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…