To hear the full episode, become a patron at petriam.com slash death panel pod.

Welcome to the death panel. Patrons, thank you so much for your support. We couldn't do any of this without you.

If you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your

favorite episodes, pre-order health communism, and request it at your local library, and follow us

at Death Panel underscore. So for today's episode, Artie, Abby, and I are going to talk about

Vinay Prasad. Not really about him personally, so to speak, but more Prasad as a kind of archetype.

We're using him as an example.

And most specifically, I think we want to try and tease apart how and why rhetoric like

Prasades can appeal to or convince people who are, you know, self-identified liberals, progressives,

or leftists, and how these arguments can make people maybe believe that,

for example, COVID is no big deal, or maybe that fear is worse than the virus, or maybe that

they are healthy and strong, and so they don't need to be vaccinated, wear a mask, or maybe even

that vaccination is possibly dangerous for them.

You know, all these ideas, of course, go way beyond tricking individuals and misunderstandings of population level risk as a sort of individual phenomenon.

But this rhetoric also, you know, for all it makes a show of boasting that it's a challenge

to power or, quote unquote, corporate capture to use

Vinay's preferred term.

This ironically has also convinced people to not levy pressure on power to do anything

different on COVID.

And this rhetoric ultimately does also facilitate power and facilitate organized abandonment

while jacketing itself as this kind of critique

of profit and grift. And so that's really what we're going to talk about today, not Prasad so

...