Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast.

I'm John Tierney, a contributing editor to City Journal. Today I'm

joined by Natalia Maroccher, who's the director and producer of a superb new documentary titled

15 Days. It tells the story of the school closures during COVID, and it's got riveting

and enraging footage, showing you the human

costs of those, and also it explains how this happened. You know, this was the worst scandal in the

history of science journalism, in my opinion, and also in the history of public health. And this

documentary shows the impact on students and families. And it shows how that disaster

occurred and how similar disasters can happen again because the journalists, activists, academics,

union leaders, and public health officials responsible for it are just waiting for another

crisis to exploit. And at the end of the podcast, we'll tell you how to watch this. It's available now online.

On Natalia, welcome to the podcast, and can you tell us how you got involved in this? Because you were not an activist.

You know, this wasn't, you were a New York City school parent who just started a drive to do this.

So tell us how you got involved with leading

the drive to open schools and how you made this documentary. Thank you so much for having me,

John. It's really a pleasure. Yeah, I was one of many New York City public school parents. I had

two girls in public elementary school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. I was concerned when we heard

that schools were closing, but I was, like other people, you know, in my shoes concerned about

the virus and the impact of the virus. So kind of went along with the fact that, hey, we need to

close schools for a short

while to figure out what's next. But I never really believed that it was going to be for 15 days.

I could tell that once schools closed, it was much easier to close them than it would be to

...