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https://tiffinohio.net/posts/pepper-lima-unions-criticize-ramaswamy-jobs-cost-living/

David Pepper joined Northwest Ohio union leaders in Lima on Tuesday to criticize Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy over jobs and the cost of living.

Gary McPheron, secretary-treasurer of the Lima Building Trades, said “Our members are watching to see which candidate will stand alongside them in good and bad times, and that’s not Vivek Ramaswamy. Instead of fighting for Ohio workers, Ramaswamy would take away our jobs and make already high costs even worse, Ramaswamy is an out-of-touch billionaire who can’t be trusted to keep jobs in Ohio or lower costs for working families. Our members and Ohioans across the state are working harder than ever. We can’t afford Vivek Ramaswamy.”

In a December 2024 social media post Ramaswamy argued that top U.S. technology companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers because, he wrote, American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”

A biotech fortune built on a failed drug

Much of the “billionaire” framing the union leaders used traces to how Ramaswamy made his money. In December 2014, a company under his Roivant Sciences umbrella bought the experimental Alzheimer’s drug intepirdine from GlaxoSmithKline for $5 million, after GSK had run four failed trials on it.

Ramaswamy built a subsidiary, Axovant, around the drug and took it public in 2015 in what was then the largest biotech IPO on record, raising about $315 million and reaching a valuation near $3 billion — even though the company had about eight employees at the time, two of them Ramaswamy’s mother and brother.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor who tracks Ramaswamy’s business dealings, told Fortune that “everything about him is a scam,” and told the Associated Press that his biotech record was “classic ‘pump and dump.’"