Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary
Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary
Matthew Zachary is the healthcare policy love child of Jon Stewart, Howard Stern, Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Seinfeld. He has 19 years of receipts to prove it. Editorially independent. Answerable to no one. What started as The Stupid Cancer Show in 2007 became Out of Patients. The first online health podcast in America, predating the medium itself. Zachary survived brain cancer at 21, built the young adult cancer movement from scratch, and spent two decades channeling patient rage into something the system never saw coming. Now he is marching into Washington. Out of Patients goes where the comfortable shows will not. Politics. Healthcare policy. Economics. Institutional accountability. Consumer protection. The forces shaping what 330 million Americans can access, afford, and survive. Battle-scarred patients. Exhausted caregivers. Rare insiders brave enough to name what is killing us. And the occasional elected official about to find out what an organized patient constituency actually looks like. This is the show that started the conversation America is still not ready to finish.
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Dec. 17, 2025

Plan B

Plan B
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Dr. Marissa Russo trained to become a cancer biologist. She spent four years studying one of the deadliest brain tumors in adults and built her entire research career around a simple, urgent goal: open her own lab and improve the odds for patients with almost no shot at survival. In 2024 she applied for an F31 diversity grant through the NIH. The reviewers liked her work. Her resubmission was strong. Then the grant system started glitching. Dates vanished. Study sections disappeared. Emails went silent. When she finally reached a program officer, the message was clear: scrub the DEI language, withdraw, and resubmit. She rewrote the application in ten days. It failed. She had to start over. Again. This time with her identity erased.

Marissa left the lab. She found new purpose as a science communicator, working at STAT News through the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship. Her story captures what happens when talent collides with institutional sabotage. Not every scientist gets to choose a Plan B. She made hers count.

RELATED LINKS

Marissa Russo at STAT News

NIH F31 grant story in STAT

AAAS Mass Media Fellowship

Contact Marissa Russo

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