Jirair Ratevosian banks on D.C. experience in race for Congress

As a gay Armenian, representation matters deeply to Jirair Ratevosian.

A few weeks ago, the candidate for Congress and his fiance were at Burbank Pride when he says a man wearing a Trump shirt told him that “Gay Armenians don’t exist.”

“He tried to erase my existence at a time when Armenian existence is actually hanging by a thread,” Ratevosian said.

Ratevosian recently returned from a trip with his parents to visit their homeland, their first in nearly 50 years. There he saw first-hand the crisis spurred by Azerbaijan’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated region which formed the breakaway Republic of Artsakh. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians who fled Artsakh are taking shelter in makeshift camps throughout Armenia as the government tries to find them permanent homes.

Ratevosian calls it “ethnic cleansing” by Azerbaijan, and if voters choose him to fill Adam Schiff’s seat, he intends to address the crisis on Capitol Hill.

“I’m going to Congress for action and that’s what I want to deliver for the people of my community in Los Angeles,” he said.

But first he’s got to get there.

Ratevosian sees himself as both a political outsider and insider.

“You have a lot of career politicians running for this seat,” he said. “People are sick and tired of Congress being out of touch.”

But “Washington, D.C. is not Sacramento,” he said. “We need people who know how that town works. I know that town, that town knows me.”

A former member of U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee’s staff, Ratevosian was appointed by Joe Biden to the State Department, where as a senior health advisor he worked on the nation’s COVID-19 response. He remains an enthusiastic supporter of the president and his policies.

“I think what this administration doesn’t get credit for is the mess we had to clean up,” he said. “Trump had eroded trust in the NIH and CDC and pulled us out of the World Health Organization. It took time to restore US credibility. There’s still a lot of damage. Our public health departments have been underfunded for years.”

He describes himself as progressive but pragmatic. He received a doctoral degree in public health from UCLA, forging a career in health care policymaking and HIV response. For seven years he worked for big pharmaceutical company Gilead as executive director of its Global Patient Solutions department.

“My job was to make the medicines that Gilead developed available for free all around the world,” he said. “I created partnerships with governments across Africa and Asia. I made medications available to poorer and low-income communities. That experience made me smarter about how policy is made. I know how the private sector thinks now. I know the ins and outs of IP and trade policies. I know how to make medicines more affordable.”

He believes corporate money is a compromising influence on America’s politicians, including some of his opponents who are among the race’s frontrunners.

Though he hasn’t accepted any campaign donations from corporations thus far, he wouldn’t necessarily reject a contribution from his former Big Pharma employer if they offered one.

“I’m not ruling that out,” he said. “I’m working in the healthcare space. I want to engage all healthcare stakeholders. I want to make sure the private sector is part of the solution, including making healthcare universal.”