COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio is still recovering from the toughest point of the pandemic on businesses, jobs, and the economy. The recovery is going faster than Ohio’s Lieutenant Governor expected.
“It went from 2020 when we didn't know what we were dealing with to a crisis that we didn't know what the solution was to managing the solution in 2021. The vaccine changed it all,” said Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted.
“In 2021, we had access to a vaccine that worked that either kept you from getting sick or at least limited the opportunity that you would get severely sick, which could enable people to resume much of their normal lives to go back to work, to do family gatherings to begin to socialize and resume the lives that they remembered. And in so, instead of being in crisis management, we were an opportunity management.”
The pandemic caused many in Ohio’s workforce to reevaluate their careers, prompting some to either leave industries forced to shut down during surging cases, leave the workforce altogether, or retire early.
“We're creating jobs in Ohio faster than we can find people to fill them,” said Husted. “Just to put this in perspective: on unemployment compensation, we have 50,000 people in Ohio, which is really historically low. We have 150,000 jobs just in Ohio Means Jobs that pay $50,000 a year or more. 250,000 jobs in total. I can't believe how quickly we've recovered. Frankly, I remember sitting there during the pandemic, where we, two weeks earlier, had record low unemployment. And then in literally a two-week period went to record high unemployment, I thought it would take a decade to recover. Largely, we are recovered in terms of people who want jobs being able to find them. But we still have challenges.”
Husted explained that the state has created programs and incentives to get people back to work, and back to Ohio.
“Through JobsOhio, we're literally pushing out job opportunities to people who maybe grew up here went to college here used to work here, we scrape the data off of the job postings and the resume sheets that are out there.,” said Husted. “We're also paying bonuses to high schools to graduate more students with industry-recognized credentials. With Ohio to Work, we're focusing on people maybe who are leaving who are on TANF, who are maybe recovering from an addiction or leaving incarceration to get them connected to jobs. We're literally trying to connect everybody that we can into the economy to get them working because we can't grow the economy until we grow the workforce.”
A distraction to the Lt.Governor’s economic recovery efforts in the state stemmed from a tweet he shared on March 26 with an article about former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, telling CNN he believed the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, despite having no evidence.
This led to a letter sent to him by members of the Asian-American community in Upper Arlington. This was during a time when the #StopAsianHate movement was gaining traction after hate crimes against Asians picked up after the pandemic was being blamed on China.
10TV’s Clay Gordon revisited the controversial comments with Husted to see if he would have handled the situation any differently.
“I probably would have inserted the word lab but other than that, I mean there are others who are trying to distort that as meaning something else than what it did. I was focused on the disease, the cover-up by the Chinese Communist Party and that's it, that's what the focus was, and I believe it was true then, it's true now,” said Husted.
Clay: “You don't think it's necessary for any sort of apology?”
Husted: “No."
Senate Bill 22 was passed after it was vetoed by Governor Mike DeWine to revoke the state's emergency and health orders. The Ohio Senate and House both override the veto to restrict the governor and health department on future mandates.
Husted says SB 22 doesn’t impact Ohio currently.
“We said Senate Bill 22 doesn't affect anything right now in terms of how we're managing the pandemic, because we have the vaccine.” Said Husted. “The only thing with Senate Bill 22 is you never know what's going to come next. You never know if there's going to be a new type of disease, virus that's out there that we will need to respond quickly to. So this is the nature of how you make public policy, you manage it, you have reactions to it.”
Husted told 10TV he plans on running for reelection for the current position he holds under Governor DeWine. He said the reelection campaign is set to back up soon to finish what they’ve started.
“We have a lot of things to accomplish in Ohio, that we’ve still haven’t accomplished. But, you know, COVID did distract us a bit, but we never took our eye off the ball. We are focused on the innovation economy; we're focused on the workforce. I really believe that the next 10 years in Ohio creates an enormous opportunity for us to restore things that have been being produced overseas, that companies now are saying we want to manufacture those things in America, that Ohio is uniquely positioned to win that.”
Husted said he does not plan on running for governor soon.
“Governor DeWine and I are going to run for reelection. He's going to run for governor. I'll run for lieutenant governor. And then what happens beyond that? Well, we'll let the future work itself out.”
