The architect behind New York City’s social distancing and vaccine policies attended sex parties and a 200-plus-person dance party while telling New Yorkers to mask up and avoid large gatherings, according to a new video.
In a compilation of recorded conversations with an off-camera woman posing to be his date, Dr. Jay Varma, the senior public health adviser to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio from April 2020 to May 2021, talks about the strong influence he had in crafting policies such as instituting a vaccine mandate. In the video, which was edited, Varma takes credit for how this policy prevented Brooklyn Nets player Kyrie Irving, who refused to get the vaccine, from playing basketball.
The recorded conversations were shared by conservative YouTube commentator Steven Crowder, who eventually confronted Varma in the video.
Varma had shared with the woman off camera that he and his wife had hosted a sex party in a hotel room and invited eight to ten people in August 2020. At the time, indoor gatherings were permitted for up to ten people in New York. Still, Varma said it would have been “an embarrassment” if it got out.
“I had to be kind of sneaky about it,” Varma says in the video. “I was running the entire COVID response for the city.”
Responding to the recordings, Varma did not dispute their validity, but he pointed out how they were edited and his words were “taken out of context.”
“I was targeted by an operative for an extremist right-wing organization determined to malign public health officials and take down the public health system in America,” Varma said in his statement. “I stand by my efforts to get New Yorkers vaccinated against Covid-19, and I reject dangerous extremist efforts to undermine the public’s confidence in the need for and effectiveness of vaccines.”
Even after leaving New York City’s government, Varma continued to be a proponent of wearing masks and mandating vaccines after, authoring an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2022.
“Like everyone else, health officials and providers like me wish the epidemic would end,” Varma wrote. “But instead, we must live in a parallel universe in which preventing and managing Covid-19 remains a daily focus when everyone else seems to have moved on.”
New York City had one of the nation’s strictest social distancing policies regarding COVID-19, playing a part in the permanent closure of thousands of businesses and the mass exodus of tens of thousands of New Yorkers.
Now, with the recordings in circulation, Democratic City Councilman Robert Holden called on Mayor Eric Adams to investigate Varma and drop the city’s appeals in lawsuits filed by city workers fired for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
“This was the public health expert for the city while it was shut down — he was busy having sex parties,” Holden wrote in a statement issued by his office. “It’s alarming, especially with so many first responders, city workers and everyday New Yorkers losing their jobs.”
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Varma is just one name added to a long list of leaders who called for strict social distancing restrictions while failing to abide by them themselves. Among those included was Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who attended dinner at the French Laundry in November 2020 while restaurants were shuttered throughout the state.
Varma now works as the executive vice president and chief medical officer at SIGA Technologies, a pharmaceutical company.