JENNIFER SEY: Generation Sacrifice: How Feds And The Media Buried The Devastating Truth.

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.

“Generation COVID” begins streaming on SalemNow November 13.