California North to South & back again
Restore Childhood on the road
Hi again! It’s been a long stretch without any updates and for that we apologize- we missed you!
Last week, our Restore Childhood team, including Dana, Emily, Stephanie & Natalya returned from a week-long trip to California where we met up with West Coast doctors and parent advocates who continue to be on the frontlines of the fight to restore full normal for children.
We were filming our documentary “15 Days…” In Silicon Valley, we had an epic two-day shoot, beginning with an interview with the great Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, an outspoken critic of the government's pandemic policy. In October 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya along with world renowned epidemiologists Drs. Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta authored the Great Barrington Declaration calling for an end to lockdowns and advocating for the use of focused protection for those who are most vulnerable while children and young people would return to normalcy. For this, Dr. Bhattacharya was described as a "fringe epidemiologist" by Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, in an email to Anthony Fauci, head of the NIH.
We also finally met our friend Jonathan Zachreson, who was newly elected to the Roseville School Board. As founder of Reopen California Schools, Jonathan has been instrumental in organizing the parent movement in California and generating national media attention surrounding the corruption of school boards and teachers unions.
We spent our final day in the Bay Area meeting many of the Urgency of Normal team, after nearly a year of extensive phone and online collaboration. We worked hard to film and preserve as many of their stories as possible, knowing that the key to making sure we don’t repeat history is to remember the mistakes made in tast.
In Los Angeles, we met up with our friend Eli Steele, a filmmaker who is also profoundly deaf. He shared with us his struggle to navigate the world independently and his experience with big tech censorship when Amazon refused to What Killed Michael Brown? We also got a chance to meet up with other Southern California friends Aaron Kheriaty, Julie Hamill, Houman Hemmati and Danna Rosenthal (follow them all on Twitter!)
Our work continues to prove evermore necessary. Even as we filmed in LA, Barbara Ferrer, Director of the State Health Department threatened to reimplement a mask mandate.
Likewise, upon our return to NYC, a strong recommendation to mask was issued by New York State's Health Department and a new mask mandate was reimposed by SUNY Purchase. In response, we have launched a direct email campaign, together with No College Mandates and Urgency of Normal, to help repeal the mask mandate at SUNY Purchase. If you would like to support our efforts, please sign up here.