Kennedy is making a mistake injecting politics into immunization policy
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently revamped the federal Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices committee, firing all its members and naming eight new ones in their place.
Such abrupt upheaval is in line with the disruptive nature of the current administration, focusing on putting people in positions of authority that support the administration's agenda. But Kennedy deflected any such criticisms, stating that all such changes were necessary due to conflicts of interest that the dismissed committee members had with pharmaceutical companies.
Before simply bashing the eight new members, it is worthwhile to recognize that they are all highly accomplished in their fields. The biggest question is whether their experience and skills align with the responsibilities and needs of the advisory committee, and whether such a mix of people will serve the best interests of the nation with respect to immunization policy.
Though I cannot comment on all of the new members, I have considerable background in common with two of them — Martin Kulldorf and Retsef Levi. Both graduated from the operations research doctoral program at Cornell University, the same program from which I graduated.
Operations research is a field that creates and uses mathematical models to support decision-making. It is widely used across government and numerous industries, including transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, and finance.
Kulldorf's background is in probability theory. His career path eventually took him to health policy and biostatistics. He was on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School for nearly two decades. His scholarly record is superb. He became most famous during the COVID pandemic for views that were contrary to the mainstream public health field at the time, since he supported natural immunity for young people while protecting the health of the most vulnerable. This was the primary thesis of the Great Barrington Declaration, which he co-authored.
Levi is on the faculty of the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He is well trained in mathematical modeling for operations, with a focus on risk mitigation. He has done considerable research on healthcare issues, though it is just one of his many interests, as evidenced by his extensive and diverse list of publications. He is member of the Mass General Research Institute.
So why is there such an uproar about these two individuals (as well as the other six members who will constitute the new advisory committee) joining the nation's primary advisory group for immunization policy in the U.S.? The reason is that these new members are not part of the mainstream immunization community. Their views, based on their writings and public statements, are not aligned with what has been recommended by previous members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices.
This means that the recommendations of the new committee risks being different from those of previous committees.
One place that this could be felt is with the Childhood and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, which is one of the committee's primary responsibilities. Yet before assuming that wholesale changes in this schedule are imminent, several decades of experience with these vaccines have produced a large body of data on their safety and effectiveness. Although the new members may have ideologies that are not considered mainstream, they are also sufficiently skilled to understand data and curious enough to ask questions before making sweeping changes that could affect population health and influence health insurance coverage policies.
If Kennedy had added some of these new people to the advisory committee rather than simply firing the entire committee, he would have found far less resistance from the many medical associations and societies asking for reinstatement of the fired members. Instead, he opted to take a more radical approach, which has placed him and the new advisory committee members under needless attack.
The recent JAMA article, coauthored by the fired members, masterfully articulates the long history of vaccines and their benefits. It also criticizes the process by which they were fired, and the risks with the new committee.
Given the size of the committee, it would behoove Kennedy to reinstate some of the fired members, providing a healthy atmosphere for discussion and debate. Indeed, having a committee that is ideologically biased in any direction is certain to yield suboptimal policies, with the the meeting that starts today being the committee's first test.
If Kennedy is so confident in his beliefs, then he should welcome having people on the committee who provide some resistance. Such a balanced environment would give all stakeholders a voice, with the necessary data used to support or deflect new or existing policies. That would temper the politics of any new recommendations and provide a pathway for immunization policy that would best serve the nation's public health interests.
Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor in the Grainger College of Engineering and the Carle Illinois College of medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Atlantic
4 hours ago
- Atlantic
RFK Jr. Is Globalizing the Anti-Vaccine Agenda
This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his address to a global vaccine summit to disparage global vaccination. The conference was organized by Gavi, the world's leading immunization program, and in a recorded speech, Kennedy accused the organization of collaborating with social-media companies to stifle dissenting views on immunization during the coronavirus pandemic and said it had 'ignored the science' in its work. He criticized Gavi for recommending COVID-19 shots to pregnant women, and went deep on a discredited study that purported to find safety issues with a tetanus vaccine commonly used in the developing world. 'In its zeal to promote universal vaccination,' Kennedy claimed, Gavi 'has neglected the key issue of vaccine safety.' Kennedy's remarks confirmed what The New York Times first reported in March: that the United States, Gavi's third-largest donor, would stop pledging money to the organization. (Congress, which has always had final say over Gavi funding, has not yet weighed in.) They are also the first indication that the U.S.'s rejection of global vaccine campaigns stems from the Trump administration's opposition not only to foreign aid, but to vaccination itself. For the first time, Kennedy has managed to use the anti-vaccine agenda to guide American foreign policy. Gavi, at its most basic level, is Costco for immunizations, wielding its massive purchasing power to buy vaccines in bulk for cheap. National governments and private philanthropies pledge funding to it every five years. The United Kingdom and the Gates Foundation are its largest donors; the United Nations distributes the shots. The poorest countries pay 20 cents per vaccine, and prices rise along with national income. Since the partnership was launched, in January 2000, 19 countries —including Ukraine, Congo, and Guyana—have gone from relying on Gavi to paying for vaccinations entirely on their own. Indonesia, which accepted donations from Gavi as recently as 2017, pledged $30 million to the organization this funding cycle. Gavi, by its own estimate, has saved about 19 million lives and vaccinated 1 billion children. At the conference this week, the director of the World Health Organization noted that since 2000, the number of children who die each year before they reach the age of 5 has fallen by more than half, largely due to the power of vaccines. By Gavi's estimates, the U.S. canceling its Biden-era pledge to provide $1.2 billion this donation cycle could lead to the deaths of more than 1 million children who otherwise would have lived. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.) In his recorded remarks, Kennedy said America would not send the money until Gavi can 're-earn the public trust' by 'taking vaccine safety seriously.' Cutting off millions of children's only access to routine vaccines is 'the most emphatic globalization of the anti-vaxxer agenda,' Lawrence Gostin, the faculty director of Georgetown's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told me. Tom Frieden, the former director of the CDC, told me that after he heard Kennedy's remarks, 'I was literally sick to my stomach,' because 'unscientific, irresponsible statements like this will result in the deaths of children.' (The U.S. has run an international anti-vaccine campaign before: According to an investigation by Reuters, in 2020, the Pentagon unleashed bot accounts on multiple social-media platforms that impersonated Filipinos and discouraged uptake of China's Sinovac vaccine—the first COVID vaccine available in the Philippines—using a hashtag that read, in Tagalog, 'China is the virus.' The goal was not to combat vaccines, but to undermine China's influence.) Kennedy's prerecorded address held back his harshest critiques of Gavi. In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy paints 'Bill Gates's surrogate group Gavi' (the Gates Foundation co-founded Gavi) as nothing more than a profiteering 'cabal' and a facilitator of 'African Genocide.' To hear Kennedy tell it, 'virtually all of Gates's blockbuster African and Asian vaccines—polio, DTP, hepatitis B, malaria, meningitis, HPV, and Hib—cause far more injuries and deaths than they avert.' Decades' worth of safety and efficacy studies have proved him wrong. In his remarks to Gavi this week, Kennedy focused on the DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) shot, describing at length a 'landmark' 2017 study that found the vaccine increased all-cause mortality among girls in Guinea-Bissau. But as Frieden pointed out, this was in fact a relatively small observational study. In 2022, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of more than 50,000 newborns found that the DTP vaccine significantly decreased infant mortality. Frieden compared the evidence: 'Hundreds of kids versus 50,000 kids. Poorly done; well done.' Kennedy made efforts to take his anti-vaccine advocacy global before he became America's health secretary. In 2021, he delivered a webinar on the importance of expanding an 'international movement' for Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization he founded. In 2019, when Samoa was experiencing a major dip in measles immunization after an improperly prepared vaccine killed two children, Kennedy visited the prime minister and, on behalf of Children's Health Defense, reportedly offered to build an information system the country could use to track the health effects of vaccines and other medical interventions. When a deadly measles outbreak took hold later that year, Kennedy sent a letter to the prime minister suggesting that widespread vaccination might make unvaccinated Samoan children more likely to die of measles. (In an interview for a 2023 documentary, Kennedy said that 'I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa' and that his conversations about vaccines with the prime minister had been 'limited.') Now, it seems, Kennedy has gained the power to realize his ambitions both domestically and abroad. Earlier this month, Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee, then replaced them with a group that includes several allies who have spread misinformation about the harms of vaccines. This week, as other countries pledged their support for Gavi, Kennedy's brand-new, handpicked panel convened for a discussion of the dangers of thimerosal, a vaccine ingredient that is a frequent target of anti-vaxxers despite having been found safe. The committee has formed a working group to review the 'cumulative effect' of childhood vaccination in the United States. As Kennedy said in his address to Gavi, 'Business as usual is over.'
The Hill
4 hours ago
- The Hill
RFK Jr. is fighting a two-front war against chronic disease and anti-MAHA partisans
At a certain point, the gruesome reality of war fades into a white noise of fatalism. Hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq; tens of thousands killed in Afghanistan; over 1 million killed or wounded in Ukraine; Israel and Iran at each other's throats, with the fear of the U.S. being dragged into a wider war. Since the end of World War Two, it can be argued that there has been no 'just' war — just needless killing. While most on the left won't want to hear it or acknowledge it, there has been no president more firmly opposed to these 'forever wars' and the slaughter of young soldiers than President Trump. That said, there was one war Trump was anxious to wage — a war that counterintuitively saves lives, while taking none. To command the campaign, Trump selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 'Make America Healthy Again.' It's a nice slogan and looks good on the front of a hat, but what is it really about? The reality is that this program has the potential to save more lives than all those lost in the wars since WWII — and then some. As Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has chosen to dedicate the rest of his working life to this quest. Why? To save lives that should not be lost in the battle against the unchecked and steadily advancing chronic disease epidemic raging in our nation. Tragically, millions of Americans are lost each year to such preventable disease. Depending upon the study, experts say that approximately 1 million Americans die each year from heart disease; over 1,300 per day, or approximately 500,000 per year, from obesity; 1.5 million Americans are newly diagnosed with diabetes each year, with over 100,000 passing away each year from the disease. Many of these deaths overlap; many are preventable; and many are caused by the foods, beverages and food additives we consume each day. But now Kennedy and his team at HHS have illuminated a bright light at the end of this dark and seemingly endless tunnel. On June 19, Kennedy posted, 'Big food brands are listening. From cereals to spices to fast food, artificial dyes and additives are being removed from America's food supply …' Along with that announcement, he attached a video reporting that General Mills was removing artificial food dyes from U.S. cereals and K-12 school foods by summer 2026 and removing all artificial dyes completely by the end of 2027; Kraft-Heinz just announced that they are removing all artificial dyes by the end of 2027; In-N-Out Burger announced that they removed artificial dyes from strawberry shakes and pink lemonade, using beet juice and turmeric instead. Steak 'N Shake will now be using beef tallow instead of vegetable oil to cook French fries, onion rings and chicken tenders; and McCormick spice company announced it is working to remove artificial food dyes and sodium. All of this comes on top of the banning of Red Dye No. 3, which potentially causes cancer. This is huge and truly transformative news for the health of the American people. None of it was really going anywhere until RFK Jr. came on the scene. While great news, little of this progress will hold unless the broken U.S. healthcare bureaucracy is torn down and rebuilt into an aerodynamic, perpetual-motion machine protecting the health of the American people. To this point, as Kennedy pointed out after his testimony before the House Commerce Committee earlier this week, 'We've thrown trillions of dollars at our health agencies — and the American people have only gotten sicker … we're transforming HHS from a bloated sick-care bureaucracy into a streamlined health care agency focused on outcomes—not waste.' He added, 'The path forward is clear: We will restore public trust by restoring public truth.' Unfortunately, while Kennedy was testifying before this committee regarding the president's 2026 Health and Human Services budget, we also got a troubling look at the other war he is forced to wage to 'Make America Healthy Again.' It is a war that Kennedy would like to avoid. Sadly, but quite predictably, a number of the Democratic members used the hearing for partisan purposes to fire loaded trick questions at Kennedy while demanding 'yes' or 'no' answers based on false premises. Most of them pompously went out of their way to prevent Kennedy from getting a word in edgewise in response. Why? Because they didn't care about any of his answers. That was not the point of the exercise. It was all partisan performance art. It was all about fundraising letters and voters back home. Kennedy is a well-known personality, they wanted to badger and harass him into getting the soundbite needed for their next reelection effort. The ironic part is that Kennedy would very much like to work with all the members taking partisan shots at him for self-promotion. He knows many of them and has worked with some in the past. Rather than be at 'war' with them, Kennedy desperately wants to enlist them as allies in the greater war which, as Kennedy has repeatedly stated, has made America 'the sickest nation in the world.' The American people are sick of being sick — and sick of the partisan nonsense that has put them at greater risk. Tens of millions now believe Kennedy is a prayer answered when it comes to combating those issues. They want and need their congressional representatives to join with Kennedy to make them and their children healthier. A 'war' that takes no lives but could potentially save millions. Kennedy is waging it but needs help from every power center to win it. Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official.
Politico
6 hours ago
- Politico
Can ‘Ohio's Anthony Fauci' Stage a Political Comeback?
ARCHBOLD, Ohio — On a Thursday night in early April, outside the banquet hall of a community college off a rural stretch of highway in northwest Ohio, a small group was hovering excitedly around Amy Acton. Acton, Ohio's Covid-era health director, was headlining a Democratic fundraiser an hour outside Toledo as the party's first announced 2026 gubernatorial candidate. Beside a table of wilted iceberg lettuce bowls, Acton greeted a gaggle of mostly female supporters. A woman in her 80s, a former Republican, gushed that Acton had been 'marvelous' as pandemic health director. A woman in her 50s, an employee of a local health department, asked Acton to sign a printout of the 'Swiss Cheese Model,' a visual aid that became a hallmark of Ohio's Covid briefings. A nurse in her 30s showed Acton her Covid scrapbook. 'I feel like I didn't get this part [as health director],' Acton, now five years out from that job, told the nurse, 'getting to meet people and hear their stories.' Acton's own pandemic story is Ohio lore. A Democrat appointed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to lead Ohio's Department of Health, Acton joined DeWine's cabinet in February 2019, with a mandate to address health outcomes in a state still grappling with the opioid epidemic. A year later, Acton was thrust into overseeing the statewide response to a global pandemic and cultivating a national profile as a compassionate and telegenic leader who put Ohio at the forefront of proactive school closures. Ohio's first stay-at-home orders went into effect on March 23, 2020. 'Today is the day we batten down the hatches,' Acton said at the time. By mid-June, following weeks of nonstop demonstrations outside her home (which included armed protesters and signs with antisemitic symbols), the harassment of her family both in Ohio and out-of-state, and an effort to blunt her powers in the legislature, Acton resigned as health director, a decision she later said was due to political pressure to sign health orders she opposed, specifically one to allow large, maskless crowds at county fairs. Acton's current-day campaign pitch to succeed DeWine begins where she left off as health director: 'I saw under the hood during Covid. I saw how fragile our democracy is,' she tells voters. 'I'm running for governor because I refuse to look the other way while our state continues to go in the wrong direction on every measure.' There's no existing model for Acton's candidacy — she's the only Covid-era health director using that experience as a springboard to run for a top statewide office, at a time when the only sitting U.S. governor who was previously a physician is Democrat Josh Green of Hawaii. How voters ultimately assess her will offer a window into how a segment of the country has processed the pandemic and its aftermath half a decade later. The takeaways won't be definitive. Acton enters the race at a distinct disadvantage, beyond even her reputation on the right as the chief architect of the state's divisive lockdowns. Donald Trump ushered in a new conservative era in Ohio, the state responsible for making JD Vance a senator. The likely GOP nominee for governor is Vivek Ramaswamy, a MAGA celebrity from Cincinnati who has effectively cleared his own primary with endorsements from Trump and the Ohio Republican Party. Acton may not even win her own primary next May, which could feature ex-Sen. Sherrod Brown and former Rep. Tim Ryan, two of the state's most prominent Democrats. That hasn't stopped Ramaswamy from treating Acton as his opponent, calling her an 'Anthony Fauci knockoff' who 'owes an apology to every kid in Ohio for the Covid public school shutdown.' It can be hard now to imagine the Before Times, when Amy Acton and Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease doctor during the pandemic, were obscure government bureaucrats. In Acton's case, the aggressively unglamorous role of state health director was not typically seen as a launchpad for stardom or a political career. But the dark days of early Covid elevated a host of unlikely voices from the trenches of public health and medicine, including Acton, Fauci, and White House Covid coordinator Deborah Birx. Those days revealed Acton to be a compelling communicator with a knack for distilling complexity and putting Ohioans at ease — traits that, in theory, translate well to retail politics, if not for the fact that Acton's skills as a messenger also inevitably recall those excruciating times. 'This is a war on a silent enemy. I don't want you to be afraid. I am not afraid. I am determined,' Acton declared on March 22, 2020. 'All of us are going to have to sacrifice. And I know someday we'll be looking back and wondering what was it we did in this moment.' Acton was lauded far and wide that spring. 'This is why we need Acton right now — she's a guiding star in what often seems like an endless night,' a local news site editorialized, below an illustration of Acton, with her prominent cheekbones and glossy-brown beach waves, as Rosie the Riveter. The New York Times called her 'The Leader We Wish We All Had.' Glamourwondered whether she was the 'Pandemic's Most Midwestern Hero.' Little kids dressed as her in white lab coats. The intensely earnest 'Dr. Amy Acton Fan Club' emerged on Facebook and amassed over 100,000 members. Acton's fans had responded to the way she 'delivered tough truths with clarity and compassion,' Katie Paris, the founder of Red, Wine and Blue, a group that aims to engage suburban women in politics, told me. She was also ridiculed by Republicans who felt her orders amounted to overreach. One GOP lawmaker accused Acton of promoting a 'medical dictatorship.' Another agreed with his wife who accused Acton, who is Jewish, of running Ohio like Nazi Germany. 'She might be the nicest and most well-intentioned person on the planet,' Bill Seitz, the GOP House majority leader during Acton's tenure, told me. 'But people were pissed off at the extent their lives changed, in their view, for the worse, because of these restrictions.' Acton hasn't been in the public eye since the early throes of the pandemic, and she's reemerging now into a totally different world. Bitter Covid skepticism on the right has given rise to the crunchy health and wellness doctrine known as MAHA, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who claims processed foods and seed oils are driving chronic illness, setting the tone as the nation's health secretary. In the years since the pandemic, trust in doctors and scientists has plummeted among members of both parties, and an increasing number of young Americans are getting their medical advice from TikTok and YouTube. In the midst of these trends, Acton will be reckoning with her own legacy and the decisions she made when so little was known about the virus. Acton is defensive of her posture back then — 'a leader's job is to give you a north star, to tell you these cold, hard facts,' she says in her stump speech, an unsubtle jab at her detractors — as well as the parasocial relationship some people have to her from the days of near-daily briefings. (That connection is 'something I'm very protective of,' Acton told me.) She's also relatively tight-lipped about DeWine — who has swatted away any notion he might cross party lines to endorse his former health director — insisting they had remained on good terms after her departure. 'The way we worked together was real,' she said. Acton acknowledges the mere fact of her candidacy dredging up Covid times can be strange and painful for some people — and may even kneecap her campaign in its infancy. 'We did overwhelm hospitals. People died during Covid from heart attacks and strokes because ambulances had nowhere to go,' Acton said, recalling one of the more nightmarish realities of that chapter. 'We haven't been honest as a country and just laid that out there. It's been too political. But we have a lot to learn from that, because we will face crises again.' 'Just hearing my voice, for some people, brings it back,' Acton told me in early April, at a park not far from her home in Bexley, where Acton arrived looking mostly like she does on TV — shoulder-length brown hair, dress, tights, ballet flats. Acton explained how at every meet-and-greet as a candidate for governor, 'somebody is crying in line … somebody is breaking down in a room. It's visceral. You don't have control over it. It just comes out.' Allyson Smith, the nurse with the Covid scrapbook in Archbold, opened up to Acton about being a contact tracer. 'I told her that I was threatened,' Smith said, thumbing open the book to a photo of her children, 2 and 4, in masks. 'It really makes me cry when I look back. It was a hard time … It was actually traumatic for people in a lot of ways.' Acton theorizes this sense of connection with her among total strangers comes from 'everybody in the world … watching the same thing at the same time, [which] led to a bond with me that's unusual. When I was trying to go back to my normal life, I realized people would come from everywhere just to see me speak. It doesn't go away.' Acton traces her empathy back to a tough childhood. Raised poor in Youngstown, Acton was always the 'smelly kid' in school. Her parents split up when she was 3, and her mother eventually remarried a man that Acton later accused of sexual abuse. The family moved a dozen times throughout her childhood and early adolescence. For nearly two years, she and her younger brother lived in a basement below a storefront where her mother sold antiques. Later, the family was homeless, sharing a tent for the winter. Acton ended up testifying about her stepfather's abuse to a grand jury, but according to Acton, he skipped town before facing charges. 'I was in the seventh grade,' she recalled, 'because I remember the feeling of new clothes and squeaky shoes walking through the courthouse.' The rest of her childhood she spent with her biological father. After high school, Acton enrolled in an accelerated medical degree program through Youngstown State University and Northeast Ohio Medical University. Acton credits her medical residency in the Bronx during the crack epidemic with her decision to pursue public health and preventive medicine. Back in Ohio, she spent most of the decade prior to her government appointment as a public health professor. Acton met DeWine through one of his aides while serving on a youth homelessness task force at the philanthropic organization where she worked as a grants manager. In Acton's retelling, she found the governor immediately 'disarming.' Acton was a pro-choice Democrat, DeWine a pro-life Republican who came up in the Bush-era GOP. Before Covid, the role of state health director was generally seen as apolitical (and non-specialized: one of Acton's predecessors was the former executive director of the Ohio Turnpike). Acton said she and DeWine were both passionate about addressing vexing health issues like the opioid epidemic and the state's below-average life expectancy. Their first joint Covid briefing was March 7, 2020. 'We know once again that there's a lot of fear, a lot of confusion out there,' Acton, wearing a white lab coat, told the press corps at the Ohio Statehouse. Two days later, Acton and DeWine signed a health order making Ohio the first state in the nation to close its schools. Almost overnight, the weekday 2 p.m. Covid pressers became appointment viewing with dedicated hashtags on a pre-Elon Musk Twitter and homemade merch. Fans praised DeWine's 'aggressive sincerity, buttressed by his endearing dorkiness,' and Acton's 'super powerful' determination and 'soothing' tone. They produced over-the-top tributes, like a cartoon of Acton and DeWine set to the theme from the '70s sitcom Laverne & Shirly. It was all part of a larger trend of prayer candles for Fauci and liberals swooning over a pre-scandal Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York. 'You could see [the pandemic] being solved, literally, day by day, and then the rest of the time behind the scenes,' said Acton, who praised DeWine for allowing the briefings to be authentic and unscripted. DeWine was also Acton's chief defender during this time, hailing her as a 'good, compassionate and honorable person' who, in the face of intense backlash, has 'worked nonstop to save lives and protect her fellow citizens.' As neo-Nazi protesters descended on the statehouse and Acton's neighborhood, DeWine warned: 'Any complaints about the policy of this administration need to be directed at me. I am the officeholder, and I appointed the director. Ultimately, I am responsible for the decisions in regard to the coronavirus. The buck stops with me.' The governor even lauded her live on air after she resigned. 'It's true not all heroes wear capes,' DeWine said on June 11, 2020. 'Some of them do, in fact, wear a white coat, and this particular hero's white coat is embossed with the name Dr. Amy Acton.' Acton stepped down as caseloads were plateauing and calls were mounting for DeWine to loosen the reins. But Acton was uncomfortable with outsiders influencing how the state reopened, she now says. From the pandemic's onset, Acton had been the governor's top adviser on health matters and a key collaborator on health orders. 'What changed in June was the pressure to sign orders,' Acton said. 'At a certain point the orders started to feel like political pressure … industries trying to leverage their [influence] to get something through the pandemic.' The county fair order, which allowed thousands of maskless spectators, 'just made no sense to me at all … I didn't sign it,' she said. DeWine's office declined to comment on the record, but noted the fair order was introduced several days after Acton's departure. Any illusion of cozy bipartisanship was gone within a year of those early briefings. In February 2021, a reporter asked DeWine about rumors Acton was considering a U.S. Senate campaign. DeWine smirked. 'I'm going to stay out of Democrat primaries, so … no comment.' For DeWine, the price of working closely with a Democrat was a semi-serious primary in 2022. 'I could give Amy Acton a pass, simply because she was acting on the knowledge she had at the time, and she was acting on good faith,' said former Republican state Rep. John Becker. 'The governor was the guy that we in the General Assembly had the problem with.' DeWine easily won the general election, though, which the Democrats now pushing Acton's candidacy take as a positive sign. 'DeWine was rewarded by voters as having been seen as reasonable, thoughtful, careful,' said David Pepper, the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. 'I think in one way we've let the negative side of Covid — the RFK wing of the world — define the response to Covid, when in fact, Mike DeWine was reelected by 25 points by moderate voters who, on another part of their ballot, voted for Tim Ryan [for Senate].' In early April, as Acton was embarking on a listening tour for her campaign, conservative Cleveland radio host Bob Frantz prodded DeWine about whether he might endorse his former health director against Ramaswamy or another Republican. 'Easiest question you've asked me,' DeWine told Frantz. 'I'm a Republican.' Facing off against Ramaswamy, Acton would be forced to answer for the many things well-intentioned public health experts got wrong at the very onset of the pandemic. We now know the virus doesn't transmit well outdoors or via surfaces, which means nobody really needed to be wiping down groceries or disinfecting the mail. There's also plenty of research now into the harmful impact of lockdowns and school closures on mental health and academics. When I asked Acton about the aspects of pandemic response that didn't age well, she argued her decision-making then was based on the best available data, while also taking into account the imperative to use stay-at-home orders sparingly. 'You don't want to do the throttle down unless absolutely your systems are collapsing,' she said. 'The best way to save the economy was to get control of the virus and be able to treat it and keep people working. So you should have had very few quarantine orders, [which are] 150-year-old powers to keep people safe.' In a statement to POLITICO Magazine, Ramaswamy senior campaign strategist Jai Chabria accused Acton, Ohio's 'Chief Lockdown Officer,' of 'keeping kids home so long they forgot what a classroom looked like. Some lost a full year of learning — and not just math and reading, but basic childhood stuff like making friends and playing sports.' Shaughnessy Naughton, the president of 314 Action, a liberal PAC supporting scientists and doctors that has endorsed Acton and is making a major push to elect doctors up and down the ballot, also conceded that lockdowns are a fraught subject. 'I think you do have to recognize that there are portions of the population that still are upset about the shutdowns, especially around schooling,' she said. With several years' hindsight, Acton still regards sweeping school closures as utterly necessary, arguing that buildings were going dark even before the state had issued orders mandating remote classrooms. 'Schools were closing already because no one was showing up,' she told me. 'Getting kids educated was the question. How do we keep kids talking to teachers? How do we get breakfast to them when they're in a food program? Those were the problems we were solving then, because it wasn't safe to be in schools. But by fall, we started to know how to open school safely.' (Acton was no longer health director when DeWine released school reopening guidelines in July, though she was technically still employed as an advisor through early August.) While many Democrats may be excited for Acton's comeback, others are more clear-eyed about their chances after endless defeats in the Trump era, including Brown's loss to Republican Bernie Moreno in November. 'I think what's unknown about her is where does she stand on all the other things,' said David Plant, the chairman of the local Democratic Party in ultra-red Defiance County. 'She's going to have to really work to define that. Because there's no doubt the Republicans will try to brand her for that.' At a deeper level, Acton has to reckon with the reality that Covid, the event that catapulted her into public consciousness, might render her an unpleasant memory for the many Ohioans who'd much rather never think about the practical reality of that time again. 'I don't think people want to hear about [Covid],' said Jim Watkins, a former director of a rural county health department. 'I hope they would not pigeonhole her with that, but that is baggage that's going to be there.' Acton realizes there are 'probably a lot of Democrats who fear I'm not electable because of Covid. They also think you're not electable because you're a woman, even though Kansas has had three women governors and Michigan is on their third almost. They'll say I'm not tough enough. Some of that was due to misunderstanding about why I stepped down.' But when problems like this arise now, Acton often reaches for one of the lessons she absorbed from Covid: 'A leader,' she said, 'has to maximize the best outcomes you can get with what you have as your reality.'
