Biotech company SIGA Technologies has fired chief medical officer Jay Varma, days after the publication of secret recordings of the former New York City public health advisor talking about how he violated many of the restrictions he helped craft during the pandemic.
The company disclosed the decision in an SEC filing Monday and didn’t provide further details when reached for comment by Endpoints News. Varma’s role on the board of directors has also ended, effective immediately.
Varma didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on LinkedIn.
The decision is the fallout from Varma getting caught on numerous secret recordings admitting to participating in ecstasy-fueled parties while he was a senior public health advisor to the mayor of New York City during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The video recordings were published by Mug Club, a conservative media outlet run by the right-wing internet personality Steven Crowder.
Varma was in the city role from April 2020 to May 2021, and said in one of the recordings that one of the parties was with friends “in August of like that first summer.” Some of the parties were sexual in nature and involved people taking ecstasy, Varma said, and were often held in hotel rooms. In another instance, Varma said he attended a party underneath a Wall Street bank.
His participation in the events ran counter to the city’s public messaging at the time, which stressed that people should prioritize social distancing and limit indoor gatherings.
The former city official’s ouster is made more notable given SIGA’s role in governments’ response to the mpox outbreak in Africa. The company’s treatment, Tpoxx, is largely known as a treatment for smallpox, but is also approved to treat mpox in the United Kingdom. The US Department of Defense finalized a new $9 million contract in August for additional doses of the treatment.
A study conducted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases released last month found that the treatment didn’t improve time-to-lesion resolution among patients with mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, compared with placebo. The company was encouraged enough by the results in different subsets of patients to suggest that additional trials were warranted.