Artie Vierkant
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avierkant.bsky.social
Artie Vierkant
@avierkant.bsky.social
Death Panel podcast, wrote Health Communism with Beatrice Adler-Bolton

patreon.com/deathpanelpod
Health Communism is out in paperback today. It contains just one new endorsement, from RWG, which meant the world to us. “The authors are at once ahead of their time and right on time.”

Get it at the link below to donate to Sameer Project, or pirate it online and donate instead
July 29, 2025 at 8:37 PM
Nathan at his most bracing and accessible, spinning an incredible yarn explaining the densely interwoven crises produced by DOGE and the Trump administration at large, from Social Security to the fundamental payments architecture of the US, and his own role in trying to expose them
May 6, 2025 at 8:18 PM
always finding new, ever more cartoonish ways to say it
February 11, 2025 at 9:07 PM
The Fetterman comment:
November 21, 2024 at 3:24 PM
When this news first leaked, it was reported that new guidance would be posted in April for public feedback. Instead it’s only March 1st and the change is “effective immediately,” with no mechanism for public comment
March 1, 2024 at 6:44 PM
S (cont.): “Lately, I have been finding solace in thinking about what plants I would like to have in my garden one day: strawberries, sweet lime, my own olive tree.

I dream I will make my world green again.”
January 25, 2024 at 4:52 PM
S: “I was 18 in 2018 and the Great March of Return is what made me want to go into public health. I cling to that memory when I am disillusioned with our field, and it helps keep me going.”
January 25, 2024 at 4:52 PM
G (cont.): “I talk about Long COVID and COVID to everyone who will listen. And while many people say that I am crazy, many are also learning COVID is still an ongoing pandemic because of calls to mask at protests in solidarity with Palestine happening in the Global North.”
January 25, 2024 at 4:51 PM
G (cont.): “It is very hurtful and alienating to see people in the Global North say that our deaths are taking away from necessary attention to COVID. The exact opposite is true.”
January 25, 2024 at 4:50 PM
G: “It can be hard to get people to care about COVID when there are bombings all day and night, snipers, drones, block by block warfare. But all day long, I am making masks out of whatever materials I can find, and handing them out.”
January 25, 2024 at 4:49 PM
R: “We are cold. We are tired. We are sick, and hungry. No one has medications. No one has dialysis. There is nowhere to give birth. This is not a humanitarian crisis. This is how health is also a weapon of war.”
January 25, 2024 at 4:48 PM
J: “Please remind our comrades not in Gaza, that there are still many of us here. It seems like some people think that everything is gone. … And we are here. … We need your solidarity. We are not already all destroyed. And we will stay alive another week.”
January 25, 2024 at 4:47 PM
The story ends with the woman telling @jeffstein.bsky.social: “You can’t stand there and say you’re the child of the Great Depression, but not understand what you’re doing to the population pushing millions of people off a financial cliff.”
January 18, 2024 at 2:01 PM
Some liberals’ main concern in rewriting this history is anxiety over people not voting for Biden (whether bc of pandemic or Palestine). But the effect of ending the programs was felt in real time—here’s a story from 2021 of a woman with lupus forced back to work by this decision
January 18, 2024 at 2:00 PM
In 2021, while there was public outcry over the end of pandemic unemployment insurance expansion, the Biden administration dithered until the very last moment, allowing it to expire, while Biden publicly said it “makes sense” for the benefits to be ending.
January 18, 2024 at 1:59 PM
Most importantly, Biden had an opportunity to position pandemic relief programs as part of a new baseline for economic security. Instead, they had Jen Psaki forcefully say the opposite, in 2021: “no one from the administration has ever proposed making these permanent”
January 18, 2024 at 1:58 PM
Today’s @deathpanel.bsky.social is in part a response to these claims by Eric Levitz, which misrepresent the fights around the termination of the pandemic welfare programs. Far from championing welfare expansion, the end of these programs means Biden has overseen welfare retrenchment
January 18, 2024 at 1:57 PM