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Fuad El-Hibri (b. March 2, 1958, Hildesheim, Germany – d. April 23, 2022, Potomac, Maryland) was a German-American businessman and philanthropist, and founder of Emergent BioSolutions.
Fuad El-Hibri was born in Hildesheim, Germany. He spent his childhood equally in Europe and the Middle East before coming to the United States to get an economics degree from Stanford and an MBA from Yale.
El-Hibri worked most of his career in the telecommunications industry. Between graduate school and working for BioPort and Emergent, he worked abroad, in countries including Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and El Salvador.
El-Hibri served as president of Digicel from August 2000 to February 2005. He served as the president of East West Resources Corporation from September 1990 to January 2004.
He was a member of the senior management team of Speywood, LTD. in the United Kingdom and organized and directed the management buyout of Porton Products Ltd. El-Hibri reorganized Porton. He was advisor to the senior management team involved in the oversight of Porton operations; served as a senior associate and resident project manager at Booz Allen Hamilton, and was a manager of Citicorp in New York City (Mergers and Acquisitions), and in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (Operations and Credit).
Beginning in June 1990, El-Hibri was chairman of East West Resources Corporation, a venture capital and financial consulting firm. He served as the chairman of Digicel Holdings from August 2000 to October 2006. He served as executive chairman of the board of Emergent BioDefense Operations Lansing Inc.
El-Hibri was on the Emergent BioSolutions board of directors. He was both the board chairman and the chief executive officer (CEO) of the company from 2004 to 2012. He was the board chairman and CEO of BioPort Corporation from 1998 to 2004. Emergent acquired BioPort in 2004.
El-Hibri's main role as the chairman of Emergent was to develop corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions.
After the 2001 anthrax attacks, some conspiracy theorists posted Internet websites that tried to imply that El-Hibri was connected to Osama Bin Laden and was connected to the anthrax attacks. USA Today interviewed El-Hibri in 2004 for an article about Muslim CEOs of companies helping to fight terrorism, and wrote, "El-Hibri calls the Web sites annoying and jokes that he's lucky to be in the vaccination business so that he can inoculate himself from the pain of accusers who can't be confronted."
One of the Yale University School of Management donor-funded awards, the El-Hibri Award provides first year School of Management students with internship program funding over the summer, seed capital for new businesses for second-year men and women and special funding for those going into early-stage start-up ventures. A group of 14 Yale alumni - entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors - choose the students who receive the awards, which total $100,000.
El-Hibri served on the boards of the United States Chamber of Commerce, International Biomedical Research Alliance, and National Health Museum. He also served on the advisory boards of the Heifetz International Music Institute and Yale Healthcare Conference.
El-Hibri's mother is a German Catholic, and his father is a Lebanese businessman. As a child, he lived in Germany and Lebanon. He became a United States citizen in 1999. He died on April 23, 2022 at Potomac, Maryland from pancreatic cancer.
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Fuad El-Hibri, Who Led a Troubled Vaccine Maker, Dies at 64
His company, Emergent BioSolutions, won a lucrative contract to produce Covid vaccines but then had to throw out millions of contaminated doses.
Fuad El-Hibri, whose biotech company won billions of dollars in government contracts to manufacture a vaccine against anthrax but stumbled in 2021 when, having been hired to produce Covid vaccines, it had to throw out the equivalent of 75 million contaminated doses, died on April 23 at his home in Potomac, Md. He was 64.
His death was announced in a statement by his family. A representative for the family said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Mr. El-Hibri’s Maryland-based company, Emergent BioSolutions, was an obscure player in the world of government contracting, but an influential one: It deployed extensive lobbying efforts and campaign contributions to secure a near-monopoly on the production of an anthrax vaccine in the early 2000s. The contract accounted for nearly half the budget for the Strategic National Stockpile, a medical reserve held in case of crises like a bioweapons attack or a pandemic.
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Though the relationship occasionally drew scrutiny — including an extensive investigation by The New York Times in March 2021 — it also made Mr. El-Hibri’s company a seemingly obvious choice to produce the Covid vaccines developed by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. Emergent received a $628 million contract from the federal government in 2020.
But in fact, Emergent was not at all ready for that imposing task. Though it was already part of a government program to scale up vaccine production rapidly in an emergency, it had yet to demonstrate such a capacity when it began to churn out Covid vaccines in early 2021.
In March of that year, the company announced that because of worker error, the equivalent of some 15 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been contaminated and had to be discarded. Production nationwide shut down temporarily, creating a political headache for the Biden administration, which had been hoping for a smooth rollout to tamp down vaccine hesitancy.
Congress launched an investigation, and in May Mr. El-Hibri, who was Emergent’s executive chairman, and Robert G. Kramer, the company’s chief executive, testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus.
While both men defended the company and cited the unprecedented challenge their task presented, Mr. El-Hibri was contrite about its failures.
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“The cross-contamination incident is unacceptable,” he said, “period.”
About 60 million additional doses were found to be contaminated in June.
Fuad El-Hibri was born on March 2, 1958, in Hildesheim, Germany, the son of Elizabeth (Trunk) El-Hibri, a homemaker, and Ibrahim El-Hibri, an engineer and entrepreneur. He grew up in Lebanon and Germany and graduated from Stanford University in 1980 with a degree in economics. He received a master’s degree in public and private management from the Yale School of Management in 1982.
Mr. El-Hibri began his career with Citicorp in Saudi Arabia and later worked for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in Indonesia. After returning to the United States, he started a business that helped national telecom companies upgrade their networks in Russia, Venezuela and El Salvador.
In the 1990s, he advised the Saudi Arabian government on its efforts to buy millions of doses of an anthrax vaccine. That experience seeded the idea for what became Emergent BioSolutions.
He co-founded the company, originally called BioPort, in 1998. He and his partners, including William J. Crowe, a former admiral, soon won a bid to buy a disused government laboratory in Lansing, Mich., and upgrade it to produce anthrax vaccines for the U.S. military.
The company changed its name to Emergent BioSolutions in 2004. It went public in 2006.
Though it mostly focused on just one product and one customer (it also produced Narcan, used to treat opioid overdoses), Emergent grew rich under Mr. El-Hibri’s leadership, reporting $1.5 billion in revenue in 2020.
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As The Times’s investigation found, the company’s financial success was in part attributable to its aggressive efforts to win a large part of the strategic stockpile’s budget. Many experts consider it an outsize chunk, given the relatively low risk of a widespread anthrax attack and the option to use cheap antibiotics for many cases.
“Purchases are supposed to be based on careful assessments by government officials of how best to save lives,” the investigation found, “but many have also been influenced by Emergent’s bottom line.”
Mr. El-Hibri and his wife were prolific campaign donors; they gave nearly $1 million between 2018 and 2021, mostly to Republican candidates. An employee political action committee at Emergent gave $1.4 million more over the same period.
Those connections proved crucial in the fall of 2020, when Emergent was one of two facilities contracted to produce Covid vaccines. Shortly afterward, Mr. El-Hibri cashed out $42 million in shares and stock options.
After the production debacle at Emergent became public, the company faced an uprising by shareholders, including a lawsuit accusing it of committing securities fraud by falsely claiming it was ready to produce the vaccine in order to boost the value of its stock.
Mr. El-Hibri stepped down as chairman of Emergent BioSolutions on April 1.
He is survived by his wife, Nancy (Grunenwald) El-Hibri; his mother; his brother, Samir; his sister, Yasmin El-Hibri Gibellini; his daughters, Faiza and Yusra El-Hibri; his son, Karim; and three grandchildren.
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