COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Former Ohio Health Director Amy Acton, who became a household name in the state in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, is running for governor.
Acton, 58, a physician and public health expert who stood alongside Republican Gov. Mike DeWine for months during his daily coronavirus briefings, said people still stop her in the grocery store or at a restaurant to share their struggles — and she doesn't want to look away.
“I feel like I have a bond with Ohioans and a connection,” she said in an Associated Press interview. “You don’t go through what we’ve been through — trying to save 11.7 million people the way we did — and not have some special connection.”
Acton filed paperwork and launched her campaign Tuesday. She plans to run as a Democrat, which places her at an immediate disadvantage in a state that has turned solidly red in recent years.
While she has said before that serving in DeWine’s cabinet taught her much about how the office operates, on Tuesday she said she believes that Ohio's Republican leaders — who control all three branches of state government — are spending too much time fighting the culture wars and they're taking the state in the wrong direction.
“It’s not OK with me that Ohioans don’t live as long as people do in other states," she said. "It’s not OK with me to watch what used to be a top education system, state-of-the-art education system, begin to fall year after year after year. It’s not OK with me that our GDP is like 45th and our biggest export is Ohioans, is young people.”
Acton's entry into the race comes as Republicans Lt. Gov. Jon Husted and Attorney General Dave Yost already are positioning to run for the seat, which the 78-year-old DeWine must vacate next year due to term limits. But the landscape of the race is far from settled.
DeWine has yet to appoint a replacement to U.S. Sen. JD Vance, who will be inaugurated as Donald Trump's vice president Jan. 20. Though DeWine has long endorsed Husted as his favored successor, the lieutenant governor is now considered a leading contender as his pick for the Senate. That's after Husted and DeWine met with Trump and Vance last month at Mar-a-Lago, a trip first reported by WEWS-TV.
Giving Husted the job would create a political opening for Trump insider Vivek Ramaswamy to possibly make a gubernatorial run against Yost in the 2026 primary. Ramaswamy has said he would not seek the Senate opening — Ohio's third in as many years — right now, because he's busy heading Trump's Department of Government Efficiency effort with Elon Musk. DOGE is not an actual government department, but a private effort.
DeWine plucked Acton from Ohio State University, where she was an associate professor of public health, to lead the Ohio Department of Health in 2019. As the pandemic ramped up in early 2020, she was thrown into the state and national spotlight — becoming a beloved source of comfort to many viewers of the governor's daily news conferences.
For her service as health director, Acton earned the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation’s Profile in COVID Courage Award, the Columbus Foundation’s Spirit of Columbus Award and Ohio State’s highest alumni honor, the Alumni Medalist Award.
But her position as the face of the DeWine administration's aggressive stance against the virus also earned Acton many enemies, among them Statehouse Republicans and average Ohioans who opposed pandemic restrictions.
During the crisis, Acton used the health director's broad emergency powers to halt the state's 2020 presidential primary, to temporarily close gyms and fitness centers around the state, and to impose stay-at-home orders as the administration tried to prevent COVID’s spread. Husted also took part in the administration's COVID response, but not to the extent that Acton did.
After a grueling period of public exposure, angry demonstrations, lawsuits and personal attacks, Acton resigned her state job in June 2020. DeWine sent her off fondly, describing her as a hero in a white coat. She stayed on as his chief health adviser until that August.
She said Tuesday that she recognizes she has not held elective office, but she feels she has the skills necessary to do the job.
“We know that I’m a doctor. I’m not a politician,” she said. “But I am a leader, and I tend to think of myself as more of a public servant and a problem solver.”
After leaving government, Acton joined the Columbus Foundation as a grants director with the title “vice president for Human:Kind.” She left that post after about six months to explore a run for U.S. Senate, ultimately deciding against joining the 2022 contest won by Vance. She later took on a job as director of the city of Columbus' Project L.O.V.E., an initiative aimed at encouraging early vaccinations in children.
Acton said she has spent all that time supporting candidates and causes that she believes in and carefully considering whether to enter politics.
“My challenge to whoever else wants to run in this race is it's time to put something bigger than ourselves at the top here,” she said. “So many of us have values in Ohio that we all hold dear. We have got to put the real problems, the day-to-day problems we all face on the table and put that first.”
FILE - Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton gives an update on the state's preparedness and education efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 in Cleveland, Ohio, Feb. 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak, File)
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Two transgender girls who were the first to challenge President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” have withdrawn their lawsuit in New Hampshire based on a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld state bans on transgender athletes in girls' sports and their own personal hardships, their lawyer said.
“This case was always about two courageous young girls who simply wanted the same opportunities as their peers to participate in school life,” their lawyer, Chris Erchull of GLAD Law, said in a statement Thursday. “Their willingness to stand up to extraordinary hostility made clear the human cost of laws that target transgender youth.”
The teenagers, Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle, took on Trump’s executive order last year, amending their 2024 complaint against New Hampshire's law on banning transgender girls from school sports. A federal judge had granted a court order allowing them to play as the case proceeded.
For Tirrell, it meant being able to keep playing on her high school girls’ soccer team. For Turmelle, it was having a chance to try out for different sports.
Both sides agreed to pause the case and wait for a ruling from the Supreme Court as it considered similar state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school and college athletic teams in Idaho and West Virginia. Last month, the court upheld the laws. It also said that barring transgender girls and women doesn’t run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
Turmelle and her family moved out of New Hampshire last summer following proposed legislation against transgender people. One measure signed into law by Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte last year prohibits medical professionals from providing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to new transgender patients under age 18.
“Though there may be a carve-out for people already receiving gender-affirming care, that is way too close a call for us to risk staying,” Turmelle's mother, Amy Manzetti, wrote in an op-ed piece at the time. “Other New Hampshire laws also seek to erase her.”
Most Republican-controlled states in the past five years have adopted laws or policies limiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors and limiting which school bathrooms transgender people can use, as well as sports restrictions. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that about 3% of youth ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender.
“The challenges with relocation are significant and burdensome — this includes having to find new employment, buying and selling homes, packing and moving possessions, integrating kids with a new school system, losing access to longstanding family and friends, and potential loss of income,” Corinne Goodwin, the executive director of Eastern PA Trans Equality Project in Pennsylvania, said in an email.
"But these families do so because they love their kids and know that supporting them with the care and opportunities they need is critical to their long-term success and happiness.”
Tirrell, 17, began her junior year last fall on the girls' junior varsity soccer team. Things were fine at first, and each time she scored a goal, she got a round of ice cream from her parents. But a few weeks into the season, she decided to stop playing.
“With all of the political stuff going on, soccer wasn't just about the game anymore,” her mother, Sara Tirrell, told The Associated Press in an interview.
It became more about preparing for the possibility of conflict.
“Were there any local Facebook groups where they were sort of agitating about potential protests and how do we prepare, and what are walking into, and we never kind of knew,” she said. “We were on a lot of pins and needles, especially after the previous season."
She was referring to a controversy at an away game where two dads from an opposing team were banned from school grounds for wearing pink wristbands marked “XX” to represent female chromosomes. They sued the school district and a judge ruled against them. They have appealed their case.
Last fall, there was an increased presence of school administrators at the games and bus drivers pulled in closer to the field so the students weren’t in the parking lot, she said.
“Parker didn’t talk about it a lot, but I think she could see that stress for everybody — for her, for her teammates, for her coaches,” Sara Tirrell said. "She felt kind of bad about pulling them all into that circus again. And so she ultimately said, ‘This isn’t fun anymore and I don’t want to do it.’”
Parker’s father described the atmosphere as “palpable tension.”
Even playing on her own turf, “there would typically be a couple of police officers at the home games where there weren’t previously,” Zach Tirrell said.
Parker's parents hope she'll return to playing soccer some day. In the meantime, “she plans to be around and use her voice to continue standing up to discrimination,” her mother said. “In some ways she’s had to grow up a lot faster than some of her peers.”
Associated Press reporter Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, New Jersey, contributed to this article.
FILE - Parker Tirrell, a transgender athlete who plays on her high school's girls soccer team, practices in the driveway of her family home, Friday, March 7, 2025, in Plymouth, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
FILE - Two teens challenging New Hampshire's new law banning transgender girls from girls' sports teams, Parker Tirrell, third from left, and Iris Turmelle, sixth from left, pose with their families and attorneys in Concord, N.H., Aug. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Holly Ramer, File)
FILE - Iris Turmelle walks with her mom, Amy Manzelli, near her high school's tennis courts, Wednesday, March 5, 2025, in Pembroke, N.H. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)
FILE - Parker Tirrell, a transgender athlete who plays on her high school's girls soccer team, heads the ball, Friday, March 7, 2025, in Plymouth, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
