With money from QVT, a hedge fund, Vivek’s company purchased a failed drug from GSK, renamed it, and performed a non-scientific post-hoc analysis of the failed drug where they cherry picked data and spun it to pump up the company’s stock. Once the stock price soared after the hysterical mass media, such as CNBC, talked up the stock, Mr. Ramaswamy sold-off (the dump part of a pump-and-dump scheme) a big portion of stock to make boodles of bucks. Once the company’s own clinical trial failed, the stock crashed and investors lost their money, but Ramaswamy was sitting high on a pile of cash from his pump-and-dump.
I don’t follow right-wing, libertarian, authority figures, who scam the public, but wanting to know what the buzz was about this guy Vivek who was on stage with 7 other dunces last Wednesday night, I googled him. Prominent on my Google feed was something on YouTube about Vivek’s fraud. Once I saw Vivek had masterly committed a biotech pump-and-dump scheme with colluding physicians and made himself millions of dollars, I had a look. Now that he’s been exposed, some people are calling him “Vivek Ramaswampy.”
This is a story about the playbook used to develop Theranos by Elizabeth Holmes (and her partner in crime and fellow jailbird, Sunny Balwani), the Houston, TX native who is a daughter of Enron executive fraudster and the evolution of her scam by Ohio native, Vivek Ramaswamy. In 2014, Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences (ROI stands for return on investment), incorporated in the tax haven of Bermuda, that was backed by about $100 million in funding from investors including QVT, a hedge fund that had previously employed Mr. Ramaswamy after college. Using the biotech fraud playbook as written by Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes (she is from Houston, TX and the daughter of an executive at Enron, the great fraud company in the energy sector), the fast talking, exaggerated smiling Vivek would hire an all star list of Board members. Using his connections, Mr. Ramaswamy assembled a star-studded, bipartisan advisory board. A friend from Harvard helped him delude and recruit Democrats, including Kansas’s Kathleen Sebelius, former Secretary of Health and Human Services; South Dakota’s Tom Daschle, a former Senate majority leader; and physician Donald M. Berwick, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The Republicans included former Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine and a physician from Texas, Mark McClellan, a prominent FDA regulator. All of these people smelled money, big money. These are all powerful people with Neoliberal views. Powerful people often suffer from the Power Paradox – they believe their own shit and can’t look at evidence that doesn’t support their own views. Neoliberalism is a point of view where capitalism is protected from democracy. The plan was following what Elizabeth Holmes did. She hired luminaries, such as General James Mattis, and other people who had no idea about biotech, but loved power and money. No scientists were on Board. Just a couple of ex-physicians who are clueless about drug and diagnostic development.
The list of Theranos Board members included:
- George Shultz, former US secretary of state. Shultz died in 2021 at the age of 100.
- Gary Roughead, a retired US Navy admiral
- William Perry, former US secretary of defense
- Sam Nunn, a former US senator
- James Mattis, a retired US Marine Corps general who went on to serve as President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense
- Richard Kovacevich, the former CEO of Wells Fargo
- Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state
- William Frist, a heart and lung transplant surgeon and former US senator
- William H. Foege, another physician and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Riley P. Bechtel, chairman of the board of the Bechtel Group Inc. at the time.
During the upside of these biotech scams, the money-loving and naive Board members will laud the company’s technology and its leaders, but once the scam is exposed, all of the sudden the Board says they didn’t have the expertise to evaluate the technology or the expertise of the company’s leaders. It’s the standard playbook for tech Board members who are only their for the power and money. Why don’t they say during the upside of the company’s scam that they have no expertise to evaluate the technology or the expertise of the company’s leaders? Answer- there would be no upside and no cash payout for the money-loving Board members. As TechCrunch points out, “their board was not meant to provide real oversight or ask hard questions. It was designed to help raise funds, inspire awe, squelch doubts and shut down criticism by the power of its members’ reputation. It did this very successfully — until it didn’t.”
In late 2014, the Roivant subsidiary that would be called Axovant bought for $5 million upfront — pocket change in the biotech industry — an Alzheimer’s drug that GlaxoSmithKline had given up on after four failed clinical trials. Six months later, before starting any new clinical trials for the drug, Ramaswamy led Axovant’s public offering in a debut that sent the company’s market value to nearly $3 billion. At that time, the company reported it had just eight employees, including Mr. Ramaswamy’s mother and brother, both of them physicians. Apparently Vivek’s mom taught him well about corruption and fraud, something that many Indian-Americans have learned well in their homeland. As described by an Indian physician concerned about corruption in his country, “The next generation of doctors [sic] is being taught to cheat and deceive before they even enter the classroom.” As part of India’s vastly corrupt healthcare system (it’s bad), his mom has a bachelor’s degree in medicine from India – a highly corrupt system (it’s really bad) where you go to college for a total of 5 years (in theory). It’s not even close to the equivalent of an MD degree from the US. The brother has his MD from Brown, but has chosen to leverage that degree to rip-off investors. Note, his medical education was subsidized by taxpayers in the US – all med students in the US, regardless of whether it’s a state or private school, receive massive amounts of taxpayer subsidies, including about $100,000/year while in residency. That subsidy includes about $50k salary plus benefits, malpractice and money to the hospital for teaching and administration. All that taxpayer spending to train a con-artist.
In late 2015, as Theranos was spirraling down in fraud, Mr. Ramaswamy sold off a portion of his Roivant shares to an institutional investor, Viking Global Investors, who wanted in on the grift. The sale was a major payday: his 2015 tax return claimed more than $37 million in capital gains. The swindle was on. Feigning his wanting to share, in an interview, Ramaswamy said he cashed out only to make room for Viking, not to hedge his bets ahead of the drug candidate’s clinical trial. Yeah, right.
Vivek became a media darling in the corporate-controlled mass media. The hysterical Jim Cramer, one of the few guys on the planet who talks faster than Vivek, was extolling the upside of investing in Roivant. Fast talking ole Jim also loved Theranos back in the day. The scam du jour was a company called Roivant Sciences, but as a scientist, it’s hard for me to spell out the whole name of the company given I know it was an anti-science company. Located in the tax haven of Bermuda, the company would have been more accurately called ROI Anti-Science Inc. Trump’s base of illiterate, science-hating, red state yahoos would have fallen for that one, but they have little money. That would have played well in your quest to become Trump’s VP candidate. Instead, Vivek appealed to the rich and greedy. Theranos’ Sunny Balwani had led by example. Smart move, Vivek. VP is a pipe-dream for you, and I hope your pipe is full of the best Indian Ganja money can buy, the kind smoked by Hindu holy men in India- because only in your dreams will you be VP.
Now here’s where it really gets good. In 2017, Ramaswamy made his pitch to Masayoshi Son (a naturalized Korean in Japan), the founder of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank who runs the world’s largest tech investment fund. His presentation included slides mimicking ones Son is known for, with charts showing an arrow shooting up and to the right, according to a person familiar with Ramaswamy’s pitch who, according to the NY Times, was not authorized to speak publicly. In August 2017, SoftBank led an investment of $1.1 billion in Ramaswamy’s Roivant. The investment wasn’t about getting in on Axovant, the subsidiary with the drug candidate; SoftBank thought intepirdine (the drug candidate) was unlikely to succeed. But SoftBank was seeking to invest in Mr. Ramaswamy’s wider drug portfolio, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The bigger the portfolio, the bigger the scam and the bigger the pot of gold for colluding investors.
A few weeks later, the Alzheimer’s drug candidate’s clinical trial failed. The stock price plunged, losing 75 percent of its value in a single day. The stock slid further in the months that followed and never recovered before the company was dissolved this year. Ramaswamy was rich, investors left with empty pockets. Thanks to the clever way the hedge fund boys knew how to structure companies to minimize their risk, the way they structured his biotechnology empire, Ramaswamy did not hold a direct stake in Axovant. His personal stake was through Roivant, allowing Ramaswamy to weather the storm. QVT, the hedge fund where Mr. Ramaswamy once worked, had also invested in Roivant, insulating it from much of the fallout.
But many investors lost much money on Axovant. One large public pension fund, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, sold its stake months later, when it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars less than in the days leading up to the disappointing clinical trial news. As Dr. Derrick Lowe, Ph.D., a biotech scientists who writes for Science has said, “I think whipping people up into thinking this was a wonder drug was unconscionable.” Further to Ramaswamy, in Science Dr. Lowe wrote (2017), ” The proteins, cells, and organs that are being targeted in the patients are impervious to bold statements and applause in the press.”
Sadly, only scientists care about science, while the hedge fund people and their physician shills bring us more and more of these schemes, such as Miami physician Philip Frost, and the many drugs that don’t work but are foisted on people through fraudulent medical research and fraudulent clinical trials.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 