THE ATLANTIC MORPHED INTO THE BABYLON BEE SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Public-Health Officials Should Have Been Talking About Their Sex Parties the Whole Time.
In conversations caught on hidden camera, New York City’s former COVID czar said that he’d organized a pair of sex parties in the second half of 2020, as New Yorkers coped with peak pandemic social isolation. “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 told an undercover reporter with whom he thought he was on a date. In a video compiled from several recordings taken this summer, the onetime senior public-health adviser to city hall describes the two events that took place in August and November of 2020. He also talked about his work promoting vaccination in the city by making it “very uncomfortable” for those who wanted to avoid the shots.
“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,” Varma said in a statement to The Atlantic. He acknowledged having participated in “two private gatherings” during his time in government, and said he takes responsibility “for not using the best judgment at the time.” The statement also notes that the taped conversations were “secretly recorded, spliced, diced, and taken out of context.”
In New York City during 2020, everything was pretty much prohibited – unless you were firebombing police cars and looting in the name of George Floyd. Then-Mayor De Blasio became infamous for singling out “the Jewish community” by name in April of 2020:
“My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”
Playgrounds were closed and their doors welded shut. Families attending funerals were severely curtailed. Indoor dining was banned.
But hey, if only DeBlasio’s COVID czar had disclosed his sex parties; nobody who had seen their livelihoods throttled or their lives disrupted would have minded then. Go, have fun, blow off steam – you’ve earned it, big guy!
As Charles Cooke wrote in 2021, “Rule-Breaking Elites Let the Mask Slip on COVID Protocols. It turns out that all those onerous health-and-safety requirements were only for the regular people this whole time.”