On a secret recording, Jay Varma admitted to hosting sex parties at the same time he was overseeing NYC’s Covid lockdown policies.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look back at how public health officials lost the trust of the public they were meant to serve, and cover more media misses.
NYC Covid Czar Needed to ‘Blow off Steam’
It should come as no surprise that it took four years and a conservative podcaster to expose the hypocrisy of New York City’s former Covid czar, given how quickly the corporate press fell into line behind public-health experts during the pandemic, treating criticism of their personal conduct or their diktats as a threat to the collective.
New York City’s former Covid czar is in hot water after he was caught on hidden camera bragging about organizing sex parties during the strict Covid lockdowns he oversaw in 2020.
“The only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then,” Jay Varma said in a video filmed by an undercover reporter, whom the epidemiologist believed he was on a date with.
Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder first shared the video last week.
In the secretly obtained recording, Varma can be heard discussing a pair of sex parties that he and his wife arranged in hotels in August and November of 2020 and admitted it would have been a “real embarrassment” for the city if he had been caught.
“I did all this deviant, like sexual stuff while I was like, you know, like on TV and stuff. People were like, ‘Aren’t you afraid? Aren’t you embarrassed?’ and I was like, ‘No, actually, I’m like, I love being my authentic self,’” he said.
Of the gathering in August, Varma said eight to ten people attended, and everyone took MDMA. “Everybody had a blast because everybody was like so pent up,” he said.
New York’s rules at the time limited gatherings to ten people or fewer, the Atlantic reports. At the time, the city also urged residents to keep group sex to a minimum, urging New Yorkers to “limit the size of” their guest lists.
In June 2021, after he left his job as senior health adviser for city hall but was still consulting on Covid policies for the city, he attended a dance party with more than 200 people underneath a bank on Wall Street. “We were all rolling, we’re all taking molly [MDMA] and everybody’s high. And I was so happy because I hadn’t done that in like a year and a half,” he said.
That same month, Varma wrote in the Atlantic calling for a “more targeted approach” to Covid restrictions. “One that neither requires universal sacrifice nor relieves everyone of all inconvenience.”
But it was too late by that point. Sacrifices had already been made.
Covid restrictions led to 5,000 business closures in Manhattan alone.
And perhaps worst of all still, Varma admits on video that neither he nor then-mayor Bill de Blasio actually believed in Covid school closures that led to learning loss for thousands of children in the city. Instead, Varma claims, de Blasio gave in to the demands of the teachers’ union for reasons of political expediency.
“He’s a bit of a weenie. He had a lot of problems,” Varma said.
“I wanted kids in schools, the mayor wanted kids in schools, but the teachers’ unions didn’t,” he added. “The teachers’ unions wanted all the teachers to be able to stay home and Zoom so they’d be safe, even though it means that kids get hurt. So the mayor was screwed.”
“Kids learn more when [they’re] in school. . . . When you’re an 8 or 9 year old you can’t sit in front of a f***ing Zoom screen all day,” he said. “We didn’t have a choice; the mayor really wanted them in school, but the unions didn’t.”
And yet, even after the public emergency ended and Mayor Eric Adams took over and clawed back a number of pandemic-era rules and restrictions, Varma spoke out at the time against moves to end indoor-vaccination requirements, allow city workers back, and open schools.
The Gotham Gazette called him “one of the most prominent critics of Mayor Adams’ unwinding of pandemic-era health measures.” As late as 2022, he was calling for new lockdown rules on nail salons.
In discussions with the undercover reporter, Varma talks about his work making it “very uncomfortable” for individuals who didn’t want to receive the Covid-19 jab.
The city’s vaccine mandates took effect in the second half of 2021. The policy led some 9,000 city workers to be placed on unpaid leave over reluctance to receive the jab, though many of the workers ultimately acquiesced and took the shots. Still, hundreds are still unemployed and embroiled in legal efforts to take back their old jobs.
While Varma has admitted to making the various on-camera comments, he argues he 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.”
But in fact, many so-called public-health experts were largely given a free pass from the mainstream media throughout the pandemic era.
California senator Dianne Feinstein was spotted maskless on several occasions, including on Capitol Hill and at the airport, despite having publicly touted the ability of masking to decrease transmission of Covid-19 and claiming that wearing masks in public “should be mandatory.” But the senator, who died in 2023 at the age of 90, avoided criticism of her apparent hypocrisy from much of the mainstream media.
And while other public officials’ hypocrisy garnered coverage — see California governor Gavin Newsom’s flouting of his own restrictions to dine with lobbyists at the French Laundry or Denver mayor Michael Hancock urging people not to travel to see family for Thanksgiving, then flying to Mississippi to see his daughter — most prominent journalists never questioned whether these leaders’ refusal to follow their own strict rules meant the rules were never worth following in the first place.
Across the pond, it was British news organizations that first outed then-prime minister Boris Johnson and his staff for holding a series of parties in 2020 and 2021 that flouted pandemic restrictions.
The controversy, dubbed “partygate,” led to a 14-month government investigation that found that Johnson’s earlier denials that any parties took place and later assurances that pandemic rules and guidance were followed were misleading.
Johnson and his wife were fined by police for breaching Covid-19 laws at a birthday party for him in June 2020 at his Downing Street home and office.
But back here, the mainstream media failed to use their better judgment and fell hook line and sinker for the experts’ latest claim, all under the guise of “following the science.”
Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci are at the center of many of the most egregious examples.
In fact, Fauci ardently defended two of the earliest Covid falsehoods: that a lab leak could not have been the cause of the pandemic and that the social-distancing requirement of six feet was grounded in science.
At the time, Fauci pointed to a peer-reviewed study that suggested the virus had leapt from animals to people, rather than having leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
However, Fauci failed to reveal that the study was his idea: He commissioned the study to discredit the lab-leak theory and even had final approval over its contents.
And on the six-foot distancing rule, Fauci has since acknowledged that the guidance “sort of just appeared.” Collins has similarly said he did “not see any evidence” supporting the rule.
And both officials falsely claimed the NIH was not involved in funding “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And these are just some of the pandemic falsehoods that have emerged in the last four and a half years. There’s no telling what we may come to learn ten, 20, 30 years from now.
Headline Fail of the Week
“Trump pivots from second apparent assassination attempt to more incendiary claims.” That’s the framing CNN chose for its reporting on the former president after he survived yet another apparent assassination attempt, this time at his West Palm Beach golf course.
“When a bullet grazed his ear in a horrific shooting that killed a rally goer in July, Trump initially acted like a changed man, telling The Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito he had a chance to bring the country and the world together — although that aspiration did not last any longer than the opening paragraphs of his convention speech,” CNN reports.
The outlet says Trump told Fox News “without evidence that the alleged would-be shooter ‘believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it.’”
Trump went on to say, “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
However, the would-be assassin, Ryan Routh, wrote about his intent to kill the former president in a note months before the incident that seems to vindicate Trump. Routh wrote in the note “to the world” that Trump is morally unfit to be president, much like Harris and Biden argue.
The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols took a page out of CNN’s book in writing about Trump after the incident: “Donald Trump is using another possible attempt on his life to inflame tensions in America, which is one more reason he should never be president again.”
Media Misses
• New York magazine’s star political correspondent Olivia Nuzzi was placed on leave last week after an alleged romantic relationship she had with former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to light. Nuzzi, who first denied the allegations, has since admitted to having a digital-only relationship with the 70-year-old Democrat-turned-independent that first began sometime after she wrote a feature about him in 2023. The magazine has hired a third party to investigate Nuzzi’s objectivity in her past reporting on the presidential race, which up until a month ago still included RFK Jr.
• Representative Nancy Mace (R., S.C.) outed liberal academic and CNN guest Michael Eric Dyson for his two-faced behavior on-air compared with his behavior in private. During a recent CNN panel, Dyson essentially called Mace racist for her mispronunciation of VP Kamala Harris’s first name. But afterward, the pair took a photo together which Dyson then sent to Mace and said, “Shh don’t tell anybody. We look good together!” His text messages included kissing emojis, and he complimented Mace’s “gorgeousness.” After the congresswoman made the texts public, Dyson doubled down and accused her of telling “ridiculous lies.”
“I had no intent with her to do anything but be nice. And her white women’s tears and mendacity are all in the service of lies and distortions. I was wrong about one thing: she IS a bigot and racist,” he said.
• The Associated Press asked a question that was easily answered last week: “The Lebanon explosions raise a question: Deep into the smartphone era, who is still using pagers?” Social-media users were quick to provide the answer: terrorists.