Making Contact

Jeremy Menchik volunteered for Moderna's vaccine trials, wanting to help end the COVID pandemic. However, as Moderna continues to hold patent rights and refuses to openly share their vaccine technology, Jeremy began to feel conflicted. He has since publicly quit as a volunteer and urges others to do the same, until everyone can freely access the vaccine. Listen to our interview with Jeremy on this special edition of Making Contact, an extra to our larger show on vaccine equality.

While Black women have played a critical role in the development of the nation, their stories have been mostly overlooked. In the new book, A Black Women's History of the United States, historians Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross honor the many significant contributions of Black women who have worked tirelessly to build this country and fight for social justice in the face of racism and sexism.

In this encore episode, we look at how COVID-19 has torn through prisons and how organizers are trying to push state and local governments to release inmates in order to contain the spread of the pandemic. In part one, we focus on California. We take a look at why a prison, like San Quentin, is such a perfect environment for infectious diseases, especially an airborne one like COVID-19, how we might safely release large amounts of inmates across the prison system, and what we've learned from past release programs like realignment.

A legal matrix that incentivizes criminal convictions can motivate unethical prosecutors to bend or break the rules. In New York, a group of law professors is trying to curb that by pushing the system to discipline its own. Reported by Nina Sparling.