Transcripts
As of December 20, 2025, Death Panel is supported by 1,991 paid Patreon members. Our goal is to reach 2500 patrons—at which point we can reliably publish full transcripts for every main feed episode as a standard part of the show.
Right now, transcripts are available for select episodes. We are steadily working through the back and current catalog of releases, but our capacity to make the show fully accessible is shaped by material conditions—not a lack of interest or commitment.
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Covid Year Five (12/23/24)
We present our 2024 year in review, taking a look back at the last year in the ongoing social and political consequences of normalizing the covid pandemic and rushing to bring the federal covid response to a close.
Extended Teaser - Covid Year Five (12/23/24)
We present our 2024 year in review, taking a look back at the last year in the ongoing social and political consequences of normalizing the covid pandemic and rushing to bring the federal covid response to a close.
The Promise and Perils of Wastewater Data w/ Betsy Ladyzhets (08/29/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton, speaks with Betsy Ladyzhets of The Sick Times about what wastewater surveillance does—and doesn’t—tell us about the level of covid spread and how the rise of covid wastewater monitoring fits inside the larger picture of the privatization of both covid risk and covid data.
Refusing to Forget w/ Vicky Osterweil (03/21/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Vicky Osterweil about the events we’re encouraged to forget, repress, and reinterpret in order to abet genocide, carcerality, or abandonment to a pandemic, and the power of refusing to forget.
#N95s4UCSF w/ Alice Wong (02/01/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Alice Wong about Alice's campaign to reinstate a mask mandate at UCSF, a hospital system home to a number of physicians who have played an outsized, deleterious, role in advocating for a premature end to covid protections.
Letters from Gaza w/ Danya Qato (01/25/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton shares messages from Death Panel listeners in Gaza and speaks with Danya Qato about how the totalizing nature of the genocide of Palestine can't be captured in death and injury statistics alone.
Unmaking the Pandemic Welfare State (01/18/24)
Death Panel podcast co-hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, and Phil Rocco discuss how recent claims that Biden has tried to bring about “the largest expansion of the welfare state in a half century” ignore his track record of ending every last pandemic welfare program.
Pathologizing Palestinian Resistance w/ Liat Ben-Moshe and Leah Harris (01/11/23)
Death Panel podcast co-hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with Liat Ben-Moshe and Leah Harris about how Palestinian resistance and rebellion is pathologized and the importance of transnational disability solidarity with Palestine.
Covid Year Four (12/12/23)
Death Panel podcast co-hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Phil Rocco, Jules Gill-Peterson and Abby Cartus present their 2023 year in review, taking a look back at the last year of major social and political developments that worked to normalize covid in 2023.
Economic Endemicity Blue (12/07/23)
As we prepare to record "Covid Year Four," Death Panel podcast co-hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, and Abby Cartus discuss what is left of national covid data following the end of the public health emergency, how what's left has become so thoroughly abstracted, and how the CDC prioritizes representing deaths as an abstract percentage even as the official death count has been over 1,000 a week since August.
Scenes from the Class Struggle at CVS (09/28/23)
Death Panel podcast co-hosts, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Phil Rocco and Abby Cartus discuss how the widely reported expense and unavailability of the new covid boosters is the disastrous (and predictable) consequence of the Biden administration’s move to kick covid vaccines and therapeutics to the private market.
DP x S23: Health and Capital (Session 1)
Death Panel podcast collaborated with the organizers of the Socialism Conference to put together five sessions at this year’s conference on the political economy of health and disability. In this session, "Health and Capital (Intro)," Death Panel podcast co-hosts, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, discuss some ways to think about the intersection of healthcare, disability, and left politics, and introduce each of the rest of the sessions.
DP x S23: How Capitalism Kills: Social Murder and Covid-19 (Session 2)
Death Panel podcast collaborated with the organizers of the Socialism Conference to put together five sessions at this year’s conference on the political economy of health and disability. In this session, "How Capitalism Kills: Social Murder and Covid-19," Death Panel podcast co-hosts, Artie Vierkant and Abby Cartus, are joined by friend of the panel and historian, Nate Holdren, to discuss Friedrich Engels’ concept of “social murder,” the structural forces within capitalism that abandon populations to injury, debility, and premature death, and how social murder is a key component of capitalism, not merely a side effect.
DP x S23: The State, Austerity, and the Politics of Healthcare (Session 5)
Death Panel podcast collaborated with the organizers of the Socialism Conference to put together five sessions at this year’s conference on the political economy of health and disability. In this session, "The State, Austerity, and the Politics of Healthcare" Death Panel podcast co-host, Phil Rocco is joined by historians Gabriel Winant and Salonee Bhaman to discuss how fiscal decentralization has become an underappreciated force driving the healthcare politics of the United States, and what it can tell us about where we are now. The healthcare struggles of the last century have been profoundly shaped by the structures of US federalism: what resources are allocated to states, and what artificial constraints are imposed on them that produce policy in the mold of austerity?
Reflections w/ Naomi Klein (09/14/23)
Death Panel podcast co-hosts, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with Naomi Klein about left melancholy, coping with and working against years of disastrous pandemic response, and her new book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
Unwound (08/24/23)
Death Panel podcast co-hosts, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, and Phil Rocco, discuss how the Medicaid "Unwinding," which has already seen over 5 million and counting lose their social safety net health insurance, is still being treated as such an afterthought in the press, even as the Biden administration does nothing to stop it.
Social Determinants of Health (Unlocked)
The Panel, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Phil Rocco and Abby Cartus, discuss the meaning and history of "the social determinants of health"—all of the social and political factors that impact individual and population health beyond what healthcare traditionally focuses on—and what becomes possible when we recognize that health is political. This episode was originally a patron exclusive.
Who Has the Tools? w/ Justin Feldman (08/18/22)
Justin Feldman joins the Panel, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, and Phil Rocco, to talk through the latest downgrade to the CDC's covid guidelines and Ashish Jha's statement this week that the Biden administration is aiming for covid vaccines and therapeutics to be kicked to the private market starting in the fall.
Outdoor Transmission w/ Dr. Theresa Chapple
Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with epidemiologist Dr. Theresa Chapple about how seemingly everyone became convinced that you can't catch covid outdoors, common misconceptions about the pandemic driven by an overwhelming focus on individual risk assessment, and lessons from her work in the field during the first two years of COVID.
Covid Year Two (12/13/2021)
Death Panel co-hosts, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, and Phil Rocco, review the year 2021 in the U.S. covid response, and the profound miscalculations on the part of the government and the media that have played a direct role in keeping this crisis ongoing. While this episode is retrospective, we have covered the pandemic quite closely day in day out since March 2020. If you’d like to listen to some of shows we released reacting in real time to some of the events described in Covid Year Two; start with our episodes “Meaning Production at 500,000 Dead” from February, “A Pandemic of the Unvaccinated” from July, “Operation Enduring Virus” from September, or “Bracing for the Wave” from December. Suffice it to say it has been a terrible year.
This episode was originally a patron exclusive posted December 13th. If you enjoy this episode and want to help us work towards our goal of being able to offer transcripts for more of our episodes, consider supporting the show at patreon.com/deathpanelpod!