FOIAengine: Media Requests Were Warnings, Months Before Bad News Hit
In the early days of the Covid pandemic, there was big money on the line as pharmaceutical companies scrambled to produce vaccines. The world needed a miracle. The companies that could deliver it wouldn’t just save lives. They would become Wall Street titans, winning government contracts potentially worth billions of dollars.
An under-the-radar pharma company called Emergent BioSolutions (NYSE:EBS) suddenly seemed an early favorite in the Covid vaccine race.
The Maryland-based company wasn’t a household name; it didn’t have the brand recognition of Pfizer or Moderna. But Emergent was already well known to the federal government because of the company’s longtime status as the principal stockpiler of anthrax vaccine – a contract that had paid the company billions, including $626 million the year before Covid hit. Emergent spent big on lobbyists and shrewdly carved its niche as a federal contractor maintaining the stockpile of anthrax vaccines.
Emergent was “an obscure contractor in an obscure corner of the federal bureaucracy,” according to reporters at the New York Times who began looking into its operations as Covid unfolded, “applying the standard tools of Washington, like well-connected lobbyists and campaign contributions, to create a business heavily dependent on taxpayer dollars.”
When Covid arrived, Emergent – with its motto “Preparedness today, safer tomorrow” – suddenly found itself positioned at the center of Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s fast-track program to quickly develop a Covid vaccine.
Emergent entered into agreements with Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca to manufacture each company’s planned vaccines at its Bayview plant in Baltimore. The U.S. government awarded Emergent a $628 million contract to support the manufacturing of the vaccines. In those early days of the pandemic, it seemed that Emergent’s Bayview plant might become the factory floor where life-saving vaccines would be manufactured.
From the outside, Emergent looked like a sure Wall Street winner. Its share price skyrocketed.
Inside, it was something else entirely – the details of which were spelled out a few weeks ago in a $10 million insider trading lawsuit filed against Emergent’s former CEO by New York’s attorney general. New York’s lawsuit is noteworthy because, based on the same facts, both the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission opted not to act.
The case is also significant for another reason. It’s an example of how Freedom of Information Act requests can represent the earliest signals of looming trouble.
In late October 2020 – months before the public would learn about catastrophic problems on the Bayview factory floor – AstraZeneca officials were already suspicious. Worried about possible production problems, they began pressing Emergent for access to the Bayview factory floor. AstraZeneca’s people wanted to walk the floor, to see for themselves what was going on.
Emergent said no.
On October 25, 2020, an Emergent executive named Sean Kirk texted another executive, Adam Havey, with a note that read like the first honest line in a long corporate thriller: “Issues keep piling up. This was last night. The AZ meeting is 8:30am on Tuesday at Bayview. They asked to do a Gemba walk and I said ‘no’.”
In Japan, the word “gemba” means “the actual place” or “the scene” – the place where the truth is. It’s commonly used to mean the scene of an incident – including a crime scene. In management, a “gemba walk” borrows that logic. It connotes going to the actual place where work happens, to find what’s really causing the problem.
The next day, October 26, the floor spoke anyway — through a slide from a “Covid-19 Projects Update” PowerPoint presentation. Multiple vaccine batches were marked “late, can’t recover.” The schedule was revised. Batch counts were reduced. A production crisis loomed.
If AstraZeneca could sense it, Emergent’s CEO was supposed to know it.
According to New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil complaint, Robert G. Kramer, then Emergent’s CEO, was not a distant executive catching occasional updates from afar. The complaint alleges Kramer spent extended stretches onsite at Bayview and received constant briefings from his top lieutenants – including Kirk and Havey – about contamination alerts, investigations, and production risks.
And yet, while the company was in what the New York attorney general characterized as an “all-hands-on-deck manufacturing crisis,” Kramer – according to the state – was quietly positioning himself for a payday.
On November 13, 2020, the NYAG alleges Kramer finalized a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan at a moment when the contamination problems remained unresolved and undisclosed. The plan – allowing a company insider to schedule future stock sales in advance – was designed to take effect once Emergent’s stock reached preset prices.
Kramer’s lawyer, Kirby Behre of Miller & Chevalier, called the New York lawsuit “baseless” and “an overreach,” stating that Kramer followed company procedures as well as federal rules governing 10b5-1 plans. He said the facts will show the case should never have been brought.
Still, New York’s theory is blunt. In January and February 2021, Kramer exercised options at roughly $25 to $31 per share. Then – pursuant to the trading plan – Kramer immediately sold the acquired shares at weighted average prices between about $106 and $120.
The NYAG calculates Kramer’s proceeds at $10,121,079.50. The state’s civil lawsuit seeks disgorgement of the full amount.
Kramer’s last sale under the 10b5-1 plan occurred on February 8, 2021 – just before what would become the public unraveling of the Bayview story. By February 19, even Emergent’s board was asking Kramer if something deeper might be driving the stock’s sudden decline. Kramer replied that investors could be worried about continuity of Emergent’s outsourced drug manufacturing business and “new speculation that the FDA may not approve the AZ vaccine due to significant inconsistencies in the manufacturing.”
That speculation was not irrational. As the New York complaint describes it, contamination signals emerged as early as late September 2020. By March 2021, the story could no longer be contained. On March 31, 2021, reports began appearing that Emergent had contaminated millions of AstraZeneca vaccine doses after workers mixed up ingredients – news that hit after market close. (AstraZeneca never brought a Covid vaccine to the U.S. market.)
Emergent’s Bayview facility was no longer a quiet national asset. It was an embarrassment. And the press began to treat it like one.
At the Securities and Exchange Commission, the story would later crystallize into a different kind of enforcement action – not about insider trading, but rather about public disclosure. In April 2025, the SEC settled an administrative action against Emergent, finding the company violated Securities Act Section 17(a)(2) by making materially misleading statements between April 2020 and April 2021 about Bayview’s readiness and manufacturing controls. The SEC imposed a $1.5 million civil penalty.
The SEC’s order noted that the investing public was unaware of Bayview’s readiness issues and cross-contamination event until March 31, 2021. After that reporting, Emergent’s stock fell sharply – from $92.91 at the close on March 31 to $80.46 on April 1.
In other words: when the Bayview truth became public, the market reacted immediately. Emergent’s stock price continued dropping in a free fall as the news went from bad to worse. By 2024, you could buy an Emergent share for 75 cents. The stock, still heavily shorted, has recovered to about $11 a share today, with at least 18 hedge funds and investment companies – including BlackRock, Oak Hill Advisors, Vanguard, State Street Global, and American Century – reporting positions.
But the paper trail shows something else, too. Others were already hunting for the truth – the documents, the inspection records, the gemba itself – months before the problems at Emergent became a headline.
After New York’s attorney general filed the lawsuit last month against Kramer, we dug into PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows, to see if there were early signals of trouble. FOIA requests to the federal government can be an important early warning of bad publicity, litigation to come, or uncertainties to be hedged and gamed out.
Among the 100 FOIA requests in our database about Emergent, here’s what we found: In November and December 2020, FDAzilla (now Redica Systems) filed FOIA requests seeking inspection records for Emergent’s Rockville facility dating back years. (Both the Rockville and Bayview facilities have since been shut down.)
Then, on January 19, 2021 – months before the catastrophic headlines – the Associated Press filed a sweeping FOIA request to FDA seeking all Form 483s issued to Emergent since 2017, all related correspondence, and all Establishment Inspection Reports for Emergent sites including Bayview.
On February 24, 2021, the AP filed another FOIA request that reads, in hindsight, like a premonition: it sought exhibits from inspection reports including gowning procedure documentation (with images) and annual environmental monitoring trending reports – the kind of manufacturing details that matter when contamination is no longer theoretical.
By then, the New York Times had also begun investigating the company. On March 6, 2021 – weeks before the March 31 Bayview contamination news broke – the Times published a deep look at Emergent’s business model, lobbying muscle, and Washington influence, portraying the company as a contractor that had learned how to turn federal biodefense spending into a durable private enterprise.
Today, under a new CEO, Emergent BioSolutions is in turnaround mode, focusing on its core products, including Narcan nasal spray, and consolidating manufacturing sites. In a recent report, lawyers at Davis Polk (who aren’t involved in the Emergent case) cited the insider-trading case as a warning: “Given New York’s significant role in the securities markets, NYAG’s actions highlight possible area of risk for public companies and approval of Rule 10b5-1 trading plans.” The lawyers called the case against Kramer “an important reminder that state authorities often have broader anti-fraud statutes than do federal regulators.”
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John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. His next book, Summer of ’71: Five Months That Changed America, about the fateful year before Watergate, will be out next year. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.
