Shareholder lawsuit: delightful weapon against drug companies

by Jon Rappoport

May 24, 2017

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The company is NewLink. The vaccine, or drug, depending on how it is defined, is called algenpantucel-L. A clinical trial of the drug recently failed to produce benefits in cancer patients, and the stock price of the company took a major dive.

A shareholder in NewLink, Rickey Ely, decided to sue.

His reasons are interesting, to say the least.

Clinical trials of new drugs seeking FDA approval go through four phases. The lawsuit states that phase 2 produced no encouraging results, violated standard protocol (there was no control group), and yet the company hyped the outcome of phase 2, and launched phase 3 only a few months after starting phase 2. Phase 3 shouldn’t have been initiated at all.

Owing to the company’s PR machine, shareholders were encouraged, but when phase 3 turned out to be a bust, the company’s stock price collapsed—thus punishing those shareholders.

Not only that, the lawsuit charges, but during the PR hype about the drug’s promising outlook, some execs of the company actually sold their own personal shares—1,154,161 shares worth $39.9 million—turning a very nice profit for themselves, before the stock price crashed.

A shareholder-lawsuit like this can be quite a strategy against drug companies (or any publicly held company). The shareholder, a part-owner of the company, is “working from the inside.” He’s “trying to protect the company from the harmful actions of its bosses.” Even if he only owns one share, he can sue.

In this case, Rickey Ely is directly suing several NewLink executives. That always tends to get execs’ attention.

They lock their office doors. They call their lawyers. They spill coffee. They have conversations with their spouses. They put personal plans on hold. They make lists of people they can blame. They make sure their secretaries are screening phone calls. They undertake a deep inventory of their…money.


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Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

8 comments on “Shareholder lawsuit: delightful weapon against drug companies

  1. Theodore says:

    Addendum: Even if the lawyers for the shareholder (plaintiff) are not able to clawback money out of the NewLink exces’s personal accounts — garnered from that slick ‘insider trading’ move — there still seems to be money in NewLink’s corporate coffers to raid…

    “While the company did have a big setback with its pancreatic cancer vaccine, NewLink’s [synthetic DNA?] Ebola shot — licensed to Merck — has been progressing and could be used against a current outbreak in Congo.”

    http://www.fiercepharma.com/vaccines/shareholder-suit-targets-newlink-management-over-failed-cancer-vaccine-trial

    See also:

    https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/05/22/new-ebola-outbreak-or-is-it-a-hoax/

  2. At Theodore:
    Wanna bet it is success, and they created a perfect storm to prove it; and shows great potential. Now every idiot, will run out and get the new shot in the arm.

  3. The start of the tsunami of lawsuits against big pharma…….

  4. Tom says:

    When Bush was in office in the early 2000’s he passed laws that protected pharma companies from being sued. However, we can still sue the individuals of those companies in their personal capacity for acts of fraud. Fraud has no statutes of limitations. The problem is that no attorney will do this for you (at least not if they want to keep a law practice), you will have to do this Pro Se. And most people in America want things done for them so they are not going to go out of their way to understand their secured inherent rights guaranteed to them by the national Constitution or how to apply their rights in court. Its challenging information to understand and apply, but when you get there, it all clicks. And yes it is a bit scary to tackle something so big. Big Pharma is one big fraud industry and each share holder and officer of that company is in collusion for fraud and possibly racketeering, since their research funding come from federal grants. There is enough information out there to even file criminal charges against these officers of Big Pharma with each states Attorney General. The national Constitution is our key in all of these things. A law must be constitutional compliant in order to have force or effect and this position is supported by numerous Supreme Court rulings. Therefore, we as a group or individually have more power than we realize. Those that have been harmed by these companies have a solution, it requires a little bit of work, tenacity and patience, but if you are willing to walk that path, it could be well worth it for yourself and for others.

  5. middleway says:

    The incestuous relationship that exists between conventional medicine, medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies leaves one to ponder one of the greatest ironies of this age,… the unbridled fear of loosing ones conventional health coverage. Learn to accept / embrace the inevitability of your own death. This alone will save you the trauma and agony of being slowly euthanized in a modern medical facility, where the faint and lingering odor of Dr. Mengele’s cologne continues to permeate the hallways.

    • Tom says:

      Hear! Hear! Well stated. I consider it one of the most glaring examples of the failure of religion and the priesthood class that so many people are terrified of death. There is much to learn from the first-person words of people who have had a Near Death Experience (NDE) and the latest research showing the
      non-locality of mind (whatever is “you” does not live inside your brain and is independent of your physical body). There is no need to fear death, only the painful and pointless prolonging of life at the hands of a cruelly unethical Medical-Industrial Complex.

  6. Ray says:

    No trend can last forever. I believe the medical-industrial-complex has the American market saturated. They have drugs for every imaginable ailment from the beginning of life to the end. They have protection against criminal liability. They have Obamacare to force the healthy uninsured into their web. Their patents are expiring faster than they can create new products.

    From here, they have no way to go but down along with all the other bubbles propped up by the federal government.

  7. Todd Millions says:

    Not a new game but higher stakes.
    In the early 1600’s rumour swept Christendom that-
    A new world tree-Ligna Vitiae,could be chopped up and brewed and or eaten too cure-The French Pox.
    Paracelsus was able too show at the time that it did no such thing.
    His learned medical colleagues tended to disagree with him because,
    they were being paid under the table,by a family of bankers(the Futterers*) who by pure coincidence had secured exclusive import rights for this wood into the Holy Roman Empire.
    Which trade in wood for fake treatment of diseased woodies was apparently the largest commodity shipped to Europe from the new world by Spain for 80 years!
    Was anything learned? Not.
    President Marcon proves (indubitably)that the French Pox still runs rampant.

    *Misspelled Deliberately.

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