Kudos to Los Angeles Times reporter David Willman for his investigation of former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig’s egregious conflict of interest in cheerleading the federal stockpiling of anthrax antibiotics as a high-level government advisor and consultant while personally stockpiling a fortune as director of a company that sold an anthrax antibiotic to the federal government. Some $334 million for the drug raxibacumab (Abthrax) flowed to Human Genome Sciences Inc. starting in 2006, keeping the company afloat while it struggled with other products. Raxi was HGS’s first commercial pill and the U.S. government remains the only customer for it, at $5100 a dose. Danzig became an HGS director in 2001 after seven years at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration, then worked as a biowarfare consultant for the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.
In a contentious takeover, Human Genome was acquired for $3.6 billion ($14.25 per share) by GlaxoSmithKline last August, after years of hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing losses on the lupus drug Benlysta, which the two firms developed together. Danzig held options on 184,000 HGS shares in 2011.
It’s worth quoting here the explanation of federal conflict of interest rules from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics website:
“18 U.S.C. § 208, the basic criminal conflict of interest statute, prohibits an executive branch employee from participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests, as well as the financial interests of:
- His spouse or minor child
- His general partner
- An organization in which he serves as an officer, director, trustee, general partner or employee, and
- A person with whom he is negotiating for or has an arrangement concerning prospective employment”
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“I feel that I’ve acted very properly with regard to this,” Danzig told the LA Times.