Natalya Murakhver joins John Tierney to discuss her film 15 Days and her efforts to resist the shutdown of schools during the Covid-19 lockdown. 

Audio Transcript

 John Tierney: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks Podcast. I’m John Tierney, a contributing editor to City Journal. Today I’m joined by Natalya Murakhver, 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. 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. Natalya, welcome to the podcast. And can you tell us how you got involved in this? Because you were not an activist. 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.

Natalya Murakhver: 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 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 reopen them. And it wasn’t just reopening the doors. It was also regaining the confidence of both parents and teachers to go back into those spaces and be together and not feel like they were under a constant danger.

Natalya Murakhver: So I went along with it throughout the entire summer of 2020 and expected that schools would reopen in the fall. But when fall came around in New York City, mayor Bill DeBlasio found himself in a quandary where the teachers unions were demanding the most harshest restrictions on school reopenings. And our kids were hanging in the crosshairs. We were trying to figure out what’s going to happen in September. De Blasio tells us schools are going to reopen, but it does seem like we’re setting impossible transmission thresholds in order to get them open. And I had seen news from around the country and around in Scandinavian countries that schools had reopened. There was no real issue for kids or even for teachers, no excess mortality. So I was pretty confident that school was safe, and I was even more concerned about the fact that these children were being kept from normal socialization, normal development for such an extended period of time. And it was concerning both at my children’s ages in elementary school, but all throughout, I mean even through college. And so when I heard that there was a group forming in New York City, it was really like a ragtag group of moms and a few dads. They came together in November, 2020 to start something called Keep NYC Schools Open, and we kicked it off with this one march, one rally down in lower Manhattan. I knew I had to be part of it even though I really, I’m not much of an activist. I don’t really love politics, and it really, normally I don’t show up to rallies.

John Tierney: That event which led you during that campaign to do that. You became familiar with it, and then you went on to make this documentary, which is just… I covered COVID. I wrote about it a lot during the pandemic for City Journal, but I still found this documentary really so, I mean, I learned things from it. You uncovered new things and you also just showed the human cost of this so vividly in the documentary, seeing these students, what they were going through, that they weren’t learning anything. They were so unhappy and it just showed things that got ignored. For instance, you’ve got an athlete in there who talks about the impact on what this did for student athletes.

Natalya Murakhver: Student athletes, especially in places like New York City, were really just completely forgotten. And we had rallies begging the city to let them play. That was the hashtag, “let them play.” I think that was a national slogan that was being used because all of these public school athletes couldn’t go back to sports, and sports weren’t just games for them. First of all, coaches are mentors. They are father figures to these boys especially who play team sports. But beyond that, that is where they find their socialization, their routines. In order to participate in public school sports, you need to, or back then, I’m not sure if you still have those standards, but back then you needed a certain GPA grade point average, and you also needed to maintain excellent attendance. So it really was like a guardrail for these young people. And when they took away sports, that really kind of took away many of these young people’s desire to even be in schools because that’s why they came there in the first place. And furthermore, many of these children are being scouted for scholarships for college scholarships in their junior years. And all the juniors who didn’t play sports that year lost those opportunities.

John Tierney: One of the haunting images in the documentary is this on playgrounds where they removed the basketball hoops, outdoor playgrounds, and you’ve got wonderful footage of the legendary basketball coach from Cardozo High who was trying to go out with his students and what happened on when he tried to help his players.

Natalya Murakhver: Yeah, Ron Naclerio was a character I was completely unfamiliar with. He has been at Cardozo High School for decades. He is the winningest high school basketball coach, I think, in the country and has been inducted into the Hall of Fame. His life is his kids and his sport. And he showed up at our very first rally and was so passionate about how important sports were for their kids, both in terms of movement, athletics, energetics, mental acumen, but also just for that family and mentorship aspect. And he saw very early on how dangerous it would be to have these children pushed from schools and from sports and onto the streets because there was nothing happening for them. As you said, the hoops were removed from the basketball fields, like kids couldn’t even play sports outside of school. I don’t know what we were thinking we would do to them, but Ron Naclerio saw very clearly that this was going to be bad for kids, and he was right.

John Tierney: Right. You show that so beautifully in it. Now, aside from just showing these very moving scenes of parents and kids affected by this, you also chronicle how this disaster happened, these supposed experts who led us down this path. And what’s probably important, well, most people still don’t realize, is that before the pandemic, there was a plan by the CDC that, it was based on serious analysis of science that had rejected, they said, even if we have a pandemic as bad as the Spanish flu of 1918, even if it’s that deadly, we still should not. They rejected the idea of locking down businesses, closing schools, telling the public to wear masks because there was no evidence that these measures would make any difference. And now you show in this, and you talked to some of the people who spoke out early against this, like Jay Bachar and Scott Atlas, who very early in the pandemic were saying that these measures that the response to the pandemic is going to be worse than the virus itself.

Natalya Murakhver: These doctors spoke out not even realizing what would befall them afterwards. Scott Atlas knew what the pandemic playbook really said. Focus protection has never been a radical idea. It was what was practiced before. We also interviewed Monica Gandhi, who is an AIDS researcher, HIV, and AIDS researcher at UCSF, and she talked about how even during the Spanish flu when children were adversely impacted by the virus, progressive school districts did not shut down. They kept schools open because they understood that even in light of this very, very terrible Spanish flu virus children,

John Tierney: That actually was dangerous to children, young people, unlike this one.

Natalya Murakhver: Exactly. But it was more dangerous for children to be outside of school buildings without teachers who are mandated reporters if they see something’s wrong without nutrition, without socialization, without their teachers, it was dangerous to lock kids out of school buildings this time. We conveniently forgot that,

John Tierney: And I had not been aware of that, and it’s such an interesting flip that the progressives, other cities did lock down or did close schools and do some measures and not that much, but my understanding. But the progressive cities like New York, as you say, they stayed open and now at this time, it became the progressive mantra, we’ve got to stay shut. We’ve got to follow the science. Why did it happen this time? That’s a big question. What did you find in talking to all these officials about why this happened, why suddenly Progressives rallied behind the idea of these really, these unprecedented restrictions of liberty? Why do progressives suddenly embrace this?

Natalya Murakhver: The simple answer is the outsized power of the teachers’ unions. The teachers unions are some of the largest donors to the Democratic Party. They gain a lot of their funds through teacher dues. I would argue that they don’t really represent the teachers. They’re really political machines that are in power, both controlling politics, but also developing and indoctrinating future generations of minds and really trying to create this society. I think many of us don’t want to look in, quite honestly. So I think they saw a crisis. As a founder of a nonprofit, I can tell you that the best time to fundraise is during a crisis, and they saw a crisis, and they used the crisis to raise so much money. I think our last count was about $189.5 billion federal bailout over the Trump, the first Trump and Biden administration to reopen the schools, but also through the other NGOs with whom they partnered with. And that was really eye-opening to discovering very, very early Zoom calls that the teachers unions were having with progressive NGOs, like environmental groups, Greenpeace, friends of the Earth, other such groups, and also Jane Fonda, and how they really kind of saw this as an opportunity to reimagine society. That’s pretty much what Randi Weingarten said in a March, 2020 zoom call that we uncovered.

John Tierney: Yeah, there is this great footage in this of that going out and one really arresting scene. You’ve got the Zoom call. You’ve got all these faces on the screen of all these environmentalists, and I think Jane, you’ve got Jane Fonda, you’ve got the Teacher’s Union, and they’re all just so excited at the idea that now that they can get their vision of America, this is a crisis that they can exploit. In Jane Fonda’s, in her infamous words, the COVID was God’s gift to the left. It’s really, I mean, it is great footage that you have to show how that happened and all these NGOs and unions working together to do it, and just the money that was involved. It was it quite incredible.

Natalya Murakhver: It was an interesting hidden camera interview with a former Biden staffer who used to manage some of the NGO disbursements a few months ago, I think it was Project Veritas that did this. They were asking what was the plan by the Biden administration after the results of the 2024 election when they knew Trump was taking office. And he talked about the fact that they were giving as much money as they could away to these progressive NGOs as quickly as they could because they knew Trump would turn the tap off. And I think his quote was, it was like throwing gold bars off the Titanic. And I think that pretty much summarizes the whole thing.

John Tierney: It does, and I mean, it’s scared because for instance, at Davos, at the World Economic Forum, they were talking about this was a paradigm. The response to COVID was a paradigm for how to deal with climate change. And even at the start of the pandemic, Anthony Fauci said, when China locked down, Fauci said, well, I can’t imagine Americans would ever submit to that. And yet they did. It was wonderfully encouraging for these people who just want large scale progressive changes in society. You said that at the start of the pandemic, you were a progressive Democrat. Is that right?

Natalya Murakhver: Yes, I was. I had voted for Obama twice. I even voted for Biden in 2020 because he claimed to prioritize reopening schools, and by then I really had become a single issue voter. But yes, I was incredibly progressive to the point where I did believe that there was such a thing as institutionalized racism. I mean, I’m a New Yorker. I went to NYU undergrad. I went to NYU for grad school. I worked at the film school for several years. I’ve always been entrenched in the arts community, so by and large, I swam with my flock or my school of fish in the stream. I wasn’t really anti-establishment on any level, but when I saw what was happening, it was extremely eye opening. I didn’t know what to make of it. At first, I was calling the local electeds, trying to get them to come to our rallies.

Well, they wouldn’t show up. I tried to send them evidence research from other countries, but nothing was welcome. And I was like, what is going on here? What is happening with my party? I mean, look, I didn’t even wake up when BLM happened. When BLM happened, I kind of just justified it. I know there are people that we interviewed for the film who were like, well, they wouldn’t let kids gather in classrooms in large groups, but then they encouraged everybody to go outside together and protest. That did not ring any bells for me, even as a critical thinker, because I was like, well, they’re outside and it’s institutional racism, so they have to do something. So yes, I’ve definitely gone through quite an awakening. I am still registered a Democrat because it doesn’t make sense in New York City to be registered as a Republican and not vote in primaries. So I remain a registered Democrat, but at this point I am really homeless.

John Tierney: We were at a screening of the documentary with a lot of other people who were progressives or had been progressives at least, and suddenly seen this for you, especially Natalya, you said that you had immigrated to the United States when you were six, right? From?

Natalya Murakhver: Yes. Yeah, from the Soviet Union.

John Tierney: And so you had seen authoritarianism firsthand?

Natalya Murakhver: I had heard about it more than seeing it. My parents talked about it, but I tried to disassociate myself. I said, that was then, this is now. It can’t happen again. Never experienced it. Those are stories of the old school.

John Tierney: Well, this really, I mean, the documentary besides showing the bad science behind it, besides showing the impact, talks about the censorship that went on. We at City Journal here, I did an article about the harms of masks to children, which are just obvious, of course. IAnd the United States, I think was one of the few, if not the only country that was masking toddlers. I mean, it was so barbaric to do that. I mean, Europe didn’t do that. In Europe, as you point out in the documentary was, they opened the schools much earlier and they didn’t make young people wear masks. And some places like Sweden, they advised everyone not to wear a mask because they correctly realized that this was not going to be effective. But at City Journal, one of my articles, it was labeled by the fact checkers for Facebook as partly false, and we had a big drop. We challenged it, and there was nothing, everything in the article was accurate, but they just disagreed. And they cited a group that’s also in your documentary, the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has basically been taken over by left-wing activists. And why don’t you tell us what you showed, what happened to them during the pandemic?

Natalya Murakhver: Yeah. Well, originally, the American Academy of Pediatrics said that we should reopen schools and the children needed to be learning in person. But after that announcement, they were, I guess, confronted by the teacher’s unions and they reversed course. And I believe this was right after President Trump said, I think in July, 2020, we must reopen schools. So reflexively, immediately, the unions pushed back and said, no, no, no, it’s not safe. So the American Academy of Pediatrics showed that it was completely compromised by progressive activists in the form of the teacher’s unions. And so schools did not reopen in many parts of the country. And some parts it did. And that’s the thing in this country, it was really inconsistent. I’ve spoken to people in Georgia, in Florida, in other red areas where things went back close to normal in the fall of 2020. Yes, they did lose a few months in the spring of 2020, but I think many of us were willing to give those months away to try to figure out how dangerous this really was. Most parents were not organizing in the spring of 2020. Many parts of the country did go back to normal places like California didn’t go back to normal for almost two years. And guess what, you were talking about masking? I just heard that Claremont, California, is it Claremont? Northern California? I believe it’s Claremont, but I might be, I think Claremont? Actually, it’s Santa Clara Valley. Santa Clara Valley, California still has a mask mandate in the wintertime. It’s still going on.

John Tierney: For the public or for students? You mean

Natalya Murakhver: For the public. I’m not sure what the rules are for students. I wonder if that’s also being held up in schools, if it’s for the public. I need to get some more details. But I just got an email the other day where it was like, can you believe that we still have a mask mandate? And the same health commissioner

John Tierney: Mask-aholic as I called them in one City Journal article. Well, this was such a disaster. I mean, the social, economic costs, the infringements on liberty were just unprecedented. And of course, the people responsible for it prefer not to talk about it at all. Or if they do, they say, well, we did the best we could knowing, and it’s really, I’m just so heartened that this documentary is there to remind people to show people. No, it was very clear early in the pandemic, and it was clear before the pandemic what the right response would be. And it was clear early that this virus was not a risky, it was very little risk to young people. And you show so well these groups that are responsible for terrifying the public and for imposing these terrible policies. It’s so important. I think that people be reminded of that, that we not let these mistakes be forgotten.

John Tierney: And as you point out in the documentary that the groups that we’re responsible for this are still in power. There’s been some changes in Washington. Jay Charia who is in the documentary, he’s now in charge of NIH and he is changing pandemic policy, but we still have these unions, this public health establishment that is still so politicized and so anti-science in so many ways. And so I really congratulate you on doing the documentary, and I hope that lots of people see it. How can people see this? They can go to 15 days film.com, is that right?

Natalya Murakhver: Yes. You can go to 15 days film.com and our ways of viewing it are constantly updating. So you can at least order the DVD or watch it for free. And at some point in the very near future, it will be streaming on the major channels. But we’ll put everything up on 15 days film.com.

John Tierney: Well, once again, the title of it is 15 Days, and you can find it by going to just one word 15daysfilm.com. Natalya, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for making this documentary, and I hope that the lots of our listeners watch it.

Natalya Murakhver: Thank you so much for having me.

John Tierney: I’m John Tierney for City Journal, and thank you for listening.

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