Company: DVAX
Filing Date: 2025-05-27
Form Type: DFAN14A
Source: 0001193125-25-125960
Chunk: 1

Company: DYNAVAX TECHNOLOGIES CORP
Filing Date: 2025-05-27
Form: DFAN14A
Chunk 1
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” or the “Company”), with ownership of approximately 14.82% of the Company’s outstanding shares, today issued the following statement in response to a report issued by Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (“ISS”) regarding the election of directors to the Company’s Board of Directors (the “Board”) at the 2025 Annual Meeting of Stockholders (the “Annual Meeting”). “We firmly believe ISS reached the wrong conclusion by failing to recommend any amount of change in the Dynavax boardroom. The report reads as a rushed and incomplete assessment: not only does it mistakenly use the name of a completely different company at one point, but it also contains numerous factual errors and does not accurately capture key events. Critical issues are completely ignored, including Heplisav’s flattening market share growth, management missing performance targets set by the Board, and a shareholder-unfriendly approach to capital allocation. ISS fails to hold the Board to account even for issues it acknowledges in its report, such as the need for improved corporate governance. Above all else, we are disappointed that ISS readily adopted the Company’s view that a significant long-term shareholder would add no value to the Board. We call shareholders’ attention to the following points:

| • |     | Recent failures demand a strategic pivot. Heplisav’s market share of 44% exiting 2024 failed to                                                                                                                                   
 achieve the target of 47% set by the Board; similarly, annual sales also failed to achieve the $275 million goal.1 This year is hardly off to a better start, with market share of only 43% for                                   
 the first quarter of 2025. Yet Dynavax refuses to acknowledge this is a problem, with management stating just earlier this month that they were “very comfortable” with and “very proud” of this result and noted the strategy is 
 going “exactly how we had planned.”2 It is entirely unclear why ISS would completely ignore key performance metrics set by the Board as part of their evaluation, choosing instead                                                
 to simply rubber stamp the Company’s arguments.                                                                                                                                                                                   |

| • |     | ISS acknowledges that the Company has “a number of suboptimal corporate governance provisions”3 yet fails to take Dynavax to task for its half-hearted attempts to address these issues. ISS ignores the most glaring governance defect, which is the imbalanced classes of directors (with the 
 classes split three, two and four) and with the classified Board structure not ending until 2028. Further, the addition of two new directors with no vaccine