Transcripts
Our goal on Patreon is to reach 2500 patrons—at which point we can afford to have regular transcripts available for all main feed episodes. For now, transcripts are available for select episodes, and we are slowly working on catching up on the back catalogue and reducing the amount of time it takes for us to finish a transcript and post it.
At the moment our capacity to offer transcripts of Death Panel is limited. This is due to Beatrice’s disability, and the conflicting access needs that exist with regard to editing/correcting transcripts and her low vision/blindness. The labor of producing transcripts is usually poorly compensated and historically is often done by disabled people due to the flexibility and availability of working on transcription from home. We are committed to making the show accessible and paying our transcript makers a fair wage.
If you would like to help us reach our goal, then please become a patron and support our work to make the show more accessible.
Mask Bans Are Everyone’s Fight (08/22/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, and Jules Gill-Peterson discuss the mask ban passed in Nassau County last week, the latest in a dramatic rise in legislation criminalizing face masks and targeting the Palestine solidarity movement. We look at what happened in the overtly hostile public hearing over the ban, the history of the New York statute that ban proponents want back, and how the threat of mask bans goes far beyond public health: mask bans embolden racist policing; they’re anti-trans; and they target the whole of the left.
The Rise of Mask Bans (06/20/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant and Phil Rocco discuss New York Democrats’ plan to ban masks on the subway and beyond, and take a close look at the latest updates on North Carolina’s anti-mask bill HB237, “Unmasking Mobs and Criminals,” which state lawmakers managed to make significantly worse since we last talked about it on the show at the end of May.
On The Atlantic’s “The UN’s Gaza Statistics Make No Sense” (06/05/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Abby Cartus and Phil Rocco discuss a recent article by The Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood that went viral for its assertion that, in the context of the genocide in Palestine, “it is possible to kill children legally.” We take a close look at the piece and how the rest of the surrounding argument uses a veneer of data “objectivity” to mask its underlying idea: that Palestinian death statistics cannot be trusted simply because they are collected by Palestinians themselves.
On NPR’s “Wrestling with my husband's fear of getting COVID again” (03/18/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant and Jules Gill-Peterson discuss a recent piece in NPR, “Wrestling with my husband's fear of getting COVID again,” which presents avoiding covid both as the product of unreasonable “anxiety” and as something immunocompromised people should let go of lest their loved ones consider abandoning them.
“Unmasking Mobs and Criminals” (05/23/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant and Jules Gill-Peterson discuss the recent push by state and local governments to criminalize masking in public space, in some cases introducing new legislation to make existing anti-mask laws more severe, and take a close look at HB237, “Unmasking Mobs and Criminals,” a bill currently being debated in North Carolina that perfectly illustrates the links between covid activism, abolition, and the fight for Palestinian liberation.
Water for Gaza (05/20/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Abby Cartus discuss how the ongoing water crisis in Palestine is a tool of genocide, how to understand the centrality of water and sanitation systems to all of the infrastructure needed to support life, and what Death Panel listeners and contacts in Gaza tell us we can do to help.
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.
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.
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: 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.
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.
How the CDC Could Further Weaken Infection Control w/ Jane Thomason (08/17/23)
Death Panel Podcast co-host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Jane Thomason of National Nurses United (NNU) about troubling new guidance changes the CDC is considering implementing that would further weaken infection control guidance and put healthcare workers and patients at risk.
Unlimited Liabilities w/ Nate Holdren (07/31/23)
Death Panel co-hosts, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, speak with historian Nate Holdren about a recent court ruling in the California State Supreme Court that denied a covid worker’s compensation claim because recognizing employer liability would have “the potential to destroy businesses and curtail, if not outright end, the provision of public services.”
Organizing and Covid-19, Part 1 (02/16/23)
In this two-part series, we speak to a few people engaged in organizing and political education projects about their experiences trying to incorporate covid protections into their existing organizing work, wins and losses they've encountered, and why it's so important for the left to take covid seriously, even as the public health emergency comes to a close.
In Part 1, we speak with Alex (beginning at 03:30), a student organizer at a university in the northeast US, and Reina Sultan (beginning at 54:30), a co-creator of 8 to Abolition. Part 2 will be released as next week's public episode.
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.