AN OPEN LETTER FROM BIOTECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY LEADERS
October 23, 2026
Vivek Ramaswamy
Republican Nominee for Governor of Ohio
Vivek Ramaswamy and Rob McColley for Ohio
471 E. Broad Street, Suite 1510
Columbus, OH 43215
Vivek,
We write as leaders in the biotechnology industry, the industry in which you made your name, to say plainly that the advertisement your campaign is running against Amy Acton is beneath the standards of our profession and of ordinary decency. We ask you to withdraw it, cancel the four million dollars behind it, and apologize to Dr. Acton and her family.
This is not a letter about campaign tactics. Politics is hard-fought, and none of us is naive about that. It is a letter about a choice you made and what that choice says about you. You chose to put Dr. Acton’s estranged mother on camera to call her a liar about being abused as a child. You chose to spend four million dollars so that as many Ohioans as possible would see it. And when asked, you confirmed that it was your ad. This was not a consultant’s lapse. It was a decision, and it is yours.
Everyone who builds a company in our industry asks for trust: from patients who take an unproven medicine and from the people who fund and prescribe it. You asked for that trust when you built Roivant, and you received it. The obligations that come with it are simple. Follow the evidence. Never use the suffering of the people who depend on your judgment against them. Those obligations do not lapse when you file for office, and your advertisement violates both.
Consider the evidence. Against your advertisement stand court records showing that Dr. Acton’s stepfather was arrested and charged with sexually abusing her when she was twelve, posted bond, and fled, and that he died a fugitive. Against those records your campaign offers the word of a mother who lost custody of her children at the time and has not seen her daughter since. No one in our industry would accept that standard of evidence in a decision affecting one patient. You have accepted it in a campaign to govern nearly twelve million people.
Consider the message. We work every day with people who have disclosed abuse, or an illness they spent years unable to speak about. Their willingness to seek help rests on a single promise: that their vulnerability will be met with respect. In pursuit of your political ambition, your advertisement attempts to shame a survivor of rape and deny the awful family trauma she experienced, as supported by overwhelming evidence. Anyone who has sat with a patient knows the harm in that message. You know it too.
Each of us has had to decide what we would and would not do to win. That is the test of character this profession imposes, and it is the test you have failed. A person who will do this to an opponent will do it to anyone in his way, and the people of Ohio are entitled to know that before they vote.
Withdraw the advertisement. Cancel the spending behind it. Apologize to Dr. Acton and her family. You lead this campaign, and we expect you to answer for what it has done.
Real leadership demands nothing less.
Sincerely,