(LifeSiteNews) — This week, an Ohio-based investigative journalist pointed out that young pharmaceutical entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy had supported determining who could return to normal life based on their COVID immunity in the early days of the pandemic.
“Could we tolerate a national system in which certain people on the basis of a biomarker are segregated?” Ramaswamy asked rhetorically in an April 3, 2020 podcast, writer Pedro L. Gonzalez noted on his Substack page “Contra.”
“I personally think that it is better than the status quo if we can send 10 or 20 percent of the people back [to normal life] on the basis of having immunity that’s proven on the basis of a lab-based result that’s now available,” Ramaswamy opined at the time on a Rockefeller Client Insights podcast interview.
While the then-34-year-old’s attitudes concerning the use of bio-surveillance to control access to normal daily life certainly doesn’t sound great to conservative ears today (now that we’ve emerged from the sci-fi nightmare of medical absurdity that was the COVID-19 response), it’s important to remember that Ramaswamy made those remarks in April 2020 … a time when nobody really had a handle on what was going on.
For a trip down memory lane, let’s juxtapose Vivek’s April 2020 COVID thoughts against some of the statements, actions, and attitudes expressed at the time by the two men currently leading the Republican pack: formidable frontrunner former U.S. President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, along with Vivek’s nearest competitor, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.
Trump let governors lock down the country, sped up vaccine rollout
Voters certainly haven’t forgotten that President Trump implemented two-weeks-to-slow-the-spread in 2020, and in 2021 pushed the so-called Operation Warp Speed to roll out experimental COVID-19 shots for Americans.
After initially seeking to calm the public and dismiss fearmongering, Trump declared a national emergency on March 13, 2020, and on March 16 instituted the infamous “15 days to slow the spread” – non-binding federal guidelines that, Americans will recall, permitted individual states to institute draconian lockdowns that lasted far longer than two weeks, with states like California extending certain restrictions and controls like mask mandates well into 2022.
Even Trump’s most fervent backers have to grudgingly acknowledge that his pandemic response, particularly in the early days of the outbreak when he heeded calls for crippling COVID controls, could have been better. His enabling of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s rise to fame has already gone down as a black mark on his otherwise fairly admirable presidential record.
But Trump was certainly no staunch lockdown advocate. He quickly and vocally moved to get Americans back to work and reopen schools, refused to implement a nationwide federal lockdown, demanded answers from China and the WHO, and frequently braved media freakouts in an effort to tamp down the COVID hysteria.
Though his Operation Warp Speed to get jabs into the arms of Americans has been looked at askance by critics of the mRNA drugs, Trump has consistently argued that the shots should not be mandated. He has pushed back against Biden for his top-down efforts to mandate the shots in violation of Americans’ freedoms but hasn’t suggested the injections weren’t of benefit.
Trump being Trump, the former president has never acknowledged that he could have made better decisions in his handling of the pandemic. And he has consistently surrounded himself with advisers and others who weren’t the most competent, to put it mildly. Would things be different a second time around?
Unless something drastic changes in the interim, it appears Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024. Would he approach another attempted medical or technological coup a little tougher and a little wiser in his second term? That’s the question voters will have to try to assess.
DeSantis implemented social distancing, threatened to crack down on COVID rule-breakers
The Trump campaign has certainly tried to make much of the fact that DeSantis – the anti-lockdown governor who opposed mask mandates, fought jab requirements, reopened his state early, and oversaw such a massive influx of new Florida residents that last year the Sunshine State became the fastest growing in the U.S. for the first time since 1957 – hadn’t always seen COVID controls as an unreasonable attack on fundamental freedoms.
Gov. DeSantis issued an executive order in March 2020 to sharply limit capacity at bars, beaches, and restaurants. He even praised Fauci early in the pandemic. In June, he threatened to strip away liquor licenses from bar keepers and restaurateurs who flagrantly defied the early “social distancing” orders.
By the fall, DeSantis had reversed course so completely that he began deliberately doing away with all remaining restrictions and fighting future mandates, thoroughly making a name for himself as “America’s governor” with a firm focus on defending individual freedom and personal responsibility.
“We’re not closing anything going forward,” DeSantis said in September 2020. “I think we need to get away from trying to penalize people for not social distancing and work with people constructively.”
DeSantis did encourage Floridians to get the COVID jabs, though he never imposed or backed mandates.
In a press release marking the three-year anniversary of the original 15-days-to-slow-the-spread guidance, DeSantis touted the fact that “Florida bucked the COVID-19 orthodoxy and instead used commonsense policies to become a refuge of sanity.”
“Federal vaccine mandates and restrictions were never about protecting Americans from a virus, they were exercising control at the expense of the American economy and the American way of life,” he said. “In Florida, we did not abdicate our leadership decisions to DC bureaucrats. Instead, we bucked the bureaucrats by ensuring kids could be in school, Floridians could go to work and businesses could thrive.”
Voters concerned about avoiding a repeat of COVID controls have long hailed DeSantis as their preferred politician, despite his going along with the program in the beginning. Is his mid-2020 turnaround on COVID sufficient to assure virus-weary voters that a President DeSantis would put freedom over fear?
Haley supported the shots, thanked Bill Gates for bankrolling jab manufacturing
Most staunch conservative voters in 2023 likely don’t have Republican establishment pick Nikki Haley on their wish list for the nomination. Her interventionist foreign policy positions, “consensus”-seeking on abortion, and experience with the United Nations might not necessarily endear her to the average religious, midwestern voter.
For the most part, however, Haley conducted herself admirably during COVID. As the ambassador to the U.N., she quickly sought answers from China and the WHO amid the early outbreak. She also supported Trump’s plans to reopen the country in May, despite outcry from the media, though she ill-advisedly encouraged him to “let his experts speak” during daily press briefings early on in the outbreak.
In 2021, she defended Trump’s speed-up of the COVID shot rollout against criticism from VP Kamala Harris and thanked Bill Gates for donating billions of dollars for the development of factories to create the injections. She hasn’t denounced the jabs, but she also hasn’t supported mandates.
In August of this year, Haley said COVID lockdowns had “wreaked havoc on our economy & the mental & physical health of every American and “damaged our children’s education for a generation.”
“We can’t allow fear, government overreach, or bureaucrat-forced mandates to hurt America again,” she said.
Ramaswamy promoted biosurveillance
As highlighted in Pedro Gonzalez’ November 29 piece referenced at the beginning of this article, Ramaswamy sided with the notion of segregation by immunity status as an alternative to total lockdowns in April 2020.
The Cincinnati Enquirer also pointed out that Ramaswamy’s expressed attitude concerning the COVID-19 jabs hasn’t always lined up with the Republican voter base.
He once called Bernie Sanders’ plan to make COVID masks available to all Americans a “sensible” one, and in 2020 said on social media that “Wearing a mask = personal responsibility,” calling it “puzzling when conservatives oppose it.”
Wearing a mask = personal responsibility. It’s puzzling when conservatives oppose it. But before deriding them, remember this: CDC and WHO discouraged wearing masks in March – a “noble lie” to save masks for healthcare workers. Institutional lying erodes public trust in science.
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 9, 2020
In 2021, he said “we should aim to safely vaccinate everyone who is eligible.”
“I’m proud that healthcare providers in my immediate and extended family have already safely received the vaccine,” he said on Twitter, now X.
Ramaswamy apparently changed his mind as of July, The Cincinnati Enquirer noted. He remarked in a podcast that he “would not have chosen to get vaccinated” if he had “had the facts that I do now,” since he is “a young, thankfully healthy male.” His changed opinion on the jabs is one he doesn’t share with his wife, a throat cancer surgeon.
“No mask mandates,” he now says. “No vaccine mandates. No lockdown ever again.”
The young entrepreneur, who burst onto the political scene with his own version of a somewhat Trump-like brash outsider image, hasn’t always been consistent about COVID. But neither have DeSantis and Trump. The question with him is – as it is with the others – do voters trust him to stake out a freedom-first position if he attains the nomination, and, eventually, the White House?
As his own campaign website puts it, “find just *one* Republican presidential candidate who didn’t say at least something totally cringeworthy about Covid back in 2020… we’ll wait.”
The decision is up to the voters in the primary
In short, people – especially politicians – do get things wrong, change their minds, and adjust their approaches. Given the current landscape, refusing to cast a vote for anyone who, in early or mid 2020 had been dazzled by the COVID narrative, would be a mistake. None of the Republican contenders can authentically claim to have gotten it 100 percent right from the start. Would any of Trump’s competitors have done better in his shoes in March 2020? It’s impossible to know for sure.
Instead, it’s important to weigh the substance of each contender’s subsequent actions, and the sincerity of his current rhetoric. While a sudden pivot in mid-2020 (or even 2022) may suggest a mere desire to placate the sentiments of voters, it could also be indicative of an actual awareness that leads to real and reliable policy changes.
Voters casting their ballots in the primaries have to decide which GOP contender, COVID baggage and all, shows the most resolve to fight bureaucratic ineptitude, uphold the Constitution, and chart a new course for freedom.