A progressive health official supported keeping kids out of school in the name of “social distancing”, but he didn’t engage in social distancing himself — he was busy engaging in promiscuous sex parties at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, even while serving as a high-ranking health official in New York City:
Jay Varma, who led the city’s coronavirus response as senior adviser to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, admitted to the pandemic promiscuity in secretly recorded conversations published by conservative podcaster Steven Crowder.
“It’s so funny,” Varma said on tape, “because I did all this like deviant, sexual stuff while I was on TV.”
Varma said in another recorded conversation he and his wife rented a hotel room to host their own secret sex party with Ecstasy. “We … had to be kind of sneaky about it because hotels didn’t want people gathering there,” Varma said, adding his profile as the city’s lockdowner-in-chief called for extra discretion. “It was fun!”
Varma said in yet another recorded conversation he attended a sex party in August 2020 with “10 to 12 people,” which likely would have violated New York City’s rules when gatherings were routinely capped at 10 people. Varma also talked about attending crowded underground dance parties.
As Ed Morrissey notes at Hot Air, “Their rules are always only intended for the subordinate classes. The elites never apply the rules to themselves. Gavin Newsom is another sterling example with his French Laundry outing during the height of COVID lockdowns.”
Health officials supported extended school closings that are now recognized as a mistake. In an interview with CBS News, Dr. Anthony Fauci has belatedly conceded that the extended school closures he effectively supported as a high-ranking health official were a mistake. The school closures lasted for more than a year in some school districts. Fauci admitted that shutting down the schools for that long “was not a good idea,” and “a mistake.”
Shutting schools actually increased COVID-19 deaths, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh. Moreover, “Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19,” said Brown University Professor Emily Oster. There is “little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to community transmission,” according to the federal Centers for Disease Control.
Under the Trump administration, the CDC had pointed out that closing schools “can lead to severe learning loss,” and that school closures kill more children than COVID. Moreover, “extended closures can be harmful to children’s mental health and can increase the likelihood that children engage in unhealthy behaviors.”
Many children became fatter when schools closed to in-person learning during the coronavirus pandemic. Childhood obesity rose at the fastest annual rate ever. “Overweight or obesity increased among 5- through 11-year-olds from 36.2% to 45.7% during the pandemic,” reported the Journal of the American Medical Association. Similarly, government lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic spawned obesity through things like “canceled soccer practices” and “shuttered dance rehearsals,” noted CNN. Skyrocketing obesity made suffering from the coronavirus worse. “The evidence linking obesity to adverse COVID-19 outcomes is ‘overwhelmingly clear,’” say medical experts. Most people hospitalized for the coronavirus were obese.
Officials’ school-closing decisions were driven in part by teachers “union influence and politics, not safety,” reported Reason Magazine. Jon Valant, a researcher at the liberal Brookings Institution, found that decisions to keep schools closed were influenced by politics, not levels of “COVID-19 risk.” Leftist teachers unions repeatedly thwarted school reopenings. Some used “sick-outs” to shut down schools and force school boards to delay school openings.
