Show Notes
In this episode, Ariel walks us through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). She traces its history from the Food Stamp Program of 1939 to its most recent changes under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 (spoiler alert: changes made due to OBBBA aren’t good). In addition to reviewing major changes to SNAP through the years, she discusses what SNAP is and the eligibility criteria, why food assistance is important, the hypocrisy of the MAHA movement’s actions (they’re not m...
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It’s SpOokY season, and Olivia and Ariel are digging into VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, where one doctor reported turning into the Hulk after his flu shot (and the report was accepted). Olivia explains VAERS as a smoke detector that beeps at both fires (proven vaccine injuries) and burnt toast (lots of unverified reports). She covers where VAERS came from, the real safety signals it has caught, and why raw reports are so easy to misread and easily fearmongered. Then they ...
In this episode, Ariel and Mattie discuss Elon Musk, wealth inequality, and his disastrous influence on public health. Earlier this year, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after already existing as the wealthiest individual on planet Earth. Billionaires should not exist, and trillionaires are even worse. Wealth inequality is bad for health, and the US ranks high in wealth inequity. In addition to wealth inequality, we cover the elimination of dog to human rabies transmission in...
Part two of our Reagan deep-dive picks up where we left off, with Mattie walking us through more of the Reagan Administration decisions that are still shaping public health today: the War on Drugs and the punitive framework it built that we're still dismantling, the roots of the modern homelessness crisis, and the mental health policy choices that gutted the safety net for people who needed it most. If you loved Part One, you're going to love this one too. Also this week: Colorado's ext...
Part one of our Reagan deep-dive has Mattie leading the charge with Ariel along for the ride, digging into the economic and public health legacy of the Reagan era: Reaganomics and the trickle-down promise that never quite trickled, the AIDS epidemic and the years of federal silence while a generation was dying, and the "welfare queen" myth Reagan built a political career on — where that story actually came from, who it was designed to target, and how it's still doing damage in policy debates ...
Part two of our cyclospora deep-dive brings in Dr. Alex Sundermann, DrPH, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, to get into the outbreak detection and surveillance side of things: why cyclospora is so much harder to catch than bacteria, the wild week the Taylor Farms lettuce sample flipped from positive to false positive to epidemiologically linked, and what's lost when institutional knowledge and federal tracking systems get gutted. Also...