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.”

It’s not clear whether Varma personally violated any COVID rules. The sex parties involved, by the account he gave to the podcaster Steven Crowder in a companion video, “like, 10 people.” At the time, New York’s guidelines—which Varma was promoting far and wide—limited gatherings to 10 people or less in an effort to curb the spread of the virus. Separate city guidance on “Safer Sex and COVID-19” discouraged—but did not forbid—group sex. (“Limit the size of your guest list. Keep it intimate,” the guidance said.) Varma explained that he’d sex-partied responsibly, noting, “Everybody got tests and things like that.” He also said that he’d attended a dance party with hundreds of others in June 2021, after he’d left government (but while he was still consulting for the city on COVID policies).

Still, you might think that a public-health official would do better to skip out on all of these events while other city residents were encouraged to minimize their social interactions. Even if Varma did not personally buck official guidance, others in his family may have crossed the line. He says in the videos that his family traveled to Seattle for Christmas in 2020, and that he didn’t join because the mayor was concerned about the optics: Public-health officials were actively encouraging people to avoid traveling for the holidays to avoid a winter surge. The following January, the U.S. reported a then-record number of COVID deaths.

In June 2021, around the time that he attended the dance party with hundreds of others, Varma wrote an article for The Atlantic about the tricky calculus behind vaccine mandates and related COVID policies. “Many academic public-health experts favor more stringent restrictions than public-sector practitioners, including me, believe are realistic,” he wrote. He argued instead for what he called “a more targeted approach—one that neither requires universal sacrifice nor relieves everyone of all inconvenience.”

Perhaps it would have helped if he’d shared his own struggles with that tension at the time. Social-science research tells us that public-health messaging wins trust most effectively when it leads with empathy—when leaders show that they understand how people feel and what they want, rather than barraging them with rules and facts. Clearly Varma struggled in the way that many others did as he tried to navigate the crushing isolation of the pandemic. In preparation for the holidays, his family was faced with tough, familiar choices, which resulted in his being separated from his loved ones.

The end result may seem hypocritical, but it’s also relatable. (Well, maybe not entirely relatable, but in principle.) “We know that transparency can increase public trust in public health and medical experts,” Matt Motta, who studies vaccine hesitancy at the Boston University School of Public Health, told me. What if Varma had been forthright with the public from the start, even on the subject of his sex parties? Perhaps he could have shown that he understood the need to get together with your friends as safely as you can, in whatever ways make you happy. Even now, his description of that moment strikes a chord. “It wasn’t so much sex,” he told the woman who was trying to embarrass him. “It was just like, I need to get this energy out of me.” So did the rest of us.