In December 2020, I went to Colonial Williamsburg with one of my best friends. At the time we had a combined six children among the two of us, and we were both looking for a way to give our children something resembling a normal experience after nine months of COVID-19.
Most of the shops were closed, and everything inside required a mask, but we could at least walk and observe all of the wreaths on display, go to a museum, and go ice skating. Coming from the Washington area, that was as close to normal as we could possibly imagine.
For that trip, we agonized about what we should share publicly. Should we admit we were sharing a hotel room? That we had even been indoors with other people? Would we be canceled for trying to offer our children their first trip in public in nine months?
I remembered the anxiety of that trip as I read about what Dr. Jay Varma and his wife, Dr. Melissa Varma, were doing right around the same time. Jay was in charge of the COVID response for all of New York City, and Melissa was a pediatrician at one of the city’s hospitals.
Since secret videos released by political commentator Steven Crowder were released, Jay Varma admitted the pair participated in “private gatherings.” What were the gatherings? Drug-fueled sex parties. In the recordings, Varma could be heard describing a “sex party” he attended at a hotel with his wife and eight to 10 others in August 2020, four months before my elicit trip to Colonial Williamsburg, and an indoor dance bash in July 2021 attended by more than 200 people.
There’s only one word to describe this: evil. Our COVID overlords were not afraid. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wasn’t afraid when she got a haircut, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) wasn’t afraid when he went out to dinner at the French Laundry and sent his children to private school, and Jay Varma wasn’t afraid when he participated in orgies. We now know that the COVID-era wasn’t just about control, but about the elites doing whatever they pleased while at the same time dooming powerless and disadvantaged Americans to “sending” their children to Zoom school and closing their businesses.
Justifiably, since the recordings were released, Varma has been fired from his gig in the private sector, where he landed after leaving city hall.
Writing for his Substack, Dr. Vinay Prasad fumed: “Pre-pandemic, when I attended Johns Hopkins School of Public Health — we were taught that public health was based on empowerment. When people faced tough situations you provided resources so they could make better choices.”
Not so for public health officials such as former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and former White House COVID-19 response coordinator Deborah Birx.
“Learning from China, [they] decided Public Health meant you could use the police state — cops in riot gear — to force people to comply with orders that you dreamt up — which had bioplausibility but no actual evidence,” Prasad wrote. “You could arrest someone for not wearing a mask. Chain playgrounds. Lock up beaches. Force people to mask outside. Fire someone for not getting a vaccine. You could throw a mother off an airplane because her toddler didn’t wear a worthless cloth mask.”
Kristen Brown, writing for the Atlantic, was more sympathetic, arguing that Varma should have been open about his sex parties at the time.
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“What if Varma had been forthright with the public from the start, even on the subject of his sex parties?” she wrote. “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.”
The Atlantic also published, at the end of 2022, an essay arguing for pandemic amnesty, suggesting we extend forgiveness to those, such as Varma, who got so many things wrong over the course of 2020 through 2022. Varma is exactly why such an arrangement is off the table. Those who foisted COVID restrictions on the rest of us weren’t worried about public health. They were fetishists (it turns out, in more ways than one) for control, and they were, at their core, truly evil.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author of Stolen Youth.