In the mid-1980s, the people of Valerie Reyes-Jiménez’s lower Manhattan neighborhood began to disappear. It had been a tight-knit Puerto Rican community but, in recent years, it had become home to one of the city’s most infamous drug bazaars. At 20, Valerie had seen a lot, but nothing prepared her for the strange, stealthy illness that took 75 people from her block in just a few short years. She and her friends called it… The Monster.

Outside Valerie’s neighborhood, doctors had a different name for what was going on. They called it HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. By this point, this illness was widely recognized as the biggest contagious threat facing the United States, but its effect on communities like Valerie’s remained largely invisible. In this season of Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows, we travel back to a pivotal moment in the history of this country, and we trace how, decades before Covid-19, a virus tore through some of our most vulnerable communities while the wider world looked away. We go to a pediatric ward in Harlem, a women’s prison in upstate New York, a drug market in the South Bronx, and the inner sanctum of the NIH. And we meet people who demanded that they, and their illness, be seen: mothers and children, doctors and nurses, nuns and sex workers, and a woman who literally helped change the definition of AIDS.

HIV and AIDS changed the United States, and it changed the world. It has killed some 40 million people, and continues to kill today; it was always as much a social disease, as it was a medical crisis. In this series, we will tell the story of some of the defining years of the epidemic—and we’ll consider, what part of the pain of this story could have been avoided? Most crucial of all, what lessons can we still learn from it today?

Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows is a co-production of The HISTORY® Channel and WNYC Studios.

Show credits can be found here.