Exclusive: Vivek Ramaswamy Supported COVID Segregation

The Republican presidential candidate pushed a dystopian national coronavirus system in 2020. A company he launched worked to make it real.

Illustration by Contra. Sources: siluetstrip / djvstock

“Could we tolerate a national system in which certain people on the basis of a biomarker are segregated?”

That sounds like an excerpt from a science fiction novel about a medical dystopia. But it’s a quote from Vivek Ramaswamy, the biopharma entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate.

In April 2020, as the U.S. went into lockdown, Ramaswamy said he would be open to that kind of system to determine who could “go back to normal life.” He described it as an “inequity,” but concluded that “everyone stands to benefit from it.” Ramaswamy made the comments during an episode of Rockefeller Client Insights, the podcast of Rockefeller Capital Management.

A concept like that is sharply at odds with the image of the civil libertarian he has cultivated during the primary. It also raises questions about his anti-establishment bona fides.

During the podcast, Ramaswamy talked about different aspects of the coronavirus outbreak with Gregory J. Fleming, the president and CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management. Fleming asked him what a “path to normalcy” might look like, given what he described as a “potentially extended timeline” for the rollout of vaccines and treatments. The country was then more than 15 days into “15 days to slow the spread.”

“One path to normalcy and a path that I’d like to see further progress made on is broad rollout of our antibody tests,” Ramaswamy said. He corrected himself and continued:

It’s not our company; I’m saying, as a society, rolling out the antibody tests such that we actually get our arms around what portion of the population is already immune through exposures that they may not have even known that they had. It might be 10 percent, it might be 20 percent, we might discover that it is some higher number. Those people are gonna be able to get back to work pretty quickly, get back to normal life because effectively they have the immunity badge, they have a badge in the form of their antibodies that protect them best we know from reinfection.

On the flip side, you then have the people who don’t have immunity, and the question is those who are negative on the antibody tests, what happens with them? Now, this has been—I’ve had discussions in the last few days with policymakers, a couple of people in Congress, one U.S. Senator, and I think this is not lost on folks. But I think one early topic that’s come up is, could we tolerate a national system in which certain people on the basis of a biomarker are segregated? To say you can’t go back to normal life, where certain people get a head start. Is that an inequity we would tolerate? I personally think that it is better than the status quo if we can send 10 or 20 percent of the people back on the basis of having immunity that’s proven on the basis of a lab-based result that’s now available. That’s a good thing, and everyone stands to benefit from it.

A draft for discussion obtained by Contra shows Ramaswamy indeed pitched this strategy to policymakers.

“After its apex of COVID-19 cases, each state should start to administer universal antibody testing to determine which individuals have immunity to SARS-Cov-2 and which individuals do not,” he wrote. “Individuals with immunity can return to normal life, be released from social distancing practices, and help restart the economy.”

“States should also have a well-designed plan for who should be released from social distancing norms to help revive the economy in advance of the availability of a COVID-19 vaccine,” he added.

Ramaswamy could argue he was defending natural immunity. But in that case, why not avoid strict government control altogether? Moreover, in the discussion draft, he countered concern of societal “backlash against discriminating on the basis of antibody test results” by arguing that the alternative would be to “lift shelter-in-place and social distancing mandates on everyone which would increase the risk of new outbreaks.”

In conclusion, he proposed a “public-private partnership” whose stakeholders would include “Organization X,” which could be a “division of government, a private company, or a nonprofit organization” that would maintain “the registry of individuals who are immune and individuals who should be prioritized for testing.”

A national system of segregation based on biomarkers indicated through testing would have been an egregious violation of individual liberties, not to mention privacy. It would also mark an expansion of the government’s powers of surveillance, which is at odds with Ramaswamy’s campaign rhetoric about gutting rather than empowering the administrative state.

However, it likely would have been a great business opportunity for whoever was involved in gathering and processing the data on every patient tested, especially if it was done in collaboration with and utilized by the state.

As it turns out, Datavant, a healthcare data company launched by Ramaswamy, pushed something like that in 2020.

Datavant was incubated and spawned in 2017 under the umbrella of Roivant Sciences, which was founded by Ramaswamy. In a statement about Datavant’s creation, he said it represented “another step forward in achieving Roivant’s long-term goal of reducing the time and cost of the drug development process.” Ramaswamy served as CEO of Roivant until January 2021 and executive chairman until February 2023 before stepping down to focus on his political career.

Five days after the Rockefeller Client Insights interview, The Wall Street Journal reported that Datavant was “spearheading” an effort “to create a registry of COVID-19 patients by pooling medical records from across the country.”

According to the Journal, the effort started in late March.

“Datavant’s proposed registry would be free for government and academic researchers to access, and would aim to include every patient who has been tested for COVID-19,” the Journal reported.

The Journal noted that the company was at that time in touch about the project with at least one federal agency, the Food and Drug Administration. Just a few months earlier, in February 2020, Datavant announced that George W. Bush-Era FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach had joined its advisory board.

Endpoints News, a biopharma publication, also covered the story and highlighted Ramaswamy’s relationship with Datavant. The company declined to comment to Endpoints on how many medical claims or COVID-19 patients would be covered by the database. “Our goal is to pull in as much data as we can that’s going to be useful,” said Bob Borek, a Datavant executive.

Come November 2020, Datavant announced that it had entered into a partnership with the National COVID Cohort Collaborative, also known as N3C, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

A press release on the company’s website states:

Regenstrief Institute, Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI) and Datavant are supporting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a national effort to securely gather data to help scientists understand and develop treatments for COVID-19.

The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) was launched as a centralized analytics platform to store and study vast amounts of medical record data from people tested for the virus. The N3C is a partnership among the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H) and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)-supported Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program hubs, with stewardship by NCATS.

Datavant scored quite the coup.

Was there more than just good fortune at play? That seems a fair question to ask, and not only because former FDA Commissioner von Eschenbach joined the Datavant advisory board in 2020.

Ramaswamy is close friends with former senior Trump adviser Jared Kushner. They have even been spotted dining together at the former president’s Bedminster club. More to the point, Kushner was also involved in an effort to create a national coronavirus surveillance system. Indeed, the timing is interesting.

A few days Ramaswamy told Fleming he had been talking with policymakers, Politico reported:

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system to give the government a near real-time view of where patients are seeking treatment and for what, and whether hospitals can accommodate them, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions.

The proposed national network could help determine which areas of the country can safely relax social-distancing rules and which should remain vigilant. But it would also represent a significant expansion of government use of individual patient data, forcing a new reckoning over privacy limits amid a national crisis.

Health privacy laws already grant broad exceptions for national security purposes. But the prospect of compiling a national database of potentially sensitive health information has prompted concerns about its impact on civil liberties well after the coronavirus threat recedes, with some critics comparing it to the Patriot Act enacted after the 9/11 attacks.

Already, the Trump administration has sought to ease data-sharing rules and assure health data companies they won’t be penalized for sharing information with state and federal officials—a move driven in part by Kushner’s push to assemble the national network, according to an individual with knowledge of the decision.

It’s worth noting the door for easing “data-sharing rules” was opened in March 2020, when then-President Donald Trump signed an emergency declaration over the coronavirus pandemic.

Among other things, it enabled the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “temporarily waive or modify certain requirements of the Medicare, Medicaid, and State Children’s Health Insurance programs and of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule throughout the duration of the public health emergency declared in response to the COVID‑19 outbreak.”

Whether Ramaswamy’s relationship with Kushner played any part in Datavant’s N3C partnership is unknown. But that is not the main point.

The point is that though he portrays himself today as a defender of civil liberties, he was yesterday willing to support a national medical data registry to determine who could have their life back. Had that happened, it would have set an awful precedent and ushered in a new era of surveillance.

And yet he has avoided any real scrutiny. No one has held his feet to the fire.

To Ramaswamy’s credit, he’s skilled at misdirection. If he cannot talk his way out of trouble, he will go to great lengths to avoid talking about things that could get him in trouble. He even hired a Wikipedia editor to scrub details from his background, including his role on Ohio’s Coronavirus Response Team. Ohio adopted a more restrictive approach toward the virus than other Republican-run states.

Ramaswamy is showing that under what passes for “populism” in America now, you can support the politics of dystopia and never say sorry so long as you tweet the right things and namedrop the right people and wave your arms wildly while doing it.

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