Vivek Ramaswamy's company spent $70K lobbying Washington on Covid-19 drugs. He's now campaigning against 'Covid ideology.'

A biotech company founded by Vivek Ramaswamy paid lobbyists more than $70,000 in 2020 and 2021 to press federal officials — including the White House, the National Institutes of Health and Congress — on the development and approval of Covid-19 drugs, according to federal lobbying disclosures reviewed by TiffinOhio.net. The previously unreported filings were first surfaced Wednesday by Politico’s Influence newsletter.

The records land in the middle of a governor’s race that Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee, has built largely around attacking Democrat Amy Acton’s record leading the Ohio Department of Health during the first year of the pandemic. Ramaswamy’s campaign and Roivant Sciences, the company he founded, did not respond to Politico’s requests for comment.

What the filings show

Two disclosures filed with the U.S. Senate account for the spending. In a first-quarter 2021 report, the law and lobbying firm Baker Donelson disclosed $50,000 in income from Roivant Sciences for lobbying the Executive Office of the President and the National Institutes of Health on “issues related to COVID-19 therapy development and approval.”

A year earlier, the Tiber Creek Group reported $20,000 from Roivant in a second-quarter 2020 filing covering lobbying of the U.S. House and Senate on the “development of therapeutics for COVID-19 and other respiratory conditions.”

Ramaswamy founded Roivant in 2014 and ran the company throughout 2020. He stepped down from its board in early 2023, shortly before launching his presidential campaign.

The candidate vs. the record

On the trail, Ramaswamy has branded Acton “Dr. Lockdown,” accused her of spreading “Covid ideology” and said her role in Ohio’s pandemic response “disqualifies her” from the governor’s office. Acton’s campaign told Politico that rhetoric is contradicted by what Ramaswamy was doing as a biotech executive at the very same time.

Ramaswamy’s position has not been uniformly anti-intervention, and the lobbying is consistent with at least part of his stated 2020 view: in a May 2020 Fox News appearance, he argued that developing Covid-19 therapeutics could allow the country to take a more measured approach than blanket restrictions. The Associated Press has reported that Ramaswamy supported vaccines during the pandemic, received one himself and encouraged mask-wearing, while saying he never backed government mandates for either.

But the public record shows his 2020 footprint went well beyond drug development. Ramaswamy advised Ohio’s own Covid-19 response that year, working with then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted — by his own account in a 2021 op-ed — and backed measures even the DeWine administration considered overreach, including mandatory antibody testing and stay-at-home orders for Ohioans without immunity, as TiffinOhio.net reported Wednesday. Gov. Mike DeWine, for his part, has said the pandemic closure decisions Ramaswamy attacks were his own, not Acton’s.

A Covid record under growing scrutiny

The lobbying disclosures add to a string of pandemic-era episodes that have followed Ramaswamy into the race. The Associated Press reported in May that Datavant, a health-data company incubated under Roivant, pushed for a national Covid-19 registry that would have let the small share of Americans with natural immunity return to normal life while the rest of the population remained, in the proposal’s framing, “segregated” — as TiffinOhio.net previously reported.

This March, Genevant Sciences, a Roivant subsidiary, announced a $2.25 billion settlement with Moderna over the unauthorized use of Genevant’s and Arbutus Biopharma’s patented technology in Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines. The settlement came roughly 3 years after Ramaswamy left Roivant’s board.

And in 2023, Mediaite reported that Ramaswamy paid a Wikipedia editor who removed the reference to his service on Ohio’s Covid-19 Response Team from his page — at the candidate’s “explicit request,” according to the editor’s own disclosure notes — days before he announced his presidential run.

A Ramaswamy-aligned super PAC has meanwhile continued pressing the Covid attack on Acton; a TiffinOhio.net fact-check published Tuesday found one of its recent ads made false claims about her record.

Democrats pounce ahead of November

The Ohio Democratic Party amplified the lobbying report within a day. “Scam artist Vivek Ramaswamy has given Ohioans yet another reason to not believe a word he says,” party spokeswoman Katie Seewer said in a Thursday statement, pointing to the registry proposal, the Moderna settlement and the newly surfaced lobbying as evidence that Ramaswamy’s attacks on Acton conflict with his own conduct during the pandemic.

Ramaswamy faces Acton — who is attempting to become the first Democrat elected Ohio governor in more than 20 years — in the general election on Tuesday, Nov. 3.