NYC mayor's former public health advisor exposed for breaking his own rules

Dr. Jay K. Varma bragged about breaking his own rules during the darkest days of the pandemic while on hidden camera...

Dr. Jay Varma just realized that his candid admissions on a series of dates with an undercover investigative journalist were recorded and would be made public.

---

Varma was not cheating on his wife, Dr. Melissa Varma, a NYC Pediatrician. They have an open marriage, he assures Steven Crowder, a “conservative” American-Canadian political commentator. He’s troubled because he divulged that while he was setting NYC’s policies on social distancing, gathering and vaccine mandates as then NYC mayor Bill de Blasio’s senior advisor for public health, he had hosted two parties where he and guests took MDMA (ecstasy).

He further admitted that he attended an underground party with over 200 attendees. This was at a time when such activity was against the rules—rules which he wrote.

Crowder broke this story last week on his YouTube Channel. He correctly points out that this story is not merely about hypocrisy by an unelected official, it is about the fact that Varma clearly did not fear the virus that he told the rest of us to fear. It was this fear that made the public comply with social distancing rules, travel and visitation restrictions, stay at home recommendations and, of course, vaccination mandates.

But Dr. Varma didn’t fear getting or spreading Covid-19 as much as he wanted us to. Here are a few of his gleeful admissions made on hidden camera:

“We went to some underground, like, dance party, like underneath a bank in Wall Street, and we were all rolling, we were all taking ‘molly’, everybody is high”

“I had to be kind of sneaky about it...I was running the entire Covid response for the city…we rented a hotel...we all took like, you know, molly[Ecstasy/MDMA] … 8 to 10 of us were in a room...like just being naked with friends…”

“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.”

“It’s so funny. It’s because I did all this deviant, sexual stuff while I was on TV and people are like, ‘aren’t you afraid? aren’t you embarrassed?’ and I was like NO, actually. I’m like, I really love being my authentic self!”

No wonder Dr. Varma appears resigned when Crowder confronted him. His wife may not care that he was on a date with another woman. Possession of illegal drugs like ecstasy is a punishable offense that would generally result in a suspension of a doctor’s medical license, but Varma is currently the Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of a pharmaceutical company, SIGA Technologies and probably doesn’t need a license in medicine to collect his salary. He knows he went too far, not with his actions but with the way he talked about them.

And then there was the Covid vaccines. Varma casually mentions that he was the one that pushed Mayor de Blasio to mandate them. His unseen date asks him if people lost their jobs because they refused:

“There might have been. But it was just a small number of people.”

She pushes him further, asking him if the fear of the unvaccinated was justified:

“It’s so bizarre. I think it’s a weird belief that somehow their body is different. It doesn’t make any difference at all. Everybody’s been exposed to the virus, whether you have been exposed to the virus because it’s breathed on you or you got it injected into you, it’s the same immune response.”

A “weird belief” that the unvaccinated posed a threat? I wonder where people got this idea from?

Varma finally said something that makes sense, sort of. It doesn’t make any difference if you were exposed through infection or injection. Of course it does make a difference. Exposure through infection results in broader and more enduring immunity. That’s how our immune system works when it hasn’t been hacked by vaccine exposure. But Dr. Varma is saying that mandating a vaccine on those who have already had Covid was useless. Why then did he push the mayor to mandate the vaccine on everybody??

He is never forced to answer this question, but later he gives us some idea of how things work in public health. Come up with a simple strategy, invite everybody to get a vaccine and then make it harder and harder for people who refuse to live their lives. Problem solved. There’s no reason to even consider the hardship that was inflicted on those who hesitated. Vaccines are 100% safe, so no harm done. Real phenomena like pathogenic priming which can make some people more susceptible to a worse course of disease once exposed after vaccinated need not be considered. It’s truly mind boggling that these are the kinds of experts that dictate public health policy.

Towards the end of the gotcha encounter, Jay Varma feebly explains that his admissions shouldn’t be taken that seriously, after all he was just babbling on a date. He was just playing the bad guy to impress. Some women like mavericks and guys who push limits and break them, right? He doesn’t seem to understand the difference between breaking someone else’s rules and breaking your own. One is a demonstration of principled irreverence towards authority, the other is a demonstration of the lack of principle. One is courageous, the other is cowardly.

We should be troubled with Varma’s last statement. His “authentic self” is not the one that appeared on TV daily as the mayor’s public health czar. That’s probably why he “had to blow off steam every now and then”. How many of our other public health officials play to the camera while leading much different personal lives?

This man fascinates me because he and I have some big things in common. We both have a south-Indian heritage. We both went to college here in Boston (Varma graduated with highest honors from Harvard). We both pursued medical degrees. We both served as chief resident of our respective training programs. We both have been, how shall I put it, generously endowed in the schnoz department…

That’s where things diverge. I rejected an academic appointment and went on to take care of people in the community, one-on-one. Varma chose a different path, consulting for the CDC in Asia and Africa to help people by setting policy instead. He describes his career on his Linkedin account:

“I am a physician executive and epidemiologist who has led and transformed large health systems, managed complex emergencies, conducted high impact research studies, and developed local, national, and global policies that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States, Southeast Asia, China, and Africa. Throughout my career, I have moved seamlessly across the globe, cultivating partnerships with government, private sector, academia, and civil society to develop strategy and build health delivery operations that avert illness and maximize wellness. A skilled writer and public speaker, I have authored over 150 scientific manuscripts and essays, co-authored a book, and made over 100 appearances on international, national, and local television and radio, including CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and NPR. From April 2020 - April 2021, I appeared daily alongside the New York City Mayor at his daily press conferences about the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Impressive.

I never gave much thought to academia and research until the pandemic struck. Varma authored over 150 scientific manuscripts. I co-authored only one. Coincidentally, at the same time when he was setting pandemic policy in NYC—including mask mandates—our paper showed how the CDC was using mathematical trickery to claim that mask mandates were associated with a decrease in the daily growth of cases.

To his credit, Varma did not agree with public school closures and still believes that his policies saved the lives of many denizens of the big apple. For what it’s worth, he also tested all his MDMA party guests for Covid before getting naked with them.

But Varma’s story hints at something very rotten at the highest levels. How can a person claim to be authentic when they are living two completely different lives with different standards? How deep is the intellectual bypassing amongst those who dictate how we live? Is it the power they have over others (Varma coyly told his date that most people aren’t smart enough to understand the science, but they will comply when rules are made that make their lives difficult—that’s what public health officials like him do)?

And who and what lurks beneath the banks on Wall Street?! Whoever threw the large, drug-fueled party when millions of NYC residents were told to stay home must have known that if invited, the mayor’s own Covid-19 policy maker would show up, without the cops.