A car, a camera, and a government policy reversal. Told by Hassan Akkad (EP 31).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government announced a bereavement scheme for NHS healthcare workers who died in service. The scheme excluded cleaners, porters and other support staff — the people who entered the same wards, handled the same risks, and were paid the least. Akkad was working as a hospital cleaner at the time.
Akkad sat in his car and filmed a video addressed to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He spoke directly, without a script, about what he had seen inside the hospital and what the exclusion meant for the people working alongside him. The video was shared widely across social media and picked up by national press.
The government reversed its position and extended the bereavement scheme to include all NHS workers, regardless of role. Akkad did not describe the video as activism or campaigning. He described it as the only available response when the formal channels — which he had no access to — had already failed.
The story is about proximity and credibility. Akkad was not an advocate speaking on behalf of cleaners. He was a cleaner. The video worked because it eliminated the distance between the person making the argument and the person affected by the policy. It is also, in the context of the podcast, a continuation of the pattern established in Damascus: when confronted with an injustice, Akkad's instinct is to speak directly to the person responsible.
See: Hassan Akkad