Former CDC Head and Merck’s Current Vaccine Division President Julie Gerberding Sells $9.1 Million in Merck Pharmaceutical Shares as Gardasil Vaccine Gets Bad Press

SEC filings reveal that Merck’s Vaccine Division President Julie Gerberding sold over half her Merck shares in January for $9.1 Million. That transaction followed a spate of bad news for Merck’s flagship Gardasil vaccine. Last month, Cancer Research UK announced an alarming 54% rise in cervical cancer among 24-29-year-olds, the first generation to receive the HPV jabs. The following day, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine published a withering critique of Gardasil’s crooked clinical trials, “It is still uncertain whether human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination prevents cervical cancer as trials were not designed to detect this outcome.” As Gerberding knows, those trials revealed that Gardasil dramatically RAISES (by+44.6%) the risk of cervical cancer among women with a current infection or those previously exposed to HPV. Merck is now fighting existential fraud lawsuits on both the MMR and Gardasil vaccines, that threaten licensing for those key products. Fat rats are always the first to jump ship.

Former CDC Director Julie Gerberding sells 38,368 shares of Merck Stock for $2.3 Million

Julie Gerberding was in charge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2002 to 2009, which includes the years the FDA approved the Merck Gardasil vaccine. Soon after she took over the CDC, she reportedly completely overhauled the agency’s organizational structure, and many of the CDC’s senior scientists and leaders either left or announced plans to leave. Some have claimed that almost all of the replacements Julie Gerberding appointed had ties to the vaccine industry. Gerberding resigned from the CDC on January 20, 2009, and took over as the president of Merck’s Vaccine division, a 5 billion dollar a year operation, and the supplier of the largest number of vaccines the CDC recommends. It was reported earlier this month that Dr. Gerberding, now the executive vice president of pharmaceutical giant Merck, sold 38,368 of her shares in Merck stock for $2,340,064.32. She still holds 31,985 shares of the company’s stock, valued at about $2 million.