Generation Sacrifice: How Feds And The Media Buried The Devastating Truth Of COVID Lockdowns

Six years ago in October, three epidemiologists published the Great Barrington Declaration. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard argued for what they called “Focused Protection”: protect those most vulnerable to COVID while allowing those at lower risk to resume normal life. Schools should remain open. Young people should be allowed to work, play sports, and live their lives.

The response was not debate. It was a swift and brutal campaign to discredit them. Francis Collins, who at the time was the director of the National Institutes of Health, emailed Anthony Fauci calling the authors “fringe epidemiologists” and demanding a “quick and devastating published take down” of the Declaration’s premises. Six years later, Bhattacharya holds Collins’s old job as director of the NIH. I’m glad he’s there, but a personnel change is not a reckoning.

I have little confidence that if officials decided to lock us down again — and frightened people enough — Americans would resist. We would forget what happened to children, businesses, institutional trust and basic civil liberties. We would forget how quickly fear made previously unthinkable policies acceptable, and how difficult it became to question those policies once they were in place.

I pushed back on school closures and lockdowns from the beginning, in deep-blue San Francisco. For that, I lost a career I had spent 30 years building, including 23 years at Levi Strauss & Co., where I rose to global brand president. I eventually left my city so my children could attend school. I lost friends who treated reasoned dissent as something dangerous.

On the day I resigned in 2022, I opened a production company with one goal: make a documentary about what had been done to children. Even then, two years into the COVID response, children in many cities were spending entire school days masked and undergoing regular testing. Unvaccinated kids were excluded from activities and teams. Students were sent home after outbreaks. In some places, normal schooling was disrupted for years. Private-school students played sports while public-school athletes lost seasons, opportunities and, in some cases, their shot at college.

When we began making the film, families wanted to talk. We met parents who lost a teenage son to suicide, a mom who nearly lost her daughter to drugs, kids who never graduated and athletes whose college opportunities disappeared. We spoke with parents who went to school-board meetings and were vilified or threatened professionally, as well as doctors, teachers, and journalists who said they were punished for questioning prevailing policies. Their stories were heartbreaking, and they wanted to tell them.

What turned out to be much harder than making the film was finding anyone willing to show it.

I produced the Emmy-winning Netflix documentary “Athlete A” in 2020. I thought that track record might at least get our calls returned. It didn’t. Mainstream outlets had little appetite for revisiting COVID policy, while conservative outlets told us they were done with COVID.

But COVID isn’t done with our children. Academic performance remains below pre-pandemic levels. Chronic absenteeism remains a serious problem. Families continue to deal with learning setbacks and mental-health consequences that did not disappear when the headlines did. Six years later, we should be able to ask difficult questions about what happened and whether the extraordinary sacrifices demanded of children were justified.

Now, just past the sixth anniversary of the Great Barrington Declaration, “GENERATION COVID” will finally see the light of day on SalemNow on November 13.

We made this film for everyone. It is not a partisan screed. It is the human face of pandemic restrictions: real families, real losses, and children who were asked to bear extraordinary burdens despite facing comparatively zero risk from the virus.

The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were asking for proportionality. Yet we closed playgrounds and classrooms, canceled sports, masked toddlers learning to speak, and told an entire generation that ordinary childhood could be suspended indefinitely for the greater good. Whatever one thought of those decisions at the time, six years later we should be able to examine their consequences honestly.

A new NIH director does not accomplish that, nor does quietly acknowledging that children suffered. We need an honest accounting of what must never be repeated, because another emergency will come. When it arrives, fear will once again make extraordinary government power tempting.

“Athlete A” helped force a reckoning over abuse in gymnastics because people finally saw the faces of the girls and women who endured it. “GENERATION COVID” attempts to do the same.

Watch it not because it will flatter your politics, but because the subjects of this experiment were children — and they are still living with the consequences.

Six years later, we owe them an honest accounting.

This film is one place to start.

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Jennifer Sey is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and the producer of the forthcoming documentary GENERATION COVID, out November 13.

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