Media Mentions

President Trump's rewrite of a Nixon-era environmental law — if it withstands expected legal challenges and the November election — could have major implications for energy projects, including oil and gas pipelines nationwide. Trump yesterday announced the completion of rules to overhaul the National Environmental Policy Act, vowing the move would lead to quicker turnarounds for buildings and "better roads, bridges, tunnels and highways." He reserved his remarks on energy to bash his presumed Democratic presidential challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, using the second official White House event in two days to accuse Biden of pitching an energy plan that "would kill" oil and gas development...As critics expected, the final rule excludes the word "cumulative" effects from the NEPA review process. The plan stated a project's effects that are "remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain" should generally not be considered. That means impacts like greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to larger problems over time are less likely to be weighed in consideration of projects. The rule also stated effects under the purview of the law "do not include those effects that the agency has no ability to prevent due to its limited statutory authority." Caitlin McCoy, an attorney at Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program, said the language in the final rule is "intentionally vague." "It'll be up to the agencies," she said...McCoy noted that the final rule states that projects using "minimal federal funding" would not trigger a NEPA review. The catch, she noted, is that the rule gives no dollar amount for what counts as "minimal."

Environmental regulation is shaping up as a defining issue in the presidential race, with President Trump doubling down on his bid to ratchet back government oversight and former Vice President Joe Biden promising to reverse Mr. Trump’s regulatory rollbacks. The rivals this week outlined diametrically opposed views. Mr. Trump ordered a streamlining of environmental reviews and said he would keep shrinking the reach of government to help business. Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, released a $2 trillion clean-energy plan he said would spur job growth through investments in new technology...Shortly after taking office, Mr. Trump also issued a hiring freeze designed to starve agencies through attrition. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which investigates and regulates workplaces for health and safety issues, has the lowest number of inspectors in more than four decades and has seen inspection tallies plummet. The Environmental Protection Agency has seen similar decreases in inspections when compared with the Obama era, according to government reports. “The administration came into office with an unnervingly good understanding of how the machinery of regulation works and they did a pretty effective job of sabotaging it,” said Joe Goffman, executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. The approach will make it tougher for a new administration to carry out its objectives.

The Trump Administration wants faster reviews of pipeline and other large projects, but its latest move to achieve that leaves the question of climate impact assessment for such projects unclear. Overhauling NEPA marks the Trump Administration's latest efforts to cut down on what it sees as "mountains and mountains of bureaucratic red tape in Washington, D.C.," the president said in his Wednesday speech. His administration first proposed its changes to the 50-year-old law in January, and in June Trump signed an executive order loosening compliance requirements for the law in response to COVID-19-related delays. Fundamentally, the law's changes are twofold, Caitlin McCoy, staff attorney at Harvard's Environmental and Energy Law Program, told Utility Dive: it would reduce the number of projects subject to NEPA review and exclude certain effects of the project from being considered significant. For a project to trigger NEPA review, it needs to pose "significant" impacts to environmental quality or be federally funded, but under revised NEPA standards, projects would be exempt if they received "minimal federal funding" or "involvement" from the government, said McCoy. It's unclear whether a pipeline would trigger NEPA under these rules, she said — the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission needs to issue a certification for interstate pipelines, but "it has no control over whether the project is ultimately built or not, how it operates, pipeline safety or security." ... If a project does trigger NEPA, it is less clear how climate impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, hydrofluorocarbon emissions and other climate-related incidentals common to major infrastructure projects would be considered, said McCoy. The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) initially proposed reviews focus only on "direct effects" of a project, but now says effects "generally not be considered if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain." The word "generally" has been added since the change was first proposed and could leave the door open to considering potential climate impacts, McCoy said.

On Wednesday, President Trump achieved a longstanding goal in weakening environmental protection: The administration significantly narrowed the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a law that requires the government to study the impact of federal projects on the communities and wild areas around them. By skipping steps and shortening deadlines, these changes help to fast-track fossil fuel infrastructure like pipelines and highways, a move that leaves out the voices of poor neighborhoods and people of color on the pollution in their communities...Twice a year, the administration publishes a Unified Regulatory Agenda that details its plans for new regulations and rollbacks. The experts who keep track of environmental rollbacks for Harvard’s Regulatory Tracker noticed an exceptionally long list in the recently updated agenda from early July. It shows 317 items  in proposed or final stages lined up for both the Department of Interior and Environmental Protection Agency. Of those 317, the rules in final stages are most important to watch, because they close enough to the finish line that Trump could conceivably rush them out the door before January if he loses the election. There are 64 EPA rules and 74 Interior rules in the final stage, according to the same list, slightly higher than the EPA and Interior had planned for the fall. “If they meet their schedule, virtually every big ticket item will be across the finish line,” says Harvard University’s Joseph Goffman, who was a senior clean air attorney under the Obama EPA... “If that happens, if there ever is a Democratic administration coming in that has any kind of ambitious regulatory agenda,” Goffman says, “they’re going to have to overcome whatever of those restrictive legal interpretations that were upheld by the courts.”

The Trump administration is rolling back major environmental protections that require the US government to comprehensively analyze how proposed projects like pipelines and highways affect surrounding communities. Trump announced the changes on Wednesday afternoon from a UPS airport hub in Atlanta, where he backed the widening of commercial truck lanes on Interstate Highway 75. The White House said projects like the Atlanta expansion would have taken seven years to permit and now should take less than two years. The White House Council on Environmental Quality finalized the changes to the regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa), which the Republican president Richard Nixon signed into law in 1970. The new rules reduce the number of projects subject to review, narrow the scope of reviews and exclude effects related to climate change from being considered significant...Less than 1% of projects funded or permitted by federal agencies require full environmental impact statements under the law. But those that do are significant. Before Nepa, “you could wake up one day and see half your neighborhood bulldozed,” said Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney for the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard. In 1956, the federal government demolished hundreds of houses in an African American neighborhood in St Paul, Minnesota, to make room for Interstate 94. “We’ve spent so much time talking about the Trump administration’s ‘rollbacks’, and most of that has been focused on how the Trump administration has sought to undo regulations that were put in place under the Obama administration … but this one is really significant because these regulations have been in place since 1978 and only small changes have been made over the years,” McCoy said. “It shows how far the Trump administration is willing to go and how emboldened they feel three and a half years in.”

People start lining up as early as 6 a.m. these days outside an emergency food pantry in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. Theresa Gilbert, a 61-year-old in-home care giver waiting in line on a recent scorching-hot day, said money has been tight since March, when she caught a cold on the job and the agency she works for sent her home. She hasn’t worked since, and the food she gets here helps make ends meet. “Whatever I have, I make it do,” Ms. Gilbert said. Demand for the free vegetables, milk and canned goods on offer here has surged since the coronavirus pandemic torpedoed the U.S. economy, closing businesses and thrusting millions out of work...Hunger-relief organization Feeding America, a nationwide network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs, estimates the pandemic could push an additional 17 million people into what it calls food insecurity this year. More than 82% of U.S. food banks are serving more people than they were last year, with an average increase of 50%, according to a June survey by the group. “The pandemic is putting pressure on a system that was already struggling to make sure all the food we are producing finds its way to people,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.

How far has the diplomatic relationship between the United States and China sunk? It’s gotten to the point where China watchers are increasingly invoking a fuzzy but extreme concept: “decoupling.” In its purest form, the term refers to a halt in the flows of information, money, ideas, and people between the world’s two powers. And there’s plenty of evidence the two countries are headed in that direction...But how realistic is a pure decoupling – and what does decoupling, in any form, mean for our collective future? To help answer this question, I gathered a group of China experts with backgrounds in finance, trade, government and technology...Joining me for the virtual discussion...[is] Mark Wu, Vice Dean and professor of international trade at Harvard Law School... "When we use the term decoupling, we have to think of it as a spectrum. There are a range of options and it will differ depending on which sector. What's the nature of that company? It will also differ based on where that company earns its revenue globally. One possibility is definitely the zero-sum choice that Samm alluded to. But for other companies, this is a question about simply not putting all your eggs in one basket. So you've seen some companies depend overwhelmingly on either Chinese or American suppliers. And now [they are] thinking, we better have other sources in case unexpected developments happen. Then there is another alternative, which is to say nothing's going to change about how we operate currently, but we may have to change our future plans. Chinese companies right now who operate with a 'China for China' type of strategy may now be thinking about going towards a 'China for the world' strategy."

An article by Noah Feldman: The blockbuster Supreme Court term that just ended was a (nearly) unmitigated disaster for movement conservatives. Chief Justice John Roberts declined to overturn precedent on abortion rights. Conservative activist Justice Neil Gorsuch showed he would join the court’s liberals when the statutory text tells him to. The natural question then is, what’s next? What are the implications for the future of the court? The short answer is that the court’s future direction is in flux like no other time in recent memory. And what happens next will be determined by the 2020 election and the justices’ health. The first crucial point here is that, had Roberts and Gorsuch not crossed the court’s ideological lines in the most high-profile cases of the term, we would be looking at an extremely conservative court for the foreseeable future, regardless of the outcome of the November vote. The court has five conservative justices who — until this term — seemed capable of acting as an unassailable voting bloc for the indefinite future. (The oldest, Justice Clarence Thomas, is only 72.) This bloc was formed after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate blocked a confirmation vote on Judge Merrick Garland during the Obama administration, allowing a newly elected President Donald Trump to appoint Gorsuch. The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing voter who repeatedly delivered liberal-friendly results on issues like gay rights, abortion, and Guantánamo, then allowed Trump to appoint Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who is (so far) a much more reliable conservative. This conservative majority was the first on the court in nearly a century, and conservative activists anticipated that it would overturn Roe v. Wade and hold the line on cultural issues like transgender rights.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Jennifer Bradley, the Founding Director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute, discusses how the coronavirus has changed cities, in some ways for the better. Plus, in his Playback column, Noah gives his take on the Supreme Court's decision on Trump's tax records.

President Donald Trump is expected to announce his final plans to expedite permitting for major infrastructure like oil pipelines and road expansions in Atlanta on Wednesday, a move that environmentalists say will bypass public input. The proposal to update how the 50-year old bedrock National Environmental Protection Act (here) (NEPA) is implemented is part of Trump’s broader campaign to cut environmental regulation to boost industry and fast-track projects that often take years to complete - an effort that has been blocked or slowed down by courts...The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) proposed the changes to NEPA in January, kicking off a public comment period. Officials had called the proposal “the most significant deregulatory proposal” of the Trump administration. Just last week (here), a federal judge ordered the Dakota Access pipeline to shut down because the Army Corps of Engineers had failed to do an adequate NEPA impact study and the Supreme Court blocked construction of the Keystone XL line from Canada pending a deeper environmental review. The CEQ received over 1 million comments after the January proposal, many of which opposed the changes and offered evidence that they could have “harmful results,” said Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney for the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. This could make the rule vulnerable in lawsuits, she said. “CEQ will need to show that it grappled with these adverse comments and considered all of the important aspects of making these changes, otherwise aspects of the regulations could be ruled arbitrary and capricious,” she said.

Brandi Collins-Dexter is the senior campaign director at the advocacy organization Color of Change and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Here, she speaks with Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic and Evelyn Douek about her new report with the Shorenstein Center, “Canaries in the Coal Mine: COVID-19 Misinformation and Black Communities,” which follows the emergence and dissemination of coronavirus-related mis- and disinformation among Black social media users in the United States. They also discuss Color of Change’s role in the #StopHateForProfit Facebook ad boycott.

Since February of last year, tens of thousands of patients hospitalized at one of Minnesota’s largest health systems have had their discharge planning decisions informed with help from an artificial intelligence model. But few if any of those patients has any idea about the AI involved in their care. That’s because frontline clinicians at M Health Fairview generally don’t mention the AI whirring behind the scenes in their conversations with patients. At a growing number of prominent hospitals and clinics around the country, clinicians are turning to AI-powered decision support tools...Hospitals and clinicians “are operating under the assumption that you do not disclose, and that’s not really something that has been defended or really thought about,” Harvard Law School professor Glenn Cohen said. Cohen is the author of one of only a few articles examining the issue, which has received surprisingly scant attention in the medical literature even as research about AI and machine learning proliferates...Harvard’s Cohen said he wants to see hospital systems, clinicians, and AI manufacturers come together for a thoughtful discussion around whether they should be disclosing the use of these tools to patients — “and if we’re not doing that, then the question is why aren’t we telling them about this when we tell them about a lot of other things,” he said. Cohen said he worries that uptake and trust in AI and machine learning could plummet if patients “were to find out, after the fact, that there’s a rash of this being used without anyone ever telling them.” “That’s a scary thing,” he said, “if you think this is the way the future is going to go.”

One area of significant contention in the state senate's recently passed police reform bill was whether to limit "qualified immunity,"a legal doctrine that protects police and other public employees from lawsuits. Qualified immunity has been both a lightning rod in local and national police reform debates, and a source of confusion about what it actually entails. We turn to Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge, WBUR legal analyst and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, on what qualified immunity is, and why many law enforcement officials are trying to hold on to it.

An article by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever: What if Sundar Pichai had been deported while studying at Stanford University: Would he still have become the CEO of Alphabet? Today, if there are any future Sundar Pichais at Stanford or elsewhere, they are likely packing their bags after the U.S. federal government passed a draconian rule mandating that all foreign students unable to attend classes in person must leave the United States. Eight years ago, we wrote a book about how the U.S.’s backward immigration policies were harming the country and stifling innovation. In “The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent,” we presented copious data detailing how immigrants had made outsized contributions to the U.S. economy in general and to the entrepreneurial and innovation economy in particular. We canvassed dozens of entrepreneurs who were either contemplating leaving the United States or had already left due to visa issues and other challenges caused by an immigration system that had become byzantine, capricious and myopic. To our minds, it could not possibly get worse. But we were wrong. First, the U.S. moved to freeze and possibly end the H-1B worker-visa program. We agree that the program’s limitations caused many problems; but millions of productive U.S. citizens came in via the H-1B, including many from the subcontinent. Then, on July 6, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that foreign students at U.S. universities must take classes in person for the coming school year or leave the country. Inflicting such a policy on those who would attend classes in person they could safely do so and who have been doing their utmost to advance their education in accordance with current health guidelines not only is unreasonable, wasteful and tyrannical. But, more than this, it is also economically damaging to the United States, and to the rest of the world. If allowed to go through, it could cause lasting damage to global innovation.

All eyes in the international tax world are focused on the last weeks of 2020, when governments are expecting a mad dash of dealmaking over the digital tax conundrum, which has eluded a multilateral solution for years.Officials at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is spearheading the negotiations, are hoping the U.S. presidential election, regardless of its outcome, could break a stalemate and allow the U.S. more leeway to participate in a consensus solution. But observers, including those who have participated in past OECD tax efforts, question whether the election, or even a change in administration, would be enough to bridge the gap between the U.S. and Europe before a potential trade war begins. "The biggest thing to expect is conflict," said Daniel Bunn, vice president of global projects at the Tax Foundation, an economic think tank based in Washington, D.C. Robert Stack, a managing director at Deloitte Tax LLP and the former Treasury deputy assistant secretary for international tax affairs, noted that whoever is president in 2021, the changeover between terms could make it difficult for the U.S. to sign off on any agreement. New personnel for former Vice President Joe Biden, if he wins the presidency, won't come in until January, while Mnuchin and other top Treasury officials may not stay through a second term of the Trump administration. Stack spoke during a webinar hosted by the Tax Foundation on July 1...Stephen Shay, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former Treasury official during the Clinton administration, told Law360 that a change in administration could put off any agreement on the most contentious issues for months. Key officials at Treasury — the political appointees who would need to sign off on an agreement — don't understand these tax issues "except at the very highest level," he noted. "It is likely well into 2021 before you get meaningful U.S. engagement and sign off," Shay said. "Biden may be much better organized than his predecessors, but that is an optimistic take."

The American Risk and Insurance Association has announced that “Testing for Adverse Selection in Insurance Markets,” a study co-authored by Harvard Law School Professor Alma Cohen and Peter Siegelman, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, is the recipient of its 2020 Robert I. Mehr Award. The award—granted each year to a study published ten years earlier in the Association’s Journal of Risk and Insurance (JRI)—recognizes studies that have “best stood the test of time” in the decade since publication. Cohen’s research has been cited more than 400 times since it was published in February 2010. The study—which evaluates the empirical literature on adverse selection in insurance markets—was selected by the 2020 editorial board of the JRI for this year’s Mehr Award. In 2011, the study also won the association’s Robert C. Witt Award for the best article published in the JRI during the preceding year. Thus, the article was selected as the best article published in 2010 in JRI both from a one-year and a ten-year perspective by the editors of the JRI serving at each point in time. The authors focus on empirical work that seeks to test the basic coverage–risk prediction of adverse selection theory—that is, that policyholders who purchase more insurance coverage tend to be riskier. They argue that the analysis of this body of work indicates that the existence of such correlation varies across insurance markets and pools of insurance policies, further exploring  reasons why a coverage–risk correlation may not be found in some pools of insurance policies. The article provides a framework for predicting and understanding when the risk of policyholders and the insurance coverage they purchase are associated. It then evaluates based on this framework the body of empirical evidence on the subject.

For the past several weeks, Americans have been greeted daily with agonizing news about the coronavirus pandemic. Not simply from the anguish of the country’s spiraling cases and death tolls, but the incompetence of much of its political culture, too: Governors who flip-flop on mask-wearing, local officials who cave to pressure on public health measures, and a President who long ago stopped attending his pandemic meetings in favor of heaping abuse on his own public health agencies. But some thinkers are exploring how the country could still craft an effective pandemic policy, even in the absence of a federal one. Cass Sunstein is one of those thinkers, a longtime professor at Harvard Law School who has written extensively on the exploding area of cognitive science known as behavioral economics, and its implications for government policy. In 2008, Sunstein published the book “Nudge” along with co-author Richard Thaler, another leading scholar in behavioral economics. Together, Sunstein and Thaler envisioned a marriage of cognitive science and policy at various levels of American government that they dubbed “libertarian paternalism.” To take an example: If the cognitive bias toward “loss aversion” dictates that humans react less often to the prospect of reward than they do to the prospect of losing something they already have, such an insight could be applied to myriad aspects of policy—from “opt-out” schemes for organ donation at the DMV, to the Army’s interactions with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Fittingly, Sunstein ended up doing exactly that, serving in the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012, where he sought out creative applications of behavioral economics to the White House policy portfolio. Lately, Sunstein has been advising foreign governments and other organizations on their own behavioral framework for addressing the pandemic, too. In an interview edited for length and clarity, Sunstein tells Washingtonian why pandemics are particularly suited to manipulating human biases, why New Zealand has tapped the cognitive power of fun, and what Texas might be able to teach the country after all.

An article by Noah Feldman: The U.S. Supreme Court term that ended last week was a blockbuster, with landmark decisions on abortion, LGBTQ rights, presidential power, immigration, religious liberty and American Indian law. No term in almost two decades comes close to having issued so many crucial decisions —with long-term consequences for millions of Americans. The drama of the term was enhanced by what you might think of as coming-out events for two justices: chosen transformations that change the way each presents to the world. Chief Justice John Roberts revealed himself to be (or to have become) a genuine, judicial restraint Burkean conservative who is prepared to uphold liberal precedents and to keep the Trump administration subordinate to the rule of law. He surprised liberals and horrified movement conservatives who had hoped he would lead or at least participate in sweeping away liberal precedents they hate. And Justice Neil Gorsuch revealed himself as so highly principled in his commitment to textualist statutory interpretation that he will carry its logic to conclusions that liberals love and conservatives hate. His bid to become the intellectual leader of the conservative wing of the court is going to have a different character than court watchers like me had anticipated. Together, these coming-out events should remind us that the justices aren’t robots, driven by partisan or ideological agendas. They are complex human beings, whose decisions are shaped by jurisprudence, values, beliefs, ideas, emotions and strategies. That’s why they have the capacity to surprise us. Roberts is now the most influential chief justice since the great John Marshall, who held the job from 1801 to 1835.

An article by Sabrineh Ardalan: Asylum lawyers have long grappled with a tension inherent in refugee law – how to win protection for individual clients without reinforcing victim narratives and negative stereotypes about other cultures and countries. Last month, the Trump administration seized upon this tension in a new 161-page proposal that would rewrite the refugee definition and cut off most asylum seekers from protection. Specifically, the rule would make ‘evidence based on stereotypes’ inadmissible – on its face an unobjectionable proposal. Indeed, at a time when we are all called upon to challenge our assumptions, reflect on our biases, and address the ways in which our laws and legal practice reinforce systemic racism, the provision would appear to be both timely and necessary. Yet, because of the corroborating evidence so often required to establish asylum eligibility, the provision would make it difficult, if not impossible, for many to obtain protection. The rule’s wide-ranging provisions include measures to fast-track deportations of asylum seekers, reject asylum applications as frivolous without ever affording asylum seekers a day in court, ratchet up the type of harm required to demonstrate eligibility for protection, and make it extraordinarily difficult to show a connection between the harm suffered or feared and a protected ground,[1] as the refugee definition requires. It would be too much to expect that a timely provision would be responsive to refugees’ plight in the current moment, instead of another cruel attack on asylum.

President Trump has said he learned lessons from President Richard M. Nixon’s fall from grace, but in using the power of his office to keep his friend and adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. out of prison he has now crossed a line that even Mr. Nixon in the depths of Watergate dared not cross. For months, senior advisers warned Mr. Trump that it would be politically self-destructive if not ethically inappropriate to grant clemency to Mr. Stone, who was convicted of lying to protect the president. Even Attorney General William P. Barr, who had already overruled career prosecutors to reduce Mr. Stone’s sentence, argued against commutation in recent weeks, officials said. But in casting aside their counsel on Friday, Mr. Trump indulged his own sense of grievance over precedent to reward an ally who kept silent. Once again, he challenged convention by intervening in the justice system undermining investigators looking into him and his associates, just days after the Supreme Court ruled that he went too far in claiming “absolute immunity” in two other inquiries...Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, said those cases could be seen as parallels to Mr. Stone’s commutation but pointed to the larger pattern under Mr. Trump. In 31 of his 36 pardons or commutations, he noted, Mr. Trump advanced his political goals or benefited someone with a personal connection, whose case had been brought to his attention by television or was someone he admired for their celebrity. “This has happened before in a way,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “But there has been nothing like Trump from a systematic perspective.”

Moderna Inc. (NASDAQ:MRNA) is one of the biotech companies that are developing COVID-19 vaccines, and if the company wins, it could earn billions in stock appreciation and sales. However, if it doesn’t succeed, its value could decline. For now, the CEO of Moderna, Stephane Bancel is earning millions of dollars each month through the sales of stock, which has almost tripled in value on COVID-19 vaccine development progress. Since January to June 26, 2020, Bancel’s share sales, which include those held under his children’s trust and companies, have been around $21 million.  Also, Moderna Chief Medical Officer, Tal Zaks, sold most of his available shares in the company since January, earning almost $35 million. Bancel has set a schedule of the sale of his shares under the 10b5-1 plan before the COVID-19 crisis. These kind of stock-sale plans are meant to prevent insider trading from company executives. The plans prevent advance selling from executives who might have knowledge about bad news on the way or putting off selling of stock until when there is a positive announcement. On March 13, 2020, Zaks put in place a new plan which has seen him cash on almost all his interest. This was days before the biotech company announced the first-in-human dosing of its COVID-19 vaccine setting the stock on a 24% surge. Executive compensation experts indicated that these lucrative liquidations are a reflection of the unusual incentives for company executives to highlight development milestones for products that aren’t sold or approved. They stated that an optimistic company statement on COVID-19 vaccines can result in overpaying for stock or create false optimism among health officials and the public. Harvard Law School professor Jesse Fried stated that sales give the executives a rare opportunity to earn big on short-lived market optimism. Fried added that for company execs, this could be chance of profiting should the vaccine fail to work. Normally company executives have discretion of information, and as a result, they have the motivation to keep share prices up.