The Politics of Pandemics

In 2001, the US government and pharmaceutical companies phased out thimerosal from the vaccines. What was a precautionary measure became the seed of a coverup accusation and start of an industry bent…

This episode we track the downfall of Andrew Wakefield in the UK as his scheme is exposed by journalist Brian Deer. However as he becomes a pariah there, Wakefield finds a new audience in the United …

In 1998, a doctor named Andrew Wakefield called on the UK government to stop using the MMR vaccine based on his own research, kickstarting the modern anti-vaccine movement. He did not start this move…

This episode is a primer for the next batch of episodes. We talk about life before the vaccines, the development of the measles vaccine, and the people that made this possible.

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Closing this trilogy on the Tablighi Jamaat and this pilot season of The Politics of Pandemics, we go to India. Here, a cluster at the birthplace of the Tablighi Jamaat ignites a fresh round of discr…

Part 2 goes to Pakistan, where a large gathering of Tablighi Jamaat faithful in Raiwind as well as returning pilgrims from Iran accounted for a large proportion of Pakistan's first wave of cases in m…

Part 1 of a trilogy. A gathering of thousands of religious faithful in Malaysia coincides with a political crisis, causing the country's first explosion of cases in March 2020.

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Peru has the highest death rate per capita from COVID-19 despite locking down early. Here, see how corruption, political instability, and endemic inequality caused a perfect storm in the country.

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Iran came into the pandemic with sanctions, years of political protests, and a calcified elite government. Western writers proclaimed COVID-19 as the nail in the coffin for the Iranian revolution. Bu…

While other nations shut down, Tanzania stayed open. Driven by the denialism of President John Magufuli, Tanzania refused to acknowledge the seriousness of the pandemic... until Magufuli died.

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South Korea's megachurches and cults became the scapegoat of the country's COVID-19 fight. It helps to understand why they ended up being blamed and if they really are at fault.

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Northern Italy was one of the first regions to be truly hit by the horrors of COVID-19, with a shockingly high mortality rate and cemeteries filling faster than they can dig them. We look at the perf…

After the first cases were detected, Wuhan insisted they had all cases quarantined and the situation under control. The world would soon find out how wrong they were.

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The story of the very first days of the pandemic, from the Huanan Seafood Market to the first death, before anyone realized what would happen.

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