Vivek Ramaswamy is the right’s new darling, a self-made biotech billionaire and American success story.
But should we take a closer look at that success story.
Ramasawamy was a hedge fund employee who started a company named Axovant (incorporated in Bermuda).
Axovant purchased a Alzheimer’s Disease drug named RVT101 from GlaxoSmithKline for $5 million. GSK was dropping the drug after three failed Stage 2 clinical trials.
Ramaswamy added his mother (an MD) to the research team for one of the failed trials and after some data manipulation, they announced that the Stage 2 trial showed the drug had promise in treating Alzheimer’s.
Ramawamy then hit the financial news talk show circuit (Jim Cramer for instance) to tout Axovant as the next great biotech company.
Before any further clinical testing, Axovant IPO’d at $15 a share and quickly rose to $50 a share on the promise of an Alzheimer’s cure. As it rose, Ramaswamy, his mother, his brother and other associates sold their shares, making billions of dollars.
The drug then went to Phase 3 Clinical Trials, where it failed completely. (GSK knew the drug was a bust.) The market responded: Axovant lost 99% of its value in a single day, wiping out the investments of everyone who believed Ramaswamy’s claims about a drug Ramaswamy knew was worthless.
Should Vivek Ramaswamy be the Republican candidate for President in 2024, Donald Trump’s running mate in 2024, or on trial for fraud?
The lesson dear friends: look closely at shiny objects.
The lesson here is anyone that threatens the status quo will be attacked.
Funny this never came out until AFTER the debate, anyone with half a brain knew they would find something to attack with. Predictable and pathetic, again one has to ask…why now? Why not before the debate?
No one bothered to do oppo research on him until the debate because he’s just some clown. It’s not a conspiracy. Opposition research is SOP for a debate.
Supporting this dude is embarrassing. I thought liberals were cringey pretending Mayor Pete is qualified to be president when he could barely run a city and never won a statewide race but this is worse.
The Waffen SS could pull my fingernails out one by one and they still couldn’t make me rap Lose Yourself over the actual song at a campaign stop when I’m running for president.
And I know all the words. Hell, I’ve been in the house randomly repeating four bars of an old Keith Murray verse for days and I still wouldn’t.
If none of the other candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination dug out this opposition research before the debate, that tells you how poorly they are running their operations. You can use that to determine whether any of them are qualified to run the Executive Branch.
If the press failed to dig this out, that tells you the sorry state of the press and how little honest investigative journalism is going on.
My take on Ramaswamy before I ran into this story is that he is a child of the Internet era – he looked at the likes for every Trump tweet ever, picked the most popular and made them his campaign themes.
If the Republicans want to run populist, more power to them. But try to find someone whose honesty can withstand minimal scrutiny.
It certainly shouldn’t be. Which is why I am waiting for James Comer and Jim Jordan to announce they are going to hold hearings into Ramaswamy’s biotech income. With luck, witnesses they call will explain that their is no actual evidence against Ramaswamy, just as Devon Archer explained that there is no basis for accused Joe Biden of bribery in Ukraine.
I suppose we’ll wait a long time because is it Different.
