested in becoming independent sellers of an ACN desktop video phone service after Trump promoted it on his show and at numerous events, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars when the technology was eclipsed by smartphones.

Payola is their no. 1 industry.