Rand Paul’s wife bought shares in an attempt to make money from the pandemic
Is Senator Rand Paul an inside trader? That’s another question thrown at the crank of conspiracy, logging, and pandemic misinformation after a very Belated disclosure of a stock move by Paul’s wife, Kelley Paul, that occurred in the early days of the pandemic. On February 24, 2020, the drug remdesivir was hailed as a drug that could have “real efficacy” in treating COVID-19 infections. Two days later, The Washington Post now reportsKelley Paul bought up to $ 15,000 worth of stock in Gilead Pharmaceuticals.
Having the wife of a sitting senator looking to make a little money in a deadly national pandemic is kind of gross, but it’s not insider trading. What moves it from merely “gross” to something that might require further scrutiny is that Rand Paul is, and was, on the Senate Health Committee. If there are people in the Senate who might have more knowledge than others about the details of the pandemic, he would be among them.
It all seems especially vague because it occurred during the same initial period that Senator Kelly Loeffler, Senator David Perdue, Senator Richard Burr, and other senators carried out important stock transactions after receiving information on the extent of the pandemic. No one was punished for any of that, because it is still not illegal for sitting senators to place bets on stocks predicting how markets will react to the death of large numbers of Americans. The only thing a senator can get in trouble for is if he makes those bets based on inside information that the rest of the public is unaware of.
That’s why senators who ran out of stock to trade stocks after receiving government reports about the looming pandemic received so much attention, but if it cannot be shown that they acted. based on That private information is just a daily and current exploitation of an American disaster to which no one is bothered.
In the end, the Pauls didn’t earn a penny from their own investment. Remdesivir was later declared ineffective against the virus, though not until after Donald Trump had filled himself with his doctors’ attempts to throw it all at the wall to cure it, when Trump himself had to be removed. to the hospital with a terrible infection. There would be no windfall from drugs.
While Rand Paul isn’t likely to get into much trouble over this, save for something we don’t know yet, there’s another detail to all of this which is … hmm. You may know Senator Rand Paul right now for his many, many attempts to spread incomplete pandemic conspiracy theories, downplay the severity of the pandemic, and speak up. against public safety measures such as mask mandates. He has been especially focused on targeting the government’s pandemic expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, but was even suspended from the social media platform YouTube earlier this week for a video falsely claiming that the masks “do not prevent infection.” . They certainly do, and N95 masks are the best means of preventing infection, aside from vaccine-based immunity or, of course, social distancing so you don’t come into contact with the virus at all.
Is it a little strange that a guy whose family owns shares in a pharmaceutical company is among the loudest voices giving Americans false information that suggests they don’t need to take pandemic precautions so seriously, everything will work out, just go about your business? ? Yes it is. A little.
Once again though, Paul has a pretty stout defense for all of this behavior. He just does what he thinks will bring in the most fundraising dollars from the Republican base; Right now, that is attacking the experts and mocking their opinions on how to get out of this pandemic. You don’t need a stock market reason to do it, it’s what you’ve done since your first season began. There is no reason to think that Rand Paul is a criminal when the much simpler explanation is that Rand Paul is simply a selfish, blinding sociopathic jerk.
