Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be Ohio's governor. His plan for getting there? Spend millions on TV ads blaming his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, for everything Ohioans didn't like about the state's COVID response.

There's just one problem. According to a cleveland.com fact check by reporter Jeremy Pelzer, the ads overstate what Acton actually did. And they leave out something big: Ramaswamy's own COVID record — the one he later paid to scrub from the internet.

What the ads claim

In March, Ramaswamy's campaign kicked off a $10 million TV ad campaign. The first ad claims Acton "called off Ohio's election at the last minute, defying a judge's orders and abusing her power."

A pro-Ramaswamy super PAC called V-PAC piled on last month with a $500,000-plus ad campaign of its own, painting Acton as the liberal who shut down Ohio's schools and businesses. A second V-PAC ad calls her the "COVID lockdown doctor."

Scary stuff. Now here's what actually happened.

Who really called off the 2020 primary

It's true that Acton, as state health director, signed the order that closed polling places on March 16, 2020 — the night before Ohio's primary. But she didn't make that call.

The decision to postpone the primary was made by Ohio's top Republican officials: Governor Mike DeWine, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, then-Lt. Governor Jon Husted, and then-Attorney General Dave Yost. NPR reported it in real time: after a judge refused to delay the election, it was DeWine who announced that Acton would order the polls closed as a health emergency. CBS News's headline that night said it plainly: "Ohio governor orders polling locations close."

DeWine himself told WCMH-TV that he ordered Acton to sign the directive, saying he believed people would die if he didn't act. And he has spent years telling anyone who will listen that the COVID decisions were his. "The buck stops with me," he told reporters last December.

So the ad blames Acton for a decision that four Republican statewide officials — including the sitting Republican governor — say they made. That's not a gray area. That's a false attack.

What the ads don't mention: Ramaswamy's own COVID activism

Here's where it gets rich. While the ads paint Acton as the villain of the pandemic, Ramaswamy was no COVID bystander. The cleveland.com report lays out his record:

• Ramaswamy wrote in a 2021 op-ed that he served as an informal COVID adviser to Republican Jon Husted in 2020 — the same Husted who helped make the call to postpone the primary.
• In an April 2020 podcast, Ramaswamy called for mandatory antibody testing and a national registry to track who had immunity, so those people could go back to normal life.
• His biotech company, Roivant Sciences, was developing a COVID-19 treatment at the time — and spent $70,000 lobbying the federal government on COVID drug issues in 2020 and early 2021.
• A Roivant subsidiary worked to build a national registry of coronavirus patients by pooling medical records, as the Wall Street Journal reported in March 2020.

Think about that. Ramaswamy's ads attack Acton for government overreach during COVID — while he was pitching mandatory testing and a national tracking registry, and his company was lobbying Washington on COVID drugs.

He didn't just omit his record. He paid to erase it.

This is the part Ohio voters really need to know. Ramaswamy's COVID history isn't just missing from his ads — he actively worked to hide it.

In 2023, a Wikipedia editor said Ramaswamy paid him to delete references to Ramaswamy's service on Ohio's COVID-19 Response Team from his Wikipedia page. That happened right as Ramaswamy was rebranding himself as a COVID vaccine skeptic for his presidential run.

When the Associated Press asked him about all this in May, Ramaswamy said his coronavirus position was "nuanced."

Nuanced. He advised a Republican official on COVID policy, pushed a national immunity registry, ran a company lobbying on COVID drugs — then paid to scrub it, and now runs ads blasting his opponent over the same pandemic response.

The pattern

This isn't the first time Ramaswamy has said one thing in public while the record showed another. When he denied his own 9/11 comments, the outlet released the audio proving he was quoted accurately. He celebrated Juneteenth on video, then called it a "useless" holiday two months later.

Now he's asking Ohioans to trust his version of COVID history — a version the state's own Republican governor contradicts, and one that leaves his own role on the cutting-room floor.

Neither Ramaswamy's campaign nor V-PAC responded to cleveland.com's requests for comment. That silence says plenty.

Ohio deserves a governor who tells the truth about the past — especially his own.

Source

Read the full fact check at cleveland.com: What pro-Vivek Ramaswamy attack ads against Amy Acton get wrong by Jeremy Pelzer.