Introducing Fiasco: The AIDS Crisis

From the co-creators of Slow Burn, Fiasco is a narrative podcast that transports listeners into the day-to-day reality of America’s most pivotal historical events. 

Using original interviews with dozens of key players, host Leon Neyfakh brings to life the forgotten twists and turns of the past while shedding light on the present day. The new season of Fiasco goes deep on the AIDS epidemic in America, with a special focus on the early years of the crisis, when a diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence. The eight-part series looks at the mystery and missteps around identifying and treating a new, contagious disease, and what it took to get the public - and the government - to care.

If you like this series, mark your calendars: a new season of Fiasco is coming July 27, 2023, exclusively on Audible. Fiasco: Vigilante tells the story of a shooting that took place in 1984 on the New York City subway, leaving four Bronx teenagers gravely wounded and turning a man named Bernie Goetz into a national folk hero. Fiasco: Vigilante offers a panoramic but intimate view of how this era-defining story unfolded, giving voice for the first time to key players, and immersing listeners in the gritty, paranoid world of ’80s New York City. Listen to the trailer now at adbl.co/vigilante, only on Audible.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's well documented from the time of the Black Death
in thirteen forty eight that with almost every epidemic, people
respond to the epidemic in exactly the same predictable ways.
The first thing they do is they deny that it's
even occurred.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Does anybody that White House know about this epidemic?

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Now, I don't know anything about any And then they
want to blame someone for having caused it.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Almost sexual promise, gourity is a violation of God's laws.
We pay the price when we violate the laws of God.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
They then start losing faith in institutions. You know, the
institutions that were supposed to protect them are now a suspect.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
You can't trust the medical establishment, you can't trust the media,
and you certainly can't trust the government.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
And at the same time there's inappropriate legislation.

Speaker 4 (00:48):
You had the preachers who were calling for quarantine and
putting people in camps and tattooing their HIV status on
their bodies.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
This has occurred in epidemic after epidemic after epidemy, and
of course we saw it in spades.

Speaker 5 (01:02):
With the aids up at him.

Speaker 6 (01:09):
I'm Leon Nafock, host of Fiasco in our New season,
we're looking back at the beginning of AIDS in America.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
It's mysterious, it's deadly, and it's baffling medical science.

Speaker 7 (01:23):
It was something nobody had ever seen. Within just five years,
almost everyone I knew was dead or dying.

Speaker 4 (01:29):
Forty million infected people.

Speaker 6 (01:31):
Is a pay fiasco. The AIDS crisis coming soon only
from Audible