Ramaswamy’s campaign has previously said they paid a Wikipedia editor to correct inaccuracies.
Days before announcing his presidential bid, Vivek Ramaswamy paid a Wikipedia editor to remove information about his close relationship with a scientist who helped pioneer mRNA vaccines, suggesting Ramaswamy believed the association with technology that was ultimately used to create the Covid-19 vaccines could be a detriment to his campaign.
Mediaite first revealed in May that Ramaswamy had paid an editor with the screen name “Jhofferman” to make edits to his biographical details on Wikipedia. Those edits included the removal of lines about Ramaswamy’s receipt of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011 and his position on Ohio’s Covid-19 Response Team. The report revealed that the Covid work was removed by Ramaswamy’s request, while the editor deleted the fellowship information after finding it was “extraneous material.”
Now, a National Review analysis reveals the paid editor also removed references to Ramaswamy’s religion and his relationship with professor Douglas Melton.
Melton, a stem-cell chemist who was one of the pioneers of the mRNA vaccine, was previously mentioned as a “mentor” to Ramaswamy on his wikipedia page. The biotech entrepreneur-turned-presidential candidate had worked for Melton in his lab while studying biology at Harvard.
On February 9, 2023, 12 days before Ramaswamy formally announced his entrance to the race, Jhofferman also deleted a sentence in the Wikipedia bio that indicated “Ramaswamy identifies as a Hindu.” The edit reveals the line was removed at the subject’s request.
While the Wikipedia bio currently does not contain any reference to Melton’s mentorship of Ramaswamy, shortly after Jhofferman deleted the reference to Ramaswamy’s Hindu faith, a different editor added a line noting that Ramaswamy “is a Hindu, and has stressed his belief in one God.”
A section about Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign reads: “During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he sought to appeal to evangelical Christian right and Christian nationalist voters, an important part of the Republican base, some of whom were unwilling to support a non-Christian presidential candidate such as Ramaswamy (who is Hindu). In campaign stops and interviews, Ramaswamy has criticized secularism. He said that the U.S. was founded on ‘Christian values’ or ‘Judeo-Christian values’; that he shares those values; and that he believes in one God.”
National Review’s analysis of the Wikipedia edits to Ramaswamy’s page also reveal a pair of edits made in November 2022 and July 2022 were made from an IP address in Ohio, where Ramaswamy lives.
In November 2022, Wikipedia editors noted the entrepreneurs’s page “gives off the strong impression of being written by either the subject or his wife.”
On February 13, a Wikipedia editor admonished Ramaswamy for attributing phrasing to the Federalist Society that in fact came from a biography on the group’s site that he had likely written himself. “It’s not correct to say the Federalist Society described him this way,” the editor wrote. A similar mischaracterization was made in a Ramaswamy campaign mailer that suggested Politico called him the “Intellectual godfather of the anti-woke movement,” when in fact the article said he calls himself that.
The Ramaswamy campaign did not respond to National Review’s request for comment.
However, Ramaswamy spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin responded to the edits that were previously reported by Mediaite by claiming the changes were only revisions of “factual distortions” on a “number of topics, including family members’ names.”
McLaughlin told HuffPost at the time that Ramaswamy was not trying to hide anything about his past.
“The point is getting accurate information on his Wikipedia,” she said, adding that since all of the information is available in a Google search, “it makes sense to clear up lies and deception planted by the very folks who appear to have planted this story.”
“It’s telling that the DeSantis Super PAC promptly distributed this misleading story ― says a lot about where this non-story came from,” she added at the time.
Those initial edits had at one time earned Ramaswamy a new subhead on his page labeled “Potential misuse of Wikipedia,” that read, “Ramaswamy may have paid an editor to alter his Wikipedia page to appear more favorable to political conservatives before announcing his campaign.”
While anyone can edit most Wikipedia pages, aside from pages with specific protections, Wikipedia says that “one of the most frowned-upon things in Wikipedia etiquette… is to edit one’s own page.”
Wikipedia rules require editors who receive compensation for their edits to “disclose who is paying you to edit (your “employer”), who the client is, and any other relevant role or relationship.”
That Ramaswamy sought to distance himself from any relation with the mRNA vaccine perhaps comes as little surprise as the two frontrunners in the GOP primary have been engaged in a political war over the jab.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis placed himself to the right of former president Donald Trump on the issue of vaccines in December when he announced plans to empanel a grand jury to investigate “any and all wrongdoing” involving Covid-19 vaccines in the state. DeSantis did not elaborate on what “wrongdoing” the grand jury would investigate, and most health officials agree that the Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are safe and effective at preventing serious illness or death from Covid-19, though concerns have emerged about an increased risk of stroke among elderly vaccine recipients and an elevated risk of myocarditis among young, male recipients.
Reporting in the spring indicated Trump allies were building a file of “opposition research” on DeSantis that shows the governor’s support for the vaccine in its early days, the New York Times reported. The research includes footage of DeSantis taking delivery of some of the first vaccines in America and “news B-roll of DeSantis presiding over vaccinations of elderly people.”
While Trump previously touted his administration’s efforts on the vaccine, known as “Operation Warp Speed,” as a great achievement, he has since sought to distance himself from the jabs to appeal to a portion of the Republican base that is skeptical of the shots.