Rising Republican star downplays globalist ties
As GOP presidential front runners President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis battle for the Republican nomination, an unlikely contender has begun to draw attention.
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy pulled ahead of Vice President Mike Pence last week to come in third place, according to a Real Clear Politics poll. While holding at 5.4% and far behind Trump and DeSantis, Ramaswamy has nevertheless hit double digits in other polls and appears to be slowly closing in on the Florida governor.
But unlike many of his presidential competitors, Ramaswamy’s political record is less known — which may be to the candidate’s benefit.
It is unclear how Republican voters would react if they were to learn, for example, that as recently as last year Ramaswamy was touting mask mandates and physical distancing as effective. In a January 2022 article for the Wall Street Journal, Ramaswamy claimed that such mandates prevent hospitalizations and deaths but should be discontinued anyway because of the “antigenic drift”.
“We should end mask mandates and social distancing in most settings not because they don’t slow the spread—the usual argument against such measures—but because they probably do,” he wrote, arguing that greater exposure among the population would lead to more immunity against the virus.
“Will relaxing restrictions come at the cost of more hospitalizations and deaths as the next variant starts to spread? Perhaps, but it would reduce the risk of a worst-case scenario and greater loss of life in the long run,” Ramaswamy added.
Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical executive himself, also declared that distribution of the mRNA vaccines was “the most important step in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic”. The statement was congruent with his suggestion that the unvaccinated were responsible for new COVID variants:
But new variants aren’t emerging in the U.S. They’re emerging in places with a higher percentage of unvaccinated individuals. Those variants are the ones that have the greatest potential to drift, and possibly shift, away from the strain that initial vaccines were designed to protect against.
Ramaswamy’s sympathetic stance towards the vaccines is unsurprising given that his company, Roivant Sciences, teamed up with Pfizer last year to market RVT-3101, an inflammatory disease drug developed by Pfizer.
However, while the 37-year-old did not appear to fundamentally contest forced vaccinations, mask mandates or lockdowns during the pandemic, he has since adopted a strong anti-mandate position.
“[I’m] dead set against vaccine mandates and I think that that was one of the major learnings from the last pandemic,” Ramaswamy told political commentator Jack Posobiec last week assertively.
Furthermore, despite backing the FDA-authorized COVID-19 injections, Ramaswamy now says he knew the FDA was “a disastrous and corrupt organization” all along and that the vaccine’s safety was questionable.
“I've interfaced with the FDA which is a disastrous and corrupt organization. The same laws and agency that say. . .you don't even have the right to try a medicine that hasn't been through 10 years of testing—that's how dangerous that could be—is the same agency in the same government that says that if there's a vaccine that's pushed through in less than a year not only is it safe enough for you to try it's safe enough to be mandated upon you on the basis of a lie,” he told Posobiec.
Ramaswamy is a graduate of Yale Law School, which he attended with the help of a scholarship from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, a foundation established by the older brother of billionaire George Soros. The fellowship is currently run by several members of the Soros family.
In August 2021, Ramaswamy lauded George Soros for his critical remarks of China President Xi Jinping.
But while he has taken an aggressive position on the Chinese leader, Ramaswamy has not been averse to dealings with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a whole. In 2017, for example, Ramaswamy’s Roivant Sciences joined a CCP-owned private equity firm, CITCPE, in backing Shanghai-based biotechnology company Sinovant Sciences.
The presidential hopeful has also had run-ins with globalist powers like the World Economic Forum (WEF), which selected him to be a Young Global Leader, though Ramaswamy says he firmly declined the offer.
Ramaswamy is one of the seven Republican presidential candidates who have qualified to participate in next month’s debate, to be held in Milwaukee on August 23rd.
