The NYC lockdown: an orgy of hypocrisy

Do you remember when Western governments around the world responded to the Covid pandemic by ordering us to stay indoors and not to visit friends and relatives? Remember when they locked up all the elderly in old folks homes, where loads of them then ‘safely’ died alone? Remember how small businesses had to close, and religious services were banned, but BLM supporters were allowed to gather in large numbers to protest the cause du jour?

I certainly remember. And although I was living in the UK, as a former resident of New York City, I paid particular attention to how its political leaders scraped the bottom of the barrel during the pandemic. Day in, day out, they struck moralistic poses as they went about depriving citizens of their most basic liberties.

The depth of their hypocrisy is becoming all too apparent. Last week, it emerged that Dr Jay Varma – the city’s senior public-health adviser under then mayor Bill de Blasio, and one of the most prominent advocates for lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates – was not exactly practising what he preached. In a series of recorded conversations posted by podcaster Steven Crowder, Varma boasts about attending sex parties and raves while implementing policies that locked New York down.

‘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’, he is recorded saying. Poor Dr Varma. We all remember what a tense time it was. Who could blame the man for getting off his head on ecstasy and going to a couple of orgies here and there?

Certainly not the Atlantic magazine, which published a piece last Friday with the headline, ‘Public-health officials should have been talking about their sex parties the whole time’. And no, this was not satire.

Dusting off NYC’s Covid rule book from 2020, the Atlantic notes that city guidance ‘discouraged – but did not forbid – group sex’. The piece helpfully points out that ‘Varma explained that he’d partied responsibly, noting “Everybody got tests and things like that”.’ There was no word from the Atlantic as to whether or not Varma managed to get his plums sucked by fellow orgy participants when the city guidelines were to only have group sex while ‘wear[ing] a face covering’. Quite the logistical challenge.

The article’s author, Kristen V Brown, argues that ‘public-health messaging wins trust most effectively when it leads with empathy’. She says that Varma’s desire to partake in several gang bangs was ‘relatable’. He ‘struggled in the way that many others did’, she writes, ‘as he tried to navigate the crushing isolation of the pandemic’.

Brown and many others like her completely miss the point. They fail to recognise that the lockdown regime was itself the problem. Hence she fails to acknowledge that the ‘isolation’, which we all struggled with, was entirely created by the very lockdown rules that Varma and his cohorts in the professional-managerial class forced upon the rest of us. Rules that they themselves then often chose to ignore, in an egregious display of double standards. (Just about every country on Earth had its own scandals involving high-ranking politicians or scientific advisers breaking their own Covid regulations.)

In one recording, Varma states that right before he helped push through ‘the vaccine mandate’ in NYC in November 2021, he had a ‘wild night’ involving a dance party on a boat and then a rave with 200 other people underneath a bank. ‘Everyone was rolling, we were all taking molly [MDMA] and everybody was so high, and I was so happy because I hadn’t done that in like a year.’

Sadly for some New Yorkers, not all raves are created equal. There were clearly those attended by the likes of Varmar, which were reported on sympathetically by the New York Times. A 2021 article on the ‘thriving’ illegal rave scene quoted a DJ whose SoHo party was shut down, although the police were ‘very kind’ and gave everyone time to leave before issuing any fines.

The NYPD were less lenient towards raves in Queens – where the plebs live. One raid on an illegal rave in 2020 led to four arrests and over a dozen criminal-court-appearance tickets for misdemeanour offences. Other gatherings of the non-privileged classes were treated similarly harshly. In Borough Park, Brooklyn, cops cited five religious institutions for ‘holding services with more than 10 people’. Each violation came with a $15,000 fine.

And let’s not forget about the million New York City children who were made to stay home from school for 18 months. This was due to school closures that the New York Times editorial board were ‘startled’ to find were ‘the most damaging disruption in the history of American education’.

The pandemic was indeed a stressful time – thanks precisely to the likes of Varna, who had clearly had no intention of living by the restrictions he wanted to impose on the rest of us. The lockdown created an orgy of hypocrisy.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.