about
This is a public health advocacy podcast.
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Disease control systems are being dismantled in broad daylight. Public health communications have crumbled.
Old pathogens are waking up with a vengeance and new pandemics are breathing down our necks — fuelled by capitalism and climate change. COVID is definitely not over and its aftershocks are just starting to be understood.
But we don’t have to accept forever-sickness and death. Or the complacency that landed us here.
This show brings public health advocates together to map out a path to a future we can all breathe in.
You’re invited to join us.
THE PODCAST
Public Health is Dead is an award-winning public health advocacy show. It’s a forward-thinking autopsy on how we've f*cked up in public health. How do we prepare for future pandemics while we're already in the thick of one? And how do we reinvent systems that place some of us closer to death?
Through examining our past successes and failures, often through the lens of COVID, we plot a route out of apathy and denial towards health liberation for all.
Guided by your host, Daniella Barreto, you'll hear unusual tales of how we've battled infectious disease throughout history and mind-stretching interviews with undaunted public health advocates today.
This podcast is your anti-establishment field guide to surviving in the era of pandemics — full of vision, hope, and a little punk rock attitude. Public Health is Dead is a eulogy for the field as we know it and a gathering of voices to map out where we go next.
AS SEEN IN…
what does it sound like?
Kind of like Science Vs. meets Ologies meets 99% Invisible
Public Health is Dead is a scrappy indie podcast punching above its weight, keeping receipts, and building up resistance to institutional abandonment.
In one corner, global leaders have sheepishly washed their hands of responsibility for our collective health. In the other, anti-science supervillains are taking a sledgehammer to centuries of progress.
This podcast exists to help figure out what went wrong, refuse the flawed and faltering systems we’ve inherited, and bring together ideas for a better future.
Guided by your host, Daniella Barreto (MSc.), the show investigates:
how the field let dogma get in the way of effective airborne disease protections,
what we can learn from the ventilation system in an old theatre built after the 1918 flu pandemic,
how public health leaders threw out the hard-won cheat codes from SARS when COVID (SARS2) came around, and
how news media completely flipped the public health narrative from “we’re all in this together” to “getting sick is good for you”. (It’s not).
Public Health is Dead launched in 2024 to help fill an expanding public health media void with storytelling, informed perspectives, and credible commentary. It interrogates the field’s foundations and gathers sharp, future-looking guests to help map out a public health that answers to each other, not money and power. Every episode builds out the show as a library in your pocket: a resource for surviving current and oncoming public health disasters.
For listeners sick of denial and complacency in public health, Public Health is Dead is a breath of fresh air. It’s a call for accountability from our leaders and an invitation to build a better future without leaving people by the wayside.
There is no safe future without each other. And there is no safe future without adapting to new information. Scientific knowledge comes with a moral imperative. In other words: if we know better, we can do better—for ourselves and our kids.
This show is a tool to help compost the radical ideas of yesterday into tomorrow's health liberation for all. When you listen, you'll find other people adapting to our changed world, organizing accomplices, scientific collaborators, and people who want to build something better together.
Public health as we know it may be dead, but we’re not dead yet!
And we’re glad you’re here. There’s lots of work to do.
Public Health is Dead aims to be anti-ableist, anti-oppressive, and anti-racist in facing the field's entrenched power structures.
Meet Daniella, host of Public Health is DeaD.
SHINY THINGS.
Public Health is Dead has been honoured in various international podcast awards competitions including:
2025 International Women’s Podcast Awards Finalist
2025 Canadian Podcast Awards Nominee x3
Listen for yourself.
This might be the very thing that helps you through the storms ahead.
Check out the spinoff collab in the feed with mj of Everything is Public Health and your Public Health is Dead host, Daniella. These Episodes are a conversational critique of the good, the bad, and the ugly when public health pops up in the media.
SHOW CREDITS
Public Health is Dead is an independent podcast created, produced, written, edited, and hosted by Daniella Barreto. Varied additional production support, including fact checking, editing, and sound design, is credited in each episode’s shownotes and corresponding blog page.
N.B. We need to say it’s a bad idea for you to take medical advice from podcasts. Good thing this show does not offer medical advice!
The point of Public Health is Dead is to share experiences and information that might help advance public health as a field and increase our collective knowledge. If you have particular personal medical concerns of your own, please talk to your own medical providers about it.
As this podcast is a response to broad, global public health failures, medical providers could also benefit from engaging with the contents and perspectives in this show :)