Rational Ground started in 2020 with one fight: getting kids back in school. So I watched Jennifer Sey’s new documentary, Generation Covid, the way you’d watch home movies of a bad year. I knew how every scene ended. It still hit hard.
The film premieres today on SalemNOW. You can sign up for free and watch it here.
Nelson, a San Francisco defensive lineman who lost his senior season. Still from Generation Covid, courtesy of the filmmakers.
A nearly complete record
Sey and her co-director, Andrew James, filmed for more than four years. The result runs just under two hours, and it covers nearly everything.
It starts with “15 days to slow the spread.” It walks through the science that was there from the start and ignored: kids were at low risk, and schools weren’t driving the spread. It shows Europe reopening schools in the spring of 2020 while American governors kept them shut. It covers the masks on two-year-olds, the Zoom classes nobody attended, the Great Barrington Declaration and the campaign to smear it, the censorship, the vaccine that was supposed to reopen schools and didn’t, and the San Francisco parents who finally threw out their school board.
Then it shows what happened to the kids. That’s the part that stays with you.
There’s Lizzy, a little girl with Down syndrome who lost the routine and the skills school had given her. Third grade, the year kids go from learning to read to reading to learn, was the year she stayed home.
Lizzy. Still from Generation Covid, courtesy of the filmmakers.
There’s Nelson, a 6-foot-4 defensive lineman in San Francisco who lost his senior season while the city’s Catholic and private schools played theirs. The year after he graduated, his old team won State.
There are teenagers who turned to drugs, and a girl groomed by strangers online. There’s a family that buried their son, a student taking four AP classes. One student sums up a day of Zoom school: woke up, rolled over, opened the laptop, turned the camera and mic off, went back to sleep.
And there are the adults who said, over and over, that the kids were fine.
Hard to watch. Watch it anyway.
I know this film will be hard for a lot of people to sit through, especially those who went along with it all. Nobody likes rewatching their worst calls. But that’s exactly why you should. The same was said about my book.
We’ve spent six years being told to move on. The film’s own subjects haven’t moved on. One of the students says it plainly near the end: “This is something that my generation will not forget. This is also something that my generation will not forgive.”
The film closes on the next scare: bird flu. If we look away now, we’ll do it all again.
These are our friends
I’ll be honest about my bias. The people in this film became our friends.
Jen Sey and I found each other on Twitter in the early days of the lockdowns. She was born Jewish and is a committed atheist. I’m a devout Mormon and a lifelong Republican. Different faiths, different politics. What we shared was the kids. I wrote about that friendship, and about Jen and her husband, Daniel, and my amazing wife Jenny back in 2022: A Mormon and a Jewish atheist walked into a pandemic.... Jen walked away from her career at Levi’s rather than stay quiet. This film is what she did with her freedom.
Jen Sey, Justin Hart, Daniel Kotzin (Jen’s husband) and Jenny Hart (my wife) in San Diego, 2022.
Jay Bhattacharya is a good friend, too. In the film, he tells what it cost him at Stanford to co-write the Great Barrington Declaration: the hit pieces, the lost friends, and an email from the head of the NIH calling him and his co-authors “fringe epidemiologists” and asking for a “devastating published take down.” He went on to lead the NIH himself. Jen and Jay were both featured at our Rational Ground conference in San Diego in 2022.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Still from Generation Covid, courtesy of the filmmakers.
And David Zweig. Very few people did the hard, careful reporting on schools while it mattered. David was one of them. He’s a former fact-checker, and in 2020 he did what reporters are supposed to do: he read the studies from Iceland, Europe and China himself. In the film he describes pitching that work to editors at the big magazines. “Every single one of them said no,” he says, “except for one place, Wired magazine.” He kept at it for years, and his book An Abundance of Caution is the definitive account.
The numbers back the film
Here’s how much of the 2020–21 school year kids actually spent in a classroom. Same virus, same year. The difference was who was in charge.
Four of the film’s five states were below the national average. California kids got 7% of a school year in the classroom. Florida kids got 97%.
(California’s decisions, of course, hit home hard for the Hart family).
And here’s what that bought us. On the Nation’s Report Card, the share of public-school 8th graders below “Basic” in math went from 32% before the closures to 41% in 2024. In three of the four main tests, 2024 was worse than 2022. The kids didn’t bounce back. Many are still falling behind.
Watch it
Generation Covid isn’t a gentle film, and it isn’t meant to be. It’s a record. Nearly every lie, every reversal and every harm is in there, told by the parents and kids who lived it and the few doctors and reporters who told the truth at the time.
The film’s last line says it: “There will be a reckoning around this. It’s just a question of how long.”
Let’s make it sooner. Watch it, then share it with someone who went along.
Watch Generation Covid on SalemNOW (free sign-up).
Charts: NAEP (National Center for Education Statistics), national public schools, 2019–2024; COVID-19 School Data Hub district learning-model data, weighted by 2020–21 enrollment, Rational Ground analysis. Stills courtesy of the filmmakers.
The teachers got a paid vacation!
The students got left behind.
Fucking criminals, every last one of them. Dr. Sara Cody from Santa Clara County should be one of the first to be locked up for what she did.