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.
Producing accurate transcripts is skilled, time-intensive labor. For Death Panel, that labor is directly shaped by debility and conflicting access needs: Beatrice’s low vision creates specific access requirements around editing and correction that require additional time and coordination. Historically, transcription work has been undervalued and disproportionately pushed on precarious workers under conditions of low pay and assumed flexibility (this landscape is getting much worse and more dire as a result of the proliferation of AI transcription products). We reject that model and are proud to pay our transcript-workers a fair wage.
We are committed to accessibility and to paying our transcript makers for the incredibly hard work of transcribing our dense and long episodes. Reaching 2,500 patreon supporters would make that commitment materially sustainable. Transcripts are not autogenerated. Each one requires skilled listening, editing, and correction by a human being. Your support on patreon directly contributes to our ability to cover this labor consistently, without relying on error-prone auto-transcription or underpaying the disabled workers who make the transcripts.
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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.
#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.
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.
Body Politics w/ Jasbir Puar
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with Jasbir Puar about the violent global effects of settler colonialism and how they shape our understanding of what we mean by “disability” and “debility.” We discuss how events like the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the bombings in 2014 are often described through the number of dead, when they also entail mass disablement and mass debilitation, and how colonial occupation itself can be understood through a theory of debility.
This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on November 21st 2022. We are re-releasing it today, alongside a new transcript of the conversation, because in the past few weeks we have found Jasbir’s work tremendously useful in understanding the enormity of what’s happening in Gaza.
Public Health and Palestine w/ Danya Qato
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Danya Qato about the political economy of health in Palestine, and how to understand the intersection of the pandemic and colonial occupation.
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: Resisting Carceral Sanism (Session 3)
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, "Resisting Carceral Sanism" Death Panel podcast co-host, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, is joined by criminologist, author and disability theorist, Liat Ben-Moshe, and mad advocate, author and activist, Leah Harris, discuss the increasing wave of policies and legislation—from Eric Adams’ stance on involuntary hospitalization to Gavin Newsom’s Care Courts—that seek to criminalize madness and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. They also discuss why it is so critical for the left to work against these policies, and how to understand the politics of what Ben-Moshe has termed “carceral sanism.”
DP x S23: Decolonial Disability Politics and the Left (Session 4)
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, "Decolonial Disability Politics and the Left" Death Panel podcast co-hosts, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson, are joined by theorist, Jasbir Puar, and Shira Hassan, who has spent decades building, documenting and participating in systems of change and support outside of the societal frameworks of oppression and exploitation. This session explores the links between disability, debility, and empire: how neoliberal framings of disability structurally exclude people disabled by ongoing colonialism and global/national/local schemes of extraction, and how to expand our conceptions of debility, disability, and capacity to include populations that don’t fit within tidy frameworks of pride and respectability.
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?
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.
"The Sociological Production of the End of the Pandemic" (02/04/21)
With the public health emergency declaration ending today, May 11th, we turn back the clock to early 2021, mere days into the Biden presidency, and the moment it became clear the US was going to "end the pandemic" not by stopping covid, but by re-narrating its social and political meaning.