The Real Lesson of Jay Varma's COVID Sex-Party Scandal - The Atlantic

An absurd lesson in transparency and hypocrisy

Listen − 1.0 x + Seek 0:00 5:18 Updated at 5:00 p.m. ET on January 9, 2025 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

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