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Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine imposed sweeping measures days before a single case of COVID-19 had been reported in his state. Ohio has since seen a significant flattening of the curve. The Washington Post Live welcomed DeWine on April 13 in conversation with Washington Post National political reporter Robert Costa, as part of the series, “Coronavirus: Leadership During Crisis”.

This article uses the concept of autoimmunity as a framework to examine how public health, designed to help protect the entirety of a population (and therefore act as an immune system), turns to an autoimmune response during pandemic flare-ups. In this context, public health campaigns seek an overactive and overrepresented focus on historically marginalized and at-risk populations, resulting in a targeting that places both the self of the body politic and the non-self of the targeted population at risk for infection. The persistency of autoimmunity as public health is evident in the America Responds to AIDS campaign of the 1980s and 1990s and Ohio’s Together Ohio and More than a Mask campaigns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using these examples, the article examines the paradox of distinguishing and blurring the self and non-self by emphasizing collective risk and collective action and overrepresenting Blackness, demonstrating a latent autoimmunity of prejudice that informs public health messaging and its reception.

The Ohio State Legislature is among the growing nationwide trend in attacking LGBTQ+ rights. Chief among these is Ohio House Bill 8, which claims to limit the types of content children encounter in schools. While the drafters cite this noble intent, the bill's actual impact further harms queer students and teachers, who already bear heavier mental health burdens due to such legislation and its societal implications. This type of legislation recently originated in Florida, where it was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 and garnered national media attention. As Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed a near-identical bill in January 2025, the outcomes observed in Florida inform the constitutional analyses for the Ohio constituency. As in Florida, Ohio's bill is left intentionally vague, banning \"gender ideology\" and \"sexual concepts\" in classrooms or constraining them to what is deemed age-appropriate without providing sufficient guidelines for what may be acceptable. The disparate impact of this legislation is rooted entirely in gender classifications, triggering intermediate scrutiny. The bill's ambiguity creates a chilling effect on students' First Amendment rights by restricting the ability to express gender non-conformity without the school disclosing such changes to their families, disregarding the child's safety, and limiting the type of instruction children may receive in the classroom. Consequently, this compels schools to treat LGBTQ+ students and age-appropriate content differently from their heteronormative counterparts, inherently relegating those with queer identities as second-class citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection and Substantive Due Process clauses.