Emergent BioSolutions under scrutiny following quality control issues with COVID-19 vaccines

Biotech firm Emergent BioSolutions is under scrutiny after quality control issues forced millions of potential COVID-19 vaccines to be discarded.

For Emergent BioSolutions, Feb. 8 was a day to revel in their success -- at least as far as the public was concerned. Standing alongside Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan at their Baltimore-area plant, Emergent CEO Robert Kramer boasted about the biotech firm's role as "one of the key suppliers" helping to produce two promising COVID-19 vaccines, and its "valuable contribution to society in being able to make hundreds of millions of doses available." Kramer's comments that day reflected a confidence that he and other Emergent executives had outwardly conveyed for months -- one born of lucrative government contracts and, as a result, generous returns on the horizon for its investors. What investors say they were not told: Emergent had at that time discarded vaccine ingredients slated for millions of Johnson & Johnson doses due to a string of quality control errors. And that on Feb. 8, nearly six weeks before Emergent's lab errors became public, Kramer had completed a weeks-long stock transaction that netted him millions of dollars -- and that later saved him millions more when the company's stock tumbled upon news of its failures, securities filings show.