Free the Vaccine for COVID-19 participant, L.M. Bogad, has a new podcast called The Plague. Check out episode three with Merith Basey, one of the leads of the Free The Vaccine for COVID-19 campaign.
I’m pleased to announce the launch of my podcast, THE PLAGUE. It’s a podcast where we look, not just at the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but at our nation’s home-made plagues, plagues created by human socioeconomic systems, that make the coronavirus more virulent and dangerous.
The coronavirus infects the human body, but what illnesses in our body politic make us more vulnerable to it? Economic inequality? Environmental devastation? Labor precarity? Alienation? We pick a different societal plague each week and talk with an expert about how that plague makes the coronavirus deadlier.
We then move on to discuss “treatments” or even “vaccines” for that plague: what kinds of political or cultural action we can take to “cure” it. Since many of our guest experts are also artists, they are invited to share a creative work on the topic—a song, poem, monologue—of their own creation or choosing.
Guests include poet and Friends of the Earth organizer Jeff Conant, Dr. Rupa Marya of the Do No Harm Coalition and the band Rupa and the April Fishes, performance artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, theatre activist Aryeh Shell, affordable medicine activist Merith Basey, playwright and San Francisco Mime Troupe member and playwright Michael Gene Sullivan, and many more.
As the host, I broadcast from my “shelter in place” bunker, while co-conspiring in ongoing creative activist campaigns on these issues.
In solidarity, and here’s to a vaccine for Covid and for authoritarianism.