Over two years into a global pandemic that’s killed more than 6 million people, infected over 500 million others and irrevocably changed the way we all live, work and interact, while some mourn and some continue to constantly readapt, for others, an investigation continues.
How did we get here? What mistakes were made? And what can we learn? For those who survived another global health crisis decades prior, one with a far higher mortality rate but drastically lower visibility, many of these questions still remain. In the summer of 1981, a quietly alarming new illness started to afflict gay men, initially reported in localised gay media but soon covered in the New York Times with the still rather unforgettably chilling headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals”. In that year 234 people in the US died. In 1982, the CDC used the term Aids for the first time. By the end of the decade, over 100,000 Americans had died.
