Ohio can't afford Vivek Ramaswamy's scams

Vivek Ramaswamy wrote a whole book about scams. The 2021 bestseller that built his political brand, “Woke, Inc.,” carries the subtitle “Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.” So Ramaswamy knows the word well. Before Ohio voters hand him the keys to the governor’s office on November 3, it is worth asking how the man who made scam-spotting his calling card actually made his money — and what he is now asking Ohioans to forget.

The answers are not flattering.

The Alzheimer’s drug that made him rich — and wiped out everyone else

In December 2014, a company under Ramaswamy’s Roivant Sciences umbrella bought an experimental Alzheimer’s drug, intepirdine, from GlaxoSmithKline for just $5 million. GSK was done with it; the drug had already failed in earlier trials. Ramaswamy saw an opportunity that had nothing to do with curing anyone.

Six months later, before running a single new late-stage trial to completion, he took the drug’s parent company, Axovant, public. The 2015 IPO valued the company in the billions — a record for a biotech debut at the time — even though Axovant reported having only a handful of employees, two of them Ramaswamy’s own mother and brother. That year, Ramaswamy reported roughly $38 million in income, most of it capital gains.

Then reality arrived. In September 2017, intepirdine failed its late-stage trial, and Axovant’s stock dropped more than 70% in a single day. It never recovered. The company was eventually wound down. Ordinary investors who had bought the hype were left holding next to nothing.

Ramaswamy was not among them. He had structured his personal stake through the parent firm, Roivant, insulating himself from the wreckage at the subsidiary. Heads, he wins; tails, the retail investors lose.

A pattern, by his critics’ account

This is where I will be careful, because the harshest words here belong to other people, not to me. Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, reviewing Ramaswamy’s biotech career, told Fortune the fortune was built by “basically a version of pump and dump.” A 2023 Newsweek opinion column went further, calling him a fraud outright. No regulator ever charged Ramaswamy with a crime, and he has never been convicted of one. Those characterizations are opinion and accusation, not court findings, and readers deserve to know the difference.

What is not in dispute is how Ramaswamy himself frames it. He has called Axovant his “single greatest failure” and said he has no regrets about how it was run. When pressed on whether he profited from a venture that cost others their savings, his campaign at first denied he made money on the failure, then acknowledged he had sold shares — saying he was “forced to sell a tiny portion” in 2015 to bring in an outside investor.

So here is the argued judgment, and I will own it as mine: a business model that reliably enriches the founder whether or not the product works, while leaving small investors to absorb the downside, is a scam in every sense that matters to the people on the losing end — even when it is perfectly legal. Legality is the floor, not the standard Ohio should accept from its next governor.

He already told Ohio what he thinks of it

Ramaswamy is running on a promise to make Ohio more competitive and more prosperous. Ohioans should weigh that pitch against what he did with his own company.

Ramaswamy co-founded Strive Asset Management in Columbus in 2022, marketing it as an “anti-woke,” anti-ESG investment firm. It grew fast. Then, in late 2024 — months before he announced his run for governor — Strive moved its headquarters from Columbus to Dallas, taking roughly $1.7 billion in assets under management and most of its Columbus staff to Texas.

When a candidate’s own firm votes with its feet and leaves the state he now wants to lead, that is not a detail. That is a tell.

Amy Acton served a Republican governor — and he says so himself

Now to the attack at the center of Ramaswamy’s campaign. He and the Ohio Republican Party have spent months branding Amy Acton “Dr. Lockdown” and accusing her of spreading dangerous “COVID ideology.” Here is the fact that branding is built to make you forget: Acton ran the Ohio Department of Health under a Republican governor, Mike DeWine, and signed the orders DeWine asked her to sign.

DeWine has endorsed Ramaswamy. He has also defended Acton’s work — and he personally knocked down the campaign’s central attack on her. One Ramaswamy ad blamed Acton for suspending Ohio’s in-person primary voting in March 2020. DeWine told the Associated Press that was his own call, not Acton’s, after a judge declined to delay the election. PolitiFact rated the ad “Mostly False.” When the Republican who appointed your opponent and endorsed you says your headline attack is wrong, that is not a close call.

Ramaswamy helped run the response he now calls disqualifying

The deeper problem is that Ramaswamy was not a bystander to Ohio’s pandemic response. He was inside it.

In a 2021 op-ed, Ramaswamy wrote that, as CEO of Roivant, he “worked with the lieutenant governor as an adviser on COVID-19” during 2020. The lieutenant governor then was Republican Jon Husted — now a U.S. senator — who stood alongside DeWine and Acton at Ohio’s daily pandemic briefings.

His positions at the time were not the civil-libertarian stance he sells today. Ramaswamy supported vaccines and mask-wearing and was vaccinated himself. According to a 2020 recording and Associated Press reporting, he also backed mandatory testing and a national COVID-19 registry that would have sorted Americans by immunity status to decide who could return to normal life. Ramaswamy says he never supported government mandates and that his proposals were about restarting the economy. Fine — but that is an argument about which restrictions to impose, not whether to act at all. It is the same debate Acton was in, and he was in it with her.

It was also lucrative. A Roivant subsidiary, Genevant Sciences, announced a $2.25 billion settlement with Moderna over patents used in COVID-19 vaccines. The pandemic Ramaswamy now invokes to disqualify Acton was, for his own companies, extraordinarily profitable. TiffinOhio.net detailed that record in earlier reporting.

Then he tried to erase his part in it. Before his 2024 presidential run, Ramaswamy paid a Wikipedia editor to remove a reference to his service on Ohio’s “COVID-19 Response Team,” along with a mention of his Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship. He called it a correction and said the panel never met. The instinct is consistent across his whole career: take the upside, then scrub the receipt.

Ohio doesn’t have to be the next mark

Ramaswamy won the May 5 Republican primary and will face Acton, a physician and former state health director, on November 3. Acton spent the worst months of the pandemic at a podium next to a Republican governor, asking Ohioans to look out for one another — “don the mask, don your cape.” Ramaswamy spent that era, and the years around it, advising the same response and turning the pandemic into a payday, and now asks voters to believe he was on the other side of it the whole time.

None of this is hidden. It is in the SEC filings, the tax-record reporting, the relocation announcements, his own op-ed, and the governor’s own words. The record is the argument. Ohio can read it for itself — and it cannot afford to be sold one more time.