“Vivek Ramaswamy” by Gage Skidmore
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has come under fire for alleged ties to George Soros, the World Economic Forum (WEF), his stance on masks, and a controversial partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over a centralized COVID-19 patient surveillance database.
In a candid and bold Twitter video, Ramaswamy addressed these allegations head-on. Expressing his readiness to take tough questions, he said, “We’re surging in the polls. The knives are coming out, the opposition research machines are churning. And you know what? That’s a good thing, because I’m running to be your next president. I want to lead this country, and I better darn well be able to take some questions along the way.”
One of the controversies that Ramaswamy answered was his alleged ties to George Soros.
Ramaswamy clarified that he has no connection with George Soros. However, his education was funded by a Soros family member.
In 2010, Ramaswamy received the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans when he was 24, which helped him pursue a Juris Doctor in Law at Yale University. This fellowship was named after George Soros’s older brother, Paul Soros, a Hungarian-born American businessman and philanthropist, often called “the invisible Soros.”
Ramaswamy asserted that he never met both Paul Soros and George Soros.
“What is my connection with George Soros? Answer none, zero, indirect, zero connection with George Soros,” Ramaswamy said.
“Back in 2010 – by the way, this was long before George Soros had completely fallen off the deep end and gone into progressive causes, funding what I perceive as disastrous and toxic prosecutors who are soft on crime, who I’ve also railed against.”
“In 2010, I won a scholarship when I was 24 or 25 years old and headed to law school that was partly funded not by George Soros but by Paul Soros, George’s brother. [Paul] made his money independently and who, by the way, is now dead, funded hundreds of people – hundreds of kids. I was one of them, to go to graduate school at the age of 24 or 25, back when I didn’t have a lot of money to do it.”
“If I had turned down that scholarship back then, that would have been so foolish that anybody that foolish probably should have no place anywhere near the White House doing trade deals on behalf of this country,” Ramaswamy added.
However, Ramaswamy’s Wikipedia page was updated to remove information about his association with Paul Soros, raising questions about the transparency of Ramaswamy’s candidacy according to critics.
According to Mediate, Ramaswamy seems to have paid Wikipedia editor “Jhofferman,” to remove content from his page that Ramaswamy believed would undermine his candidacy in the Republican primary. A few days later, Ramaswamy declared his intention to run in 2024.
“According to the article’s version history, the editor removed lines about Ramaswamy’s receipt of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011,” the outlet reported.
Ramaswamy’s bio can still be found at the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans’ website.
Source: Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans
Ramaswamy was also criticized due to his tweet in 2021, where he seemed to compliment George Soros for labeling Xi as the “most dangerous enemy of open societies in the world.”
Well said, George Soros:
“I consider Mr. Xi the most dangerous enemy of open societies in the world.”https://t.co/kg9GCZqK6v
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) August 15, 2021
Ramaswamy has also faced scrutiny over his inclusion in the WEF’s 2021 ‘Young Global Leader’ list published on March 10, 2021. Despite rejecting the award and repeatedly asking for his name to be removed, the WEF refused.
“The World Economic Forum named me on a list of so-called young global leaders. They did it despite the fact that I turned down their award. They kept my name on that list despite the fact that I repeatedly asked them to take it off because I did not share their values. I’m an opponent of it,” Ramaswamy said.
Funny you should bring this up. The first chapter of my upcoming book in April has the “receipts” of my exchanges with the World Economic Forum years ago when they *repeatedly* kept trying to get me to be named. I gave them a polite “hell no.” Reveals the games that WEF plays. https://t.co/v5SVRr1p9z
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) February 22, 2023
After two years on the list, Ramaswamy was removed by the WEF after he filed a lawsuit against the company earlier this year, saying, “This is an organization that does a lot of wrong and I’ve opposed it publicly and believe it should be held accountable.”
“Well, when they refused to do it, you know what I did? I sued them because I believe in taking action,” Ramaswamy said.
On the topic of face masks, Ramaswamy acknowledged that he made a statement encouraging people to buy masks out of personal responsibility early on in the pandemic, in opposition to government advice. However, he clarified that as the scientific understanding of masks evolved, so did his stance.
“I’ll admit it, my anti-government instincts got the better of me. Because I don’t know if you all remember this, but back in March, April 2020, when I put that tweet out, which said that we should buy masks based on individual personal responsibility or whatever it was that I said, that was in response to the government, including Fauci and the head of the CDC, laughing at people for buying masks and telling people across this country that they shouldn’t buy masks. I have inherently libertarian instincts,” he said.
“I’m skeptical of the government. I think the government mostly lies. And so when they were saying, don’t buy masks, I went the other way and said that, you know what? If the government’s going to tell me not to protect myself, then maybe we should be protecting ourselves. Well, as the facts changed, so did my opinions on it,” he added.
Ramaswamy’s alleged work with Ohio’s COVID-19 response team was also removed from his Wikipedia page at his request, a move that has raised eyebrows.
According to Mediate, “Also removed from the page on February 9, 2023 was Ramaswamy’s role on the state of Ohio’s Covid-19 Response Team. The editor recorded that Ramaswamy’s Covid-era work was removed from the article by the candidate’s own explicit request, while his Soros fellowship was deemed “extraneous material” by the editor.”
Vivek Ramaswamy has yet to respond to allegations that his company partnered with the National Institutes of Health to create a database of patients’ personal medical information.
“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,” according to the news release.
“Regenstrief, Datavant and Indiana CTSI created solutions that will enable the linking of data from different sources without the identifiers, improving the quality and completeness of the information while still protecting patient identities. This process will make data more useful to researchers as they work to understand the virus and develop solutions to address it.”
“Datavant provides the privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) technology which underpins de-identified data contributions to the NIH COVID-19 Data Warehouse, including the N3C, ensuring patient records are shared safely, securely, and privately in compliance with de-identification standards. De-identified data linkages within and with the N3C will address the challenges of assembling comprehensive patient records in large-scale clinical research due to care fragmentation and data fragmentation.”
San-Francisco-based Datavant is a unit of Roivant Sciences, which Vivek Ramaswamy owns.
Source: Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans
According to its SEC filing:
Datavant, a business that we’ve built to connect patient level real-world health data in a privacy first, HIPAA-compliant manner. So, Datavant has a toolkit that has hundreds of customers at this point and sits behind the HIPAA firewalls of healthcare institutions like payers or lab companies or EMR systems and takes patient level data within those databases and de-identifies it, strips out all the identifiable information, like, you know, Matt Gline’s name and social security number, and replaces it with cryptographically secure hashes that can be used to link data between sources. And so one of our challenges as a drug developer and understanding our patient populations is being able to follow in the US a patient journey between multiple different siloed datasets, and Datavant allows for the linkage of data across those siloed datasets so that we can better understand patient populations.
This is useful in a variety of ways for us, including it’s being deployed in some of our clinical trials to help us understand our actual patient populations, and ultimately may be useful for renting real world evidence to payers as we want to think about the impact that our medicines have on the patients who get them.
However, critics were skeptical of this method.
More from The Dossier:
In a pursuit forged through one of his subsidiary companies, a “health information” data mining outfit called Datavant, Ramaswamy’s outfit pursued the establishment of a single national and global database for all covid-related patient health records.
Screenshot: Endpoints News/ The Dossier
Through a partnership with Snowflake, a San Francisco based cloud computing company, Ramaswamy wanted to “fight covid-19” by manufacturing a “single repository of all the real-world medical data” thanks to the production of a “national data infrastructure” of private and public patient records, all without the consent of the actual patients.
Screenshot: Endpoints News/ The Dossier
Datavant claimed the records would be anonymized through their internal systems and that the broad database would only be available to researchers and government officials. However, some weren’t buying the sales pitch, citing gross violations of medical privacy. Moreover, none of the methods to supposedly anonymize records were made open source for review.
Amid this allegation, The Gateway Pundit is extending an open invitation to Ramaswamy and his team to provide comments and further clarity, particularly about his partnership with the NIH.
WATCH:
We’re surging. The knives are out. “WEF.” “Soros.” “Masks.” Here’s the TRUTH. Stay skeptical. Keep the questions coming & I’ll keep answering. pic.twitter.com/eOjKTRndZu
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 19, 2023
The post GOP Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy Faces Scrutiny Over Alleged Ties to Soros, WEF, and Controversial Partnership with NIH for Centralized COVID-19 Patient Surveillance Database (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.