Nov. 17, 2025 - Epoch Times
04:02
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Randy Weingarten is the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers' union in the country. | |
| I reached out to Randy Weingarten in the fall of 2022 because I saw that she was receptive to speaking with parents and engaging with parents. | |
| And I knew that she had a say in CDC reopening guidelines. | |
| At that point, the New York Post and Fox had broken the story that Randy and the teachers' unions had crafted the school reopening guidelines, which, you know, up until then, parents certainly didn't know. | |
| So it was surprising. | |
| I had hoped that there was some good faith in those guidelines and she was coming to it, you know, with an open heart. | |
| And so I reached out to her on X on Twitter back then because I had heard she was receptive to speaking with parents and said, could we meet at some point? | |
| I'd love to speak with you. | |
| My children are suffering in school with masks on. | |
| And I've done the research. | |
| There's no research supporting the safety and efficacy of masks. | |
| We need to get the kids back to normal. | |
| And she said yes. | |
| And we met on Marathon Sunday in November 2022 on the Upper West Side for drinks. | |
| And it was very pleasant. | |
| We had a good conversation. | |
| And I asked her if she would talk to the CDC. | |
| I mean, I think this is, it's kind of ludicrous to tell this story. | |
| I can't even believe that we had this conversation. | |
| I said, I know that you have a say in what the CDC does. | |
| Can you talk to them about revising their guidelines and getting these kids back to normal? | |
| They need to be able to see each other's faces. | |
| And she said, you know what, Natalia? | |
| If you present an outline for how to unmask the kids, I will present it to the CDC and we'll see what we can do. | |
| It was shocking. | |
| I, an Upper West Side mom without a medical degree, I mean, what am I going to present to her? | |
| I want her to remove the masks, but I guess now I need to go through the steps because I've been given an opportunity to have a say in policy. | |
| So the first thing I did was I called Tracy Hoag, who was a researcher in the Bay Area at the time and a friend. | |
| And I said, Tracy, Randy Weingarten is willing to present our proposal to unmask the kids. | |
| I need research. | |
| And she's a dual citizen between the United States and Denmark, speaks five languages, is really just a brilliant researcher. | |
| And she just laughed and she said, of course I'll work with you on this, but there's no proposal. | |
| She's like, if we give them an off-ramp, we're going to have an on-ramp. | |
| She goes, there's no research behind masking kids. | |
| Just take them off. | |
| So we worked together for a few months, figured out that there was a toolkit that another virologist had developed on the West Coast for his own kids' school about the benefits and harms of masking and the mental health issues that were developing in kids that he was seeing in his own children. | |
| And we ended up taking that toolkit and creating something called Urgency of Normal, which was released in January, I guess, 23 or 22. | |
| I can't remember the year anymore. | |
| And it was a toolkit for parents, not for the teachers' unions. | |
| We kind of just, we realized there was nothing for us to present to Randy and the CDC. | |
| We needed to give the parents access to the data and to the stories so that they could advocate on their own local levels. | |
| And we wrote op-eds. | |
| We had multiple doctors, including Vinay Prasad, Monica Gandhi, Lucy McBride, big name doctors who signed on to it. | |
| We did a Zoom call that had over a thousand parents from around the country, which is great considering we didn't have a budget. | |
| This was just a Zoom call we publicized on Twitter. | |
| And that went viral. | |
| And that created, you know, the parent part of the parent movement definitely gave access to parents. | |
| They would reach out to us from all over the world, not just the United States. | |
| I'd get emails from everywhere. |
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