Vivek Ramaswamy appeared on Jack Posobiec's Human Events Live podcast Friday to answer pressing questions from his audience about the potential Republican Presidential Candidate. The most pressing: Ramaswamy’s alleged pump-and-dump scheme involving an Alzheimer’s drug he developed.
Vivek was happy to clarify. “So I actually did develop a drug for Alzheimer's disease, it failed. Like…99.7 percent of drugs ever tested for Alzheimer's disease have failed.”
He explained, “The myth is that I somehow made money on this… Roivant was the company I founded, it developed a number of medicines. The way I made my money is [from] five medicines that succeeded.”
Among the other medications developed were a “life-saving therapy” drug for children, a prostate cancer medication and an endometriosis medication for women. He clarified that this is how he “made the money.”
After the failure of the Alzheimer’s medication, Vivek and his pharmaceutical company, Roivant, “did not sell a single share… That's actually remarkable, because we could have we could have made money, but literally did not. Some would actually go so far as to call that out honorable that we didn't do that.”
Referring to his critics who have tried to use this occurrence to discredit him, Ramaswamy continued, “one of the things I've learned about this, Jack, is in partisan politics, people will stop at nothing.”
Poso brought up the popular references to Vivek being a “Pharma bro,” which has placed him in the same realm as Big Pharma companies who have infamously pushed vaccines on and dictated medications for the American people. “They would say this guy is very seems very close to this industry. How can we really trust his background?”
Vivek responded: “So most people in Big Pharma hate me… Most of the CEOs hate me because I've called out a lot of the bluff of Big Pharma. It’s inefficiency, its coordination, the corrupt relationship with the FDA, which I've said that I will actually gut as the next president.”
“It's also why I started Roivant, to challenge what I saw as a corrupt pharmaceutical industrial complex.” He continued, “The part that I challenge was [that] they systematically decided not to develop certain kinds of medicines. Because the thing about Pharma, it's all about groupthink.”
Ramaswamy highlighted the avoidance of taking individual risks in the industry and relying on the risks that “everybody else” are taking in case disaster ensues.
Vivek cleared the air, “So where am I on the policy questions? Dead set against vaccine mandates, dead set against mandates of any kind. I'm an absolutist on medical choice. That means definitely saying no to vaccines and mandates or any mandate of something that has been approved.”
He elaborated that he is also an absolutist on “right to try,” meaning having the ability to try a potentially life-changing medication that has not made it through the FDA approval process yet, thus giving medical autonomy back to the individual. “I think it is corrupt that the FDA says that you know what a patient who's dying from a disease doesn't have the ability to make a medical choice and say that even though that's not approved, I still have the right to try it,” stated Ramaswamy.
“That doesn't exist today.”
Vivek continued, “And the corruption really is, the same FDA that says ‘it takes over 10 years to develop a new medicine before you even have the right to try it,’ is the same one that said you have to take a vaccine that they pushed through in less than nine months.”
