early AIDS – Forty-five years after the CDC’s first AIDS report, a renewed look at New York City’s early HIV years shows how U.S. policy treated AIDS as a disease of gay men—leaving women and communities of color behind and even cutting them off from benefits.
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the stakes were measured in lives—and the decisions made in Washington and in research labs often decided whose lives counted.
Decades before Covid-19, the AIDS epidemic tore through communities in the United States and around the world. It has killed some 40 million people and continues to take lives today. Yet early research and public policy focused on AIDS as a gay men’s disease. overlooking other vulnerable groups. including communities of color and women.
This month marks 45 years since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published its first report about a mysterious illness that would eventually be called AIDS. To revisit what those first years meant for the people most affected. a new replay brings back “Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows. ” from reporters Kai Wright and Lizzy Ratner. which chronicles the first years of the HIV epidemic in New York City.
At the center of the story is Katrina Haslip. an influential activist for women with AIDS who was a prisoner at a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. In the 1980s, Haslip and other incarcerated women started a support group to educate each other about HIV and AIDS. It was activism born from the same reality the epidemic was imposing on them—limited access. limited information. and the urgent need to protect each other.
Haslip’s work didn’t stay behind prison walls. After her release in 1990, she took her activism into the wider public world, including meeting with CDC leaders. One of her main goals was to change the definition of AIDS at a time when it excluded many symptoms that appeared in HIV-positive women.
The consequences were immediate and bureaucratic, but no less devastating. Because many women did not qualify under that definition, they often did not qualify for government benefits such as Medicaid and disability insurance.
The story also shows how far-reaching the policy gap was—how a medical label tied to eligibility could determine who received support and who was left waiting. Long before anyone could say what “aging with HIV” would look like. women like Haslip were fighting to ensure the illness was recognized as it actually appeared in their bodies and their lives.
“Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows” is a co-production of The History Channel and WNYC Studios. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in February 2024.
And in the present, as the epidemic still takes lives, the lesson from the early years is hard to miss: when public policy narrows the definition of who is “supposed” to be sick, the people most affected can end up treated as if they aren’t—until they organize to force the system to see them.
AIDS HIV CDC Katrina Haslip women with AIDS Medicaid disability insurance public policy New York City Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows