The news that Dr. Jay Varma, the city’s former COVID czar, attended underground dance and sex parties during the worst of the pandemic is troubling. He was recorded saying “I did all this deviant, like sexual stuff while I was like, you know, like on TV and stuff. People were like, ‘Aren’t you afraid? Aren’t you embarrassed?’ and I was like, ‘No, actually, I’m like, I love being my authentic self.’ ” The Varma case is the latest in a series of exposés to reveal that all too often, those making and enforcing rules on vaccinations, masking and social distancing disregarded those edicts themselves. Varma says his quotes were “spliced, diced” and “taken out of context,” even as he admits to having participated “in two private gatherings” between April 2020 and May 2021 and takes responsibility “for not using the best judgment.” Even when the slips are relatively small, imperious politicians and public health professionals like this do nearly as much damage to the public health measures they care about as crackpot anti-vaccination types like Bobby Kennedy Jr. We hold them to a higher standard because we should. In the U.K., then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson had Partygate — even their scandals take on the -gate suffix borrowed from Watergate now — a row over the PM and other senior officials meeting and mixing and drinking even as they were asking their countrymen and women to hunker down. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom went to a crowded birthday party at a fancy restaurant. Newsom later acknowledged, “The spirit of what I’m preaching all the time was contradicted. I need to preach and practice, not just preach.” Here in New York in the spring of 2020, officials were aiming wagging fingers and police at folks who gathered across the five boroughs, including thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews who came together (many of them in masks) for the funeral of a prominent rabbi, with then-Mayor Bill de Blasio defending enforcement by insisting on “one standard” for all. “The amount of danger from that gathering is inestimable,” de Blasio said. “People will die because of it, unfortunately.” While one can surely take issue with how they cracked down, de Blasio, with Varma usually at his side, wasn’t wrong to tell people to stay apart and mask up and then use government power to enforce vaccine mandates. More than 46,000 lives in New York City have been lost to the virus — numbers that would be far higher if nobody had followed any of the rules, especially in those days when the bug was new to our immune systems. It’s impossible to defend the motives or the journalistic ethics of Steven Crowder, the partisan commentator who released the Varma video. He thinks public health rules designed to tame the worst pandemic in a century were nothing but government tyranny. The more officials he can label as hypocrites, the easier it is to make that argument. But just because the messenger is a crank doesn’t mean we can tune out the inconvenient truths he happens to bring to light. Varma the public health official said almost all the right things. Varma the private citizen undermined his own message.