What happened
Vaccine-specialist Novavax (NVAX -1.63%) wasn't inoculated against the stock market's bears on Tuesday. Investors traded the company's shares down by 4.6% on a generally good day for the market. This occurred despite Novavax announcing the hiring or promotion of several well-qualified executives.
So what
After market hours on Monday, Novavax announced it had filled one newly created executive position and appointed two people to key roles in the company. The new job role is that of the busy-sounding senior vice president, chief safety officer, and head of global vaccine safety.
Image source: Getty Images.
This is being filled by Denny Kim, who comes to Novavax from Johnson & Johnson's Janssen subsidiary. Kim had been at the Johnson & Johnson unit since the start of 2019. Among other experiences, he did a five-plus year stint at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in a variety of executive-level jobs.
Meanwhile, Novavax has appointed Raburn Mallory as senior vice president and head of clinical development. Mallory comes to the company from pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, where he served for less than a year as its vice president of clinical development, infectious diseases, and vaccines.
Finally, Novavax said that it has promoted Marco Cacciuttolo to senior vice president of process and analytical development. Prior to that, Cacciuttolo was a vice president at the company, which he joined in 2020.
Now what
The key personnel move here seems to be Kim's appointment. In its press release, Novavax said that his "leadership and COVID-19 vaccine experience uniquely equip him to lead a best-in-class safety and pharmacovigilance function at Novavax."
That's heartening, but perhaps this illustrates a slightly uncomfortable fact about the company: After months of being in the public eye thanks to its NVX-CoV2373 coronavirus vaccine candidate, it still hasn't submitted it for Emergency Use Authorization to the Food and Drug Administration.
This apparently is going to happen by the end of this year, but investors might be annoyed that the latest news is about personnel, not about that product.
