Former N.Y.C. Covid Czar Partied While Preaching Social Distancing

In a hidden-camera video posted by a conservative podcaster, Dr. Jay K. Varma boasts about flouting the public health guidelines he insisted others follow.

The official in charge of New York City’s pandemic response participated in sex parties and attended a dance party underneath a Wall Street bank during the height of the pandemic, even as he was instructing New Yorkers to stay home and away from others to stop the spread of Covid-19. He acknowledged his transgressions on Thursday after being caught on hidden camera boasting about his exploits.

The video of the official, Dr. Jay K. Varma, who was City Hall’s senior public health adviser under Mayor Bill de Blasio from April 2020 to May 2021, was posted on Thursday by the conservative podcaster Steven Crowder.

The video appears to have been compiled from several recordings, in which Dr. Varma is seen at a number of restaurants and cafes, chatting with a woman who remains off camera. At various points, he describes a sex party he and his wife held in a hotel and a dance party he attended in a space under a bank on Wall Street, joined by more than 200 people.

In a statement, Dr. Varma did not dispute the recordings’ authenticity but said they had been “spliced, diced and taken out of context.” He said he attended three gatherings between August 2020 and June 2021.

At the time, public health officials in New York, like those in cities and countries around the world, were frantically seeking to contain the virus and Covid’s rising death toll by encouraging people to wear masks and avoid large gatherings. New York City schools were abruptly closed beginning in March 2020. Indoor dining in restaurants was forbidden. Masking indoors in public places was mandatory.

“I take responsibility for not using the best judgment at the time,” Dr. Varma said in his statement.

As an architect of the city’s vaccine policies, Dr. Varma regularly appeared with Mr. de Blasio at Covid briefings, where he would urge people to mask up and observe social distancing. Dr. Varma rose to national prominence for helping put in place the mandatory vaccination rules that prevented the Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving from playing basketball in New York for a time after he refused to get the shot.

The revelations about Dr. Varma’s pandemic behavior called to mind similar instances of official hypocrisy, including Boris Johnson’s lockdown soirees when he was prime minister of Britain and the November 2020 dinner at the French Laundry attended by Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. And they stoked anger among some politicians who have criticized what they say was an unnecessarily heavy-handed response to the pandemic that infringed on individual liberties.

Joseph Borelli, the Republican minority leader of the City Council, who represents Staten Island, said the revelations undercut the public health measures Dr. Varma had advocated.

“I recall being treated like a pariah for pointing out the obvious at the time — that so many of our so-called leaders were just making up illogical rules as they went along,” Mr. Borelli said. “Still, even I couldn’t have predicted how full of it they actually were.”

On Thursday, City Councilman Robert Holden, a Democrat who represents a district in Queens, called on Mayor Eric Adams to investigate Dr. Varma’s actions and on the city to drop its appeals cases against city workers who sued after being fired for refusing to comply with Covid vaccine mandates.

“This was the public health expert for the city while it was shut down — he was busy having sex parties,” Mr. Holden wrote in a statement issued by his office. “It’s alarming, especially with so many first responders, city workers and everyday New Yorkers losing their jobs.”

The video recordings of Dr. Varma appear to have been made during several different social encounters or dates. A spokesman for Dr. Varma, Chris Vlasto, would not elaborate on the nature of the meetings.

“I 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,” Dr. Varma said in his statement. “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.”

Dr. Varma, in the video, appears to acknowledge the hypocrisy of participating in sex parties while also insisting that New Yorkers isolate to avoid spreading the virus.

“I had to be kind of sneaky about it,” Dr. Varma says to an unidentified woman off-camera at one point in the heavily edited video. “I was running the entire Covid response for the city.”

He has written extensively, including for The New York Times in 2022, about the need for masking and vaccines and the importance of adhering to the same sorts of policies that, in the video, he admits he violated.

“Like everyone else, health officials and providers like me wish the epidemic would end,” he wrote in The Times. “But instead, we must live in a parallel universe in which preventing and managing Covid-19 remains a daily focus when everyone else seems to have moved on.”

Mr. Vlasto, the spokesman, said that the Wall Street dance party happened in June 2021, shortly after Dr. Varma officially left his position as senior adviser, but during a period in which he was still a part-time consultant to City Hall. Mr. Vlasto did not address the sex party, which Dr. Varma describes in the video as “just being naked with friends” and says took place in August 2020. He claims in the video to have rented a hotel room with his wife and invited eight to 10 people.

At the time, indoor gatherings of up to 10 people were permitted in New York.

Mr. Vlasto later clarified that Dr. Varma had participated in a second sex party in November 2020.

Mr. Crowder, the podcaster, has routinely used hidden cameras and techniques that would be considered ethical breaches in the world of professional journalism. In spring 2023, Mr. Crowder himself was the subject of a hidden-camera recording in which he berates and curses at his pregnant wife. They have since announced their divorce.

After his work for the city, Dr. Varma went on to become a professor and the director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is now the executive vice president and chief medical officer at SIGA Technologies, a pharmaceutical company.

Upon Dr. Varma’s departure to the private sector, Mayor de Blasio praised him for his work on tackling the pandemic. Mr. de Blasio did not respond to multiple calls and texts requesting comment on the video.