A New Jersey middle school was forced to hold virtual classes on Friday after several students contracted COVID-19 while celebrating the bar mitzvah of former Gov. Chris Christie‘s nephew, The Post has learned.
The event involving the 13-year-old son of Todd and Andrea Christie took place last weekend and school officials learned late Thursday night that it led to an outbreak, Mendham Township schools Superintendent Salvatore Constantino said.
“There were, unfortunately, a few adult cases and a few student cases that came out of it,” Constantino told The Post.
There were already “a few cases” at Mendham Township Middle School “and we couldn’t ensure a safe environment, so we thought it would be prudent for us to go virtual again on Friday,” Constantino said.
“We are actually in very good shape,” he said.
“We’ll be back in session and ready to go on Monday.”
Constantino declined to say exactly how many kids were infected at the bar mitzvah, saying only that the school had “fewer than half a dozen [cases], stemming from the event and existing population.”
The bar mitzvah was apparently followed by a reception at the Avenue A Club in Newark, according to a screenshot of a photo — obtained by The Post — that Todd posted on social media but appears to have since deleted.
The photo appears to show Todd and Andrea Christie and their five kids — none wearing masks — as they posed in a small room at the club.
Todd Christie, 56, hung up immediately after The Post contacted him by phone Friday evening and didn’t return a voicemail message left at his home.
During a brief phone interview Friday evening, Chris Christie, 59, said he knew nothing about the outbreak but said his brother had been vaccinated.
Chris Christie — who has been publicly flirting with a 2024 presidential campaign —declined to answer any other questions.
In October 2020, Chris Christie contracted a case of COVID-19 and was hospitalized for nearly a week.
He later blamed his infection on the “serious failure” of not wearing a mask when he attended then-President Donald Trump’s announcement in the White House’s Rose Garden that he was nominating Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court.
The Sept. 26, 2020, event — after which Trump tested positive and was hospitalized for three days at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center — was labeled a “super-spreader” by Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Chris Christie said he went also maskless while helping Trump prepare to debate Joe Biden, who later beat him in the election.
“I paid for it, and I hope Americans can learn from my experience,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
“I am lucky to be alive. It could easily have been otherwise.”
A woman who answered the phone at the Avenue A Club said she was unaware of any cases linked to events there.
In 2010, the New York Times reported that Todd Christie earned more than $60 million when Goldman Sachs bought the Spear, Leeds & Kellogg stock specialist firm, of which he was CEO, ten years earlier.
He was later implicated in a federal criminal fraud probe but never charged in a case that led two traders to plead guilty, the Times said.
