Speaker 1: Hey, this is Leon Napok. I'm the host of Fiasco,
Speaker 1: but you may also know me from the podcasts Slowburn,
Speaker 1: Think Twice, Michael Jackson, and Backfired the Vaping Wars. I'm
Speaker 1: excited to be sharing with you the next season of Backfired,
Speaker 1: titled Attention Deficit, which is now available exclusively on Audible.
Speaker 1: Backfired is a podcast about the business of unintended consequences.
Speaker 1: In the first season, my co host Ril Pardess and
Speaker 1: I dove deep into the world of vaping and how
Speaker 1: the well intentioned quest for a safer cigarette went awry.
Speaker 1: Now we're tackling ADHD and how the push to destigmatize
Speaker 1: this hard to define childhood diagnosis has led to an
Speaker 1: explosion of stimulant use in kids as well as adults.
Speaker 1: It's a story about the promise of psychiatry to fix
Speaker 1: our brains and the power of the pharmaceutical industry to
Speaker 1: shape how we and our doctors think about what's wrong
Speaker 1: with us. To hear both seasons of Backfired, go to
Speaker 1: audible dot com slash Backfired and start a free trial
Speaker 1: that's audible dot com. Slash Backfired is intended for mature audiences.
Speaker 1: For a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used
Speaker 1: in our research. Follow the link in the show notes.
Speaker 2: This is the Gay Life ksam's Public affairs show for
Speaker 2: gentlemen who prefer gentlemen, for women who prefer women, and
Speaker 2: for people who prefer people. You don't have to be
Speaker 2: gay to listen. Good Evening, I'm Randy Alfred Tonight. Our
Speaker 2: discussion is on the new diseases, the so called gay
Speaker 2: cancer and Later. In January of nineteen eighty two, a
Speaker 2: radio show in San Francisco featured an interview with a
Speaker 2: local nurse. His name was Bobby Campbell. Good Evening, Bobby,
Speaker 2: Good Evening, Randy. Let's start the story at the beginning.
Speaker 1: Campbell was twenty nine years old. About a year earlier,
Speaker 1: he had gotten sick from an unusual infection and spent
Speaker 1: four days in the hospital. It turned out there was
Speaker 1: something wrong with his immune system.
Speaker 3: I found that I had a low white blood cell count,
Speaker 3: which which is the main mechanism the body uses to
Speaker 3: fight off infection.
Speaker 1: Not long after his hospital stay, Campbell went on a
Speaker 1: hiking trip with his boyfriend on the California coast. Afterwards,
Speaker 1: he noticed purple spots on the soles of his feet.
Speaker 1: He figured they were blood blisters from all the walking
Speaker 1: he'd been doing. But then a few weeks past and
Speaker 1: the spots still hadn't gone away. Campbell and his boyfriend
Speaker 1: got worried. There had just been a few newspaper stories
Speaker 1: published about a rare form of skin cancer afflicting gay
Speaker 1: men in New York in San Francisco. It was called
Speaker 1: Capussi's sarcoma.
Speaker 3: My boyfriend he said, oh, well, you know, cop, she
Speaker 3: does appear on the on the feet and legs. I said,
Speaker 3: feet and legs.
Speaker 4: How did you feel?
Speaker 3: It can't be me. I can't have this. It's not this,
Speaker 3: It's just a bloodlister. It's something else.
Speaker 1: Campbell got a biopsy. It showed that he did have
Speaker 1: Capussi's sarcoma, the disease some had started calling gay cancer.
Speaker 2: As a health professional, surely you had read of it.
Speaker 3: As a matter of fact, I had not read of it.
Speaker 3: It's so rare that until nineteen eighty one it was
Speaker 3: mentioned in medical dermatology textbooks with one paragraph and sort
Speaker 3: of glossed over onto the next thing.
Speaker 1: Campbell wanted to warn other gay men, especially those who
Speaker 1: didn't share his relatively privileged position.
Speaker 3: I really feel very fortunate in some ways, and that
Speaker 3: I have a lover who cares for me. I have
Speaker 3: real good health insurance, I can be on medical leave
Speaker 3: of absence. I have a lot of things going for me,
Speaker 3: and I'm worried about someone who may develop this disease
Speaker 3: and yet not have those pluses. So hopefully in my
Speaker 3: being a blabbermouth in this way has some payoff for
Speaker 3: this hypothetical person on Caster Street of Santa Monica Boulevard
Speaker 3: or whatever.
Speaker 1: This interview with Bobby Campbell is the earliest recording I've
Speaker 1: been able to find of someone talking in the first
Speaker 1: person about having AIDS. Of course, Campbell didn't know that's
Speaker 1: what it was, yet he just thought he had cancer,
Speaker 1: not realizing it was a symptom of something even worse.
Speaker 1: To me, that's what's so extraordinary about hearing him talk
Speaker 1: about it. He just knows so little about what's coming,
Speaker 1: and yet he's already certain that it's important and that
Speaker 1: people need to know about it.
Speaker 2: You've never been a closet cancer patient.
Speaker 3: No, I've never been a closet cancer patient. I tend
Speaker 3: to be very disclosing in the things that happened to me,
Speaker 3: But I just thought that the more I talked about it,
Speaker 3: the better it would be for me, and the better
Speaker 3: it would be for other people in my community.
Speaker 1: To help spread the word, Campbell took polaroid photos of
Speaker 1: his feet and put them on a poster. He hung
Speaker 1: it in the front window of a pharmacy on Castro
Speaker 1: Street in San Francisco. He also started writing a column
Speaker 1: in a local gay newspaper and distributed informational leaflets to
Speaker 1: other gay men while inhabiting a drag persona he called
Speaker 1: Sister Florence Nightmare, registered nurse.
Speaker 2: So I think it's very brave of you to be
Speaker 2: here publicly discussing a very private and life threatening of situation,
Speaker 2: and I want to commend you and thank you for that.
Speaker 3: If I don't feel brave so much as maybe I
Speaker 3: show off, I am, but it's I don't know. I
Speaker 3: feel comfortable in doing it, and as a healthcare professional
Speaker 3: and an articulate person, I have a story to tell
Speaker 3: and I'm happy to do it.
Speaker 1: It would be another six months before Bobby Campbell's disease
Speaker 1: was given the name we know it by today. It
Speaker 1: would be a year before its underlying cause was identified
Speaker 1: as a virus that destroyed the immune system, and it
Speaker 1: would be more than a decade before an effective treatment
Speaker 1: was developed.
Speaker 3: Anything you want to add before we close for the evening,
Speaker 3: Take care of yourselves, brothers and sisters. You're the only
Speaker 3: one you've got.
Speaker 1: This season of Fiasco is about the early years of
Speaker 1: the AIDS epidemic, when a diagnosis was tantamount to a
Speaker 1: death sentence.
Speaker 5: AID syndrome has spread in epidemic, proportions of the victims
Speaker 5: have died.
Speaker 1: Over the course of eight episodes, you'll hear the story
Speaker 1: of a scandal unlike any we've covered before. It's a
Speaker 1: story about denial and misinformation.
Speaker 6: People are saying you can catch as from a mosquito
Speaker 6: bite are in swimming.
Speaker 1: Pools, and the politics of a disease that intensified old
Speaker 1: prejudices and activated new ones.
Speaker 7: I believe that God does not judge people.
Speaker 4: God judges sin.
Speaker 1: It's also a story about what people do in the
Speaker 1: absence of scientific clarity, when the authorities they depend on
Speaker 1: an answer to can't or won't figure out what to do.
Speaker 1: We'll return to Bobby Campbell in a bit. For now,
Speaker 1: I want to go back to the fall of nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty when a group of doctors and scientists scattered around
Speaker 1: the country first became aware that something inexplicable was happening
Speaker 1: to gay men. I'm Leon Napok from Audible and Prologue projects.
Speaker 1: This is Fiasco, season five, the AIDS Crisis.
Speaker 5: It's mysterious, it's deadly, and it's baffling medical science.
Speaker 8: A new deadly disease that no one understands, not where
Speaker 8: it comes from, how to treat it, or how to
Speaker 8: stop it from spreading.
Speaker 4: A great medical puzzle. It's known as gay plague.
Speaker 5: They are violating the laws of nature, and nature is
Speaker 5: striking back.
Speaker 9: What I was hearing was from patients. My circle of
Speaker 9: friends are disappearing.
Speaker 4: And within just five years, almost everyone I knew was
Speaker 4: dead or dying.
Speaker 1: One night in the fall of nineteen eighty, doctor Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Green was called into work to see a new patient.
Speaker 1: It was after midnight and the man needed Green's urgent attention.
Speaker 9: I remember everything I remember about this patient because it
Speaker 9: was probably one of the most poignant moments of my life.
Speaker 9: It was about one o'clock in the morning, but when
Speaker 9: I saw him, he was in the intensive care unit
Speaker 9: and he was being intubated, being put on a breathing
Speaker 9: machine because he was gasping for breath and very short
Speaker 9: on oxygen and he needed to be put on the
Speaker 9: breathing machine for survival. Had a very high fever, and
Speaker 9: I was confused. I didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 1: Green was working in the Infectious disease unit at Bellevue
Speaker 1: Hospital in Manhattan. Bellevue was one of the biggest public
Speaker 1: hospitals in the country and an especially interesting place to
Speaker 1: be an infectious disease specialist because it was cheaper and
Speaker 1: more accessible than the private hospitals in town. Bellevue served
Speaker 1: as a safety net for patients from all walks of life,
Speaker 1: and because it was in New York. Many Bellvue patients
Speaker 1: were people from abroad carrying diseases that were uncommon in America.
Speaker 1: As Green put it, he and his colleagues saw a
Speaker 1: little bit of everything.
Speaker 9: They could be three four, five or even more new
Speaker 9: patients per day in terms of consultations, and I would
Speaker 9: go see those patients to give my opinion as to
Speaker 9: what was going on, to help make diagnoses, and to
Speaker 9: help in orchestrating the treatment.
Speaker 1: The patient Green saw that night in nineteen eighty had
Speaker 1: the initials HW. He was thirty eight years old. A
Speaker 1: round of tests confirmed that there was something seriously wrong
Speaker 1: with his lungs.
Speaker 4: Very poor oxygenation.
Speaker 9: His chest X ray was almost white, very advanced pneumonia
Speaker 9: in all five lobes of the lung.
Speaker 1: There didn't seem to be anything about HW's medical history
Speaker 1: that could explain what was happening to him.
Speaker 4: Before he was in debated.
Speaker 9: I was able to get a medical history, which previous
Speaker 9: to that admission was pretty benign. He was a guy
Speaker 9: in his thirties. He was a gay man. He was
Speaker 9: in the last throes of life. He lived long enough
Speaker 9: to go for an open lung biopsy, which is where
Speaker 9: the surgeon takes the patient to the operating room and
Speaker 9: through the rib takes a wedge of lung tissue to
Speaker 9: examine to see what we might be dealing with. And
Speaker 9: it was on that tissue that he saw these five
Speaker 9: different infections.
Speaker 1: Each of the five infections HW was fighting was extremely
Speaker 1: rare on its own. For all five to show up
Speaker 1: in one young, apparently healthy person was unheard of. Taken together,
Speaker 1: the infections seemed to suggest some kind of immune suppression.
Speaker 1: Someone with a healthy immune system could have fought them
Speaker 1: off without even knowing they had been exposed. HW had
Speaker 1: other symptoms too, and I.
Speaker 9: Remember seeing this very large purple lesion on the patient's nose.
Speaker 9: But we had bigger fish to fry, you know, with
Speaker 9: this guy, so we weren't so concerned about his skin lesion.
Speaker 1: The only thing that was clear was that HW's immune
Speaker 1: system had somehow gone haywire.
Speaker 9: I realized that this patient had to have come in
Speaker 9: with severe immune suppression for whatever reason.
Speaker 4: We weren't sure, but we felt.
Speaker 9: That the only way that he could have had all
Speaker 9: these things simultaneously would be basically an immune system that
Speaker 9: had died before he did.
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Green was one of the first doctors in the
Speaker 1: world to notice that a strange and deadly new disease
Speaker 1: was spreading in the United States. It was not how
Speaker 1: he thought his career would turn out. Growing up during
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties in a sheltered, middle class neighborhood in
Speaker 1: Queen's Green always imagined that being a doctor would be
Speaker 1: a job in which he got paid to help sick
Speaker 1: people get better.
Speaker 4: I was birthed by my family's GP. He used to make.
Speaker 9: House calls, come give shots in the house, make me
Speaker 9: feel better.
Speaker 4: When I was sick.
Speaker 9: You know, he was like part of the family really,
Speaker 9: and as I was thinking about my future, even as
Speaker 9: a very young kid, you know, I always thought being
Speaker 9: a doctor would be a thing that I would like
Speaker 9: to try.
Speaker 1: By the time Green entered medical school in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: doctors who made house calls were pretty much a thing
Speaker 1: of the past. Instead, Green went into the field of
Speaker 1: infectious disease.
Speaker 10: Communicable diseases recognize no boundaries, always watchful for epidemics. Practicing
Speaker 10: physicians constitute the first line of defense.
Speaker 9: I liked the idea of finding a problem, diagnosing a problem,
Speaker 9: and fixing a problem. Infectious diseases was the only one
Speaker 9: that attracted me. We had tools to actually cure people.
Speaker 9: I mean, sometimes people didn't make it, but for the
Speaker 9: most part, patients who got admitted with severe infections got better.
Speaker 1: The science of treating infectious diseases had advanced to an
Speaker 1: almost unthinkable degree during the twentieth century. For much of history,
Speaker 1: diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis had routinely proved fatal. By
Speaker 1: the time Green entered the field, the vast majority of
Speaker 1: patients seeking treatment for infections could be cured in a
Speaker 1: matter of days.
Speaker 10: Now, at last, the hidden enemy could be examined under
Speaker 10: the probing such light of science. The hunt was on
Speaker 10: for contagious diseases and their causes, wherever they existed.
Speaker 1: Green's patient HW died just eight days after Green started
Speaker 1: taking care of him. To the doctor, it looked like
Speaker 1: a freak occurrence, not an accident, just deeply confusing.
Speaker 9: It was something nobody had ever seen. Of course, this
Speaker 9: was a one and only case. This was case one.
Speaker 1: Case two walked into Bellevue a few weeks later. Once again,
Speaker 1: Green noted that the patient was gay and was suffering
Speaker 1: from a strange infection in his lungs. Not long after,
Speaker 1: Green was making rounds at the hospital when he overheard
Speaker 1: a conversation about yet another patient.
Speaker 9: While I was doing my note in this little cubicle,
Speaker 9: the other four or five people were discussing this case,
Speaker 9: and I was sort of listening peripherally to what was
Speaker 9: going on. And then I heard them snap an X
Speaker 9: ray into the X ray box, and I looked over
Speaker 9: my shoulder at the X ray, and I said, to them,
Speaker 9: is that patient gay?
Speaker 1: The other doctors were shocked. How could Green possibly know
Speaker 1: such an intimate detail about a patient? He had never met.
Speaker 4: The guy who was presenting.
Speaker 9: He was standing and holding this blue plastic folder with
Speaker 9: all the papers of his admission in his hand. He
Speaker 9: dropped it on the floor and the guy said to me, how.
Speaker 4: Did you know that? And I said, I don't know.
Speaker 4: I don't know how I knew it.
Speaker 9: And then later in the day I said, I know
Speaker 9: how I knew it, because that X ray looks like
Speaker 9: HW's X ray, the patient number one.
Speaker 1: Within several months, Green says he had encountered about a
Speaker 1: dozen patients who, like HW, were afflicted by rare forms
Speaker 1: of pneumonia and skin lesions. As you heard Bobby Campbell
Speaker 1: say in his interview on The Gay Life, those skin
Speaker 1: lesions were capaces sarcoma, a rare form of cancer typically
Speaker 1: found in people from sub Saharan Africa and older Mediterranean men.
Speaker 1: Some of Green's patients had other, even more unusual symptoms,
Speaker 1: including ones associated with diseases typically carried by animals, not people.
Speaker 9: We had typocarcosis, which is a pigeon fungus that caused
Speaker 9: the meningitis, you know. We had toxoplasmosis. We had disseminated
Speaker 9: microbacterial diseases, which is again a typical.
Speaker 1: Why these rare infections were suddenly popping up with a
Speaker 1: textbook medical mystery into many doctors, including Green, The fact
Speaker 1: that the first few cases had all presented in gay
Speaker 1: men seemed like a really important clue.
Speaker 9: It's a little embarrassing to discuss this because I thought
Speaker 9: we were looking at a gay disease. The first three
Speaker 9: or four cases that I saw were in people who
Speaker 9: were gay, so it wasn't that.
Speaker 4: Unusual for me to jump to that conclusion.
Speaker 1: It was the only clear connection Green could see between
Speaker 1: the patients. Soon, his assumption was that anyone suffering from
Speaker 1: this new affliction had to be gay, even if they
Speaker 1: refused to admit it.
Speaker 9: What happened was on case number four, the guy came
Speaker 9: in with numasisters pneumonia, and he also passed away, but
Speaker 9: before he did, he absolutely denied being gay. And I
Speaker 9: can't tell you how many times I asked the guy.
Speaker 9: He must have thought I was a freak or something,
Speaker 9: because I kept asking him, are you sure you're not gay?
Speaker 9: And after he passed away, I reached out to this
Speaker 9: woman who I became friendly with while she was visiting,
Speaker 9: and I said, what's a story?
Speaker 4: I mean, was he gay. You know, he's not gay.
Speaker 9: And I said, well, so where did he live? He
Speaker 9: said so he was living in a halfway house for
Speaker 9: drug addicts.
Speaker 1: Intravenous drug users were known to be at high risk
Speaker 1: for any disease that could be spread through blood, like
Speaker 1: hepatitis B or C. But when Green went to Harlem
Speaker 1: to visit the halfway house, he learned something that seemed
Speaker 1: to confirm his original assumption.
Speaker 9: And I talked to people who knew him, and I
Speaker 9: started asking him the same question, and everyone said, no,
Speaker 9: he wasn't gay.
Speaker 4: But someone said, but he turned gay tricks.
Speaker 1: Green wasn't exactly sure what that meant, and asked the
Speaker 1: person to elaborate, and he.
Speaker 9: Said, well, to make money for his habit, he you know,
Speaker 9: he would go with men.
Speaker 4: He would go with women, he would you know.
Speaker 9: So, I said, finally I figured it out. It is
Speaker 9: something to do with gay sex or whatever.
Speaker 1: Looking back, it's striking how easy it was to conclude
Speaker 1: that the new disease was quote unquote gay related. Even
Speaker 1: when he was faced with someone with a history of
Speaker 1: intravenous drug use, Green remained and convinced that the patient's
Speaker 1: sexuality was the key factor. As more cases emerged in
Speaker 1: early nineteen eighty one. Green was sure that he was
Speaker 1: seeing something totally novel, and without knowing the cause, the
Speaker 1: best he could do was try to use existing treatments
Speaker 1: for his patient's symptoms. The trouble was the cases he
Speaker 1: was seeing sometimes required specialized medications that could be difficult
Speaker 1: to obtain. For instance, to treat numicistas pneumonia, Green needed
Speaker 1: a drug called pentamidine, but because the demand for pantamidine
Speaker 1: was usually incredibly low, it wasn't profitable for drug companies
Speaker 1: to market it. Instead, pantamidine was controlled and dispensed by
Speaker 1: the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. The CDC
Speaker 1: so yet have to request it.
Speaker 9: They would take a history and if you had the
Speaker 9: requisite answers, they would release one patience worth of pentamidine
Speaker 9: for a treatment course of two to three weeks.
Speaker 1: The CDC was established in nineteen forty six primarily to
Speaker 1: combat malaria.
Speaker 10: CDC is one of the task forces of the Public
Speaker 10: Health Service.
Speaker 1: It quickly evolved into an all purpose first response service
Speaker 1: for various medical emergencies.
Speaker 10: Ready to help each state in its fife against communicable diseases.
Speaker 1: Anytime there was a major disease outbreak, the CDC was there,
Speaker 1: doing the investigative legwork and providing assistance to doctors and
Speaker 1: nurses on the ground. As a result, the CDC had
Speaker 1: a hand in some of the greatest achievements of the
Speaker 1: modern era, including the eradication of polio in the United
Speaker 1: States and smallpox all over the world.
Speaker 7: And historic victory over a dread disease. Here scientists usher
Speaker 7: in a new medical age with the monumental reports that
Speaker 7: proved the vaccine against crippling polio to be a sensational success.
Speaker 1: The CDC had special outposts at major airports where they
Speaker 1: distributed medications to the doctors who needed them. That was
Speaker 1: where doctor Green would get his pentamidine.
Speaker 4: I would get in.
Speaker 9: My car and drive to JFK and I think there
Speaker 9: is a CDC quarantine office and they had the shipment
Speaker 9: waiting for me, and I get back on the car,
Speaker 9: drive back to Bellevue and hang the drug.
Speaker 4: Soon.
Speaker 1: The trip to JFK Airport was part of Green's regular routine,
Speaker 1: but a CDC technician fielding his requests for pentamidine noticed
Speaker 1: that Green was not giving a reason for why his
Speaker 1: patients had numicistus pneumonia. The technician knew that it usually
Speaker 1: only appeared in patients who had compromised immune systems, like
Speaker 1: kids with leukemia or people who had received organ transplants.
Speaker 1: But Green wasn't indicating anything like that on the forms
Speaker 1: he was filling out. So either he was doing something
Speaker 1: wrong or there was an inexplicable new outbreak happening, one
Speaker 1: that the CDC needed to get on top of immediately,
Speaker 1: So the technician alerted her supervisor. Though the details were sketchy,
Speaker 1: there appeared to be a growing cluster of numisistus cases
Speaker 1: in New York. As it turned out, Green's requests for
Speaker 1: pantamidine were not the only troubling signal popping up on
Speaker 1: the CDC's radar at this time. By the late spring
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty one, multiple physicians around the country had
Speaker 1: started asking the agency for help treating young gay men
Speaker 1: with inexplicable symptoms. Among the CDC officials on the receiving
Speaker 1: end of these requests was doctor Mary Geinan.
Speaker 11: We started getting phone calls from physicians saying, you know,
Speaker 11: I have this young man in the intensive care unit
Speaker 11: and he's dying and I don't know what's wrong with him.
Speaker 1: Geynan was a specialist in venereal disease, so when a
Speaker 1: written report on some kind of outbreak among gay men
Speaker 1: came into the CDC, she was asked to review it.
Speaker 11: Since it wasn't a disease that we knew about, there
Speaker 11: was no expert in CDC about it, but all of
Speaker 11: these men also had herpes virus infections, so they asked
Speaker 11: me to make a comment on it.
Speaker 1: The report would turn out to be a foundational document
Speaker 1: in the history of AIDS. He was co authored by
Speaker 1: a young doctor in Los Angeles, whom you'll hear more
Speaker 1: about later in the series. For now, all you need
Speaker 1: to know is that he was seeing numacistus cases at
Speaker 1: pretty much the same exact time as Jeffrey Green, and
Speaker 1: when Mary Gynan had a chance to review his findings,
Speaker 1: she knew the CDC had to get involved. Mary Guynan
Speaker 1: studied Comis Street in college, but when she got her
Speaker 1: degree in nineteen sixty one, she found that nobody was
Speaker 1: willing to hire her.
Speaker 11: After I graduated as a chemist, I was living in
Speaker 11: New York and the New York Times Want Dads was
Speaker 11: segregated by gender. There was a help wanted male and
Speaker 11: a help wanted female, and there was never a job
Speaker 11: listing for a chemist in the help Wanted Female. So
Speaker 11: I finally found a job at a chewing gum factory.
Speaker 12: What's new in the Magic Land of Chicklets.
Speaker 11: My job was to make new flavors for chewing gum.
Speaker 13: Well great them orange Bradberry.
Speaker 11: I was in a laboratory. I had all these different
Speaker 11: flavors and I would mix them and taste them.
Speaker 14: A world of flavor from the Magic Land of Chicklets.
Speaker 1: And eventually Gynan decided to go to medical school, where
Speaker 1: she became interested in smallpox and got accepted into a
Speaker 1: training program at the CDC. There, she worked on the
Speaker 1: agency's medical Detective Squad, the Epidemic Intelligence Service.
Speaker 11: The Epidemic Intelligence Service is a training program for epidemiologists.
Speaker 11: The worldwide symbol of a field epidemiologist is the hole
Speaker 11: in the soul, evidence that we have worn out our
Speaker 11: shoes tracking down vital clues.
Speaker 1: Geynan ended up getting a job in the CDC's Venereal
Speaker 1: Disease Control Division. By nineteen eighty one, she was an
Speaker 1: expert on genital herpes infection.
Speaker 11: I became doctor Herpes. People call me from all over
Speaker 11: the world. I had rock stars calling me from Australia.
Speaker 11: They had genital herpes, and I say, I'm sorry, I
Speaker 11: can't offer you.
Speaker 1: Anything long distance phone calls from rock stars. Aside, being
Speaker 1: doctor herpes wasn't exactly glamorous. Even within the CED, Venereal
Speaker 1: disease was considered an unsavory specialty.
Speaker 5: Nice people don't talk about VD.
Speaker 6: Perhaps that's why America is in the middle of the
Speaker 6: greatest venereal disease epidemic and its history.
Speaker 11: People said, what's a nice girl like you doing a
Speaker 11: thing like that? It was considered to be people who
Speaker 11: couldn't get regular jobs took this job.
Speaker 10: Venereal disease is almost as prevalent as the common cold.
Speaker 10: One problem in dealing with VD is the reluctance of
Speaker 10: many of the infective de seek treatment.
Speaker 11: I worked in a venereal disease clinic one day a week,
Speaker 11: and when I would come back, if I saw some
Speaker 11: of my colleagues say say to me, oh, my goodness,
Speaker 11: did you wash your hands.
Speaker 1: Guidan's time at the CDC coincided with the rise of
Speaker 1: a new administration in Washington. Ronald Reagan had run on
Speaker 1: a pledge to slash the federal budget, and when he
Speaker 1: got into office, he wasted no time delivering on that promise.
Speaker 15: I've already placed a freeze on hiring replacements for those
Speaker 15: who retire government service. I've ordered a cut in government travel,
Speaker 15: the number of consultants to the government, and the buying
Speaker 15: of office equipment and other items.
Speaker 1: At the CDC, everything became more difficult, buying new equipment,
Speaker 1: securing additional research funding, and traveling to investigate outbreaks. For
Speaker 1: fiscal year nineteen eighty two, the Center for Infectious Diseases
Speaker 1: faced overall budget cuts of up to fifty nine percent.
Speaker 1: So that was the state of play. When Gaynan read
Speaker 1: the report from Los Angeles about a mysterious cluster of
Speaker 1: numisistus cases in gay men.
Speaker 11: I read it and it was like incredible. I knew
Speaker 11: that something terrible was happening because these are all homosexual men,
Speaker 11: and two of them had died, and nobody knew why.
Speaker 11: So I sent it up the hierarchy of approval all
Speaker 11: the way to the top, and I sent it to
Speaker 11: my supervisor, who wrote on the paper.
Speaker 1: Hot stuff guidance. Supervisor was doctor Jim Currn, a senior
Speaker 1: researcher in the CDC's Veneurial Diseases Division.
Speaker 14: It was circulated to my disc I would say perhaps
Speaker 14: ten days before it was published. On June fifth, nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: One, Kerran happened to be going to a conference on
Speaker 1: sexually transmitted diseases, and he asked some of his fellow
Speaker 1: attendees if they'd seen anything like what was being described
Speaker 1: in the report.
Speaker 14: We talked to the doctors who were working with people
Speaker 14: in the gay community and gay physicians themselves, and they
Speaker 14: told us that they too were seeing cases that were
Speaker 14: very unusual. And there were some doctors in New York
Speaker 14: who were also calling us about this rare cancer kapasci
Speaker 14: sarcoma that was being seen in New York.
Speaker 1: One month after the new Massisus report was published, the
Speaker 1: CDC followed up with a second one documenting the cases
Speaker 1: of capasi sarcoma. The New York Times covered it that
Speaker 1: same day on page twenty under the headline rare cancer
Speaker 1: in forty one homosexuals. The article cited Kerran in saying
Speaker 1: there was no apparent danger to non homosexuals from contagion.
Speaker 1: That same week, Kerran traveled to New York for his
Speaker 1: first in person meeting with a patient suffering from the
Speaker 1: new disease.
Speaker 14: And we went to see one individual patient and as
Speaker 14: we talked about our past, we said, you know, we
Speaker 14: are exactly the same age.
Speaker 1: The patient was an actor, and as he and Kerran
Speaker 1: started chatting, they found they had a lot more in
Speaker 1: common than just their age. They were both from Detroit,
Speaker 1: and they were both raised Catholic. In fact, they even
Speaker 1: went to rival Catholic prep schools. Both had left Michigan
Speaker 1: for college, one to Notre Dame, the other to Yale.
Speaker 1: And now one was a doctor trying to diagnose the other.
Speaker 14: And then he had these skin lesions on his face.
Speaker 14: His question to me, of course a doctor expert from CDC,
Speaker 14: will these go away? I be able to get rid
Speaker 14: of him so I can continue my acting career. And
Speaker 14: of course I'd never seen a patient in my life
Speaker 14: with Kappa she sarcoma, so I didn't know.
Speaker 1: Kurran kept tabs on the patient as his condition worsened
Speaker 1: over the following months.
Speaker 14: He had went from a tall, handsome actor to having
Speaker 14: lost almost half his body weight, all of his hair.
Speaker 14: And I will always think how similar our background was
Speaker 14: on how he died. This inexplicable death. What made us different.
Speaker 14: I guess it was because he was a gay man
Speaker 14: and I was straight. That he went to New York
Speaker 14: and was exposed in the epicenter of this horrible disease
Speaker 14: to something neither one of us knew what at that point,
Speaker 14: and he died and I was living there to study it.
Speaker 1: Not long after the CDC published its report on Numisistus pneumonia,
Speaker 1: the agency created a centralized task force to investigate the situation.
Speaker 1: Jim curn was put in charge.
Speaker 14: So at the time they asked me to share it,
Speaker 14: and I was assigned disease detectives from a variety of areas.
Speaker 14: Virology because perhaps this was a virus cancer assigned somebody
Speaker 14: to us, and we had some laboratory people assigned to us,
Speaker 14: and a statistician assigned to us, and we thought it
Speaker 14: could well be sexually transmitted, so std people were actually
Speaker 14: assigned from my own group.
Speaker 1: Before the task force did anything else, they set out
Speaker 1: to confirm that what they were seeing was in fact
Speaker 1: a new phenomenon. To that end, they reviewed hospital records
Speaker 1: in the eighteen largest cities in the country to see
Speaker 1: how many previous cases of pneumaicistus or other rare infections
Speaker 1: there had been.
Speaker 14: What we found was virtually there were no cases before
Speaker 14: nineteen seventy eight, and there were none outside New York
Speaker 14: and California except one case in Atlanta, so we were
Speaker 14: reassured that this was new.
Speaker 1: Different people on the task force had different ideas about
Speaker 1: what was making people sick, but a central animating question
Speaker 1: was why the disease seemed to be disproportionately affecting gay men.
Speaker 14: Some people thought it was related to allogenetic semen, that
Speaker 14: if you were exposed to hundreds of different semen, you
Speaker 14: could become allergic to it, and that allergy would cause
Speaker 14: the reaction to damage your immune system. Some people thought
Speaker 14: it was an environmental cause, since many people who have
Speaker 14: sex with each other go to the same places, maybe
Speaker 14: there was some kind of contaminant.
Speaker 1: The so called environmental theories posited that maybe something about
Speaker 1: the environments where gay men congregated was causing them to
Speaker 1: get sick. A leading early hypothesis was that the disease
Speaker 1: was caused by poppers, the inhalable muscle relaxings that many
Speaker 1: gay men were using in clubs to get high and
Speaker 1: to make it easier to have anal sex. Mary Guinan
Speaker 1: and other members of the CDC task Force thought the
Speaker 1: chemicals used to make poppers might be causing some kind
Speaker 1: of reaction in people's immune systems, or that maybe a
Speaker 1: bad batch had made it onto the street.
Speaker 11: Poppers were available all over the place, so one of
Speaker 11: the things that I wanted to do was to see
Speaker 11: what they contained.
Speaker 1: Guidan heard she could find poppers at adult bookstores around Manhattan,
Speaker 1: so she went to New York in search of samples.
Speaker 11: They would actually have a place to have sex inside
Speaker 11: the bookstore, and they sold poppers. It was a bookstore
Speaker 11: in Greenwich Village.
Speaker 1: I think Geynan brought the poppers back to CDC headquarters
Speaker 1: in Atlanta to be tested, and I brought them in.
Speaker 11: We sent them over to various people within CDC to
Speaker 11: see if they were but it was There wasn't any
Speaker 11: real connection.
Speaker 1: The poppers theory endured long after it fell out of
Speaker 1: favor with scientists. There are a few reasons why. For
Speaker 1: one thing, it made it possible to blame the new
Speaker 1: disease on a substance specifically associated with gay nightlife and vice,
Speaker 1: but also more generally, it held out the promise of
Speaker 1: a simple smoking gun. If the illness really was caused
Speaker 1: by some kind of environmental factor, and solving the problem
Speaker 1: could be as straightforward as isolating it and getting rid
Speaker 1: of it. Not surprisingly, the people who made poppers got
Speaker 1: pretty defensive about their product. Here's a clip from the
Speaker 1: Gay Life radio show in which they interviewed a manufacturer
Speaker 1: named W. J.
Speaker 4: Freezer.
Speaker 12: There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever linking alcohol, nitrites or
Speaker 12: any other nitrites with Carposi sacoma, the so called gay cancer.
Speaker 12: The CDC was asked by the press whether poppers had
Speaker 12: been eliminated as a factor. CDC replied, and quite properly,
Speaker 12: that nothing has as yet been eliminated. That response has
Speaker 12: been blown way out of proportion.
Speaker 1: Well, Jim Curran wanted the answer to be poppers too,
Speaker 1: but he and his colleagues at the CDC were fairly
Speaker 1: convinced from the start that what they were seeing was
Speaker 1: most likely a virus. Their suspicion was that the new
Speaker 1: disease might be similar to hepatitis B, which was transmissible
Speaker 1: through blood and other bodily fluids, and could be spread
Speaker 1: through sex and intravenous drug use. If that was how
Speaker 1: the new disease worked too. That would mean it didn't
Speaker 1: actually discriminate based on sexuality. Even if it was true
Speaker 1: that for now it was spreading mostly among gay men,
Speaker 1: it would inevitably cross over into other populations. In July
Speaker 1: of nineteen eight, one current CDC task force was preparing
Speaker 1: to send teams to New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and
Speaker 1: San Francisco. The goal was to interview gay men who
Speaker 1: were showing symptoms of the new disease and compare them
Speaker 1: to a control group. Doctor Gynan was sent to San Francisco,
Speaker 1: where she met with her subjects in a cheap hotel
Speaker 1: room in the Tenderloin district.
Speaker 11: It was all sorts of questions, first about drug use
Speaker 11: and about sexual behavior. And we all had to ask
Speaker 11: the same questions, what kinds of sex, what kind of drugs?
Speaker 11: How many sex partners have you had in the past year.
Speaker 11: And I was just amazed at how cooperative these people were.
Speaker 11: They would be counting the number of sex partners they had.
Speaker 11: They'd say I had two or three thousand partners in
Speaker 11: their lifetime. And so people afterwards said to me, oh,
Speaker 11: they were just bragging about Let's see, they were not
Speaker 11: They were bragging, they were telling the truth. They were
Speaker 11: trying to help.
Speaker 1: After administering the questionnaire, Guynan collected patient samples.
Speaker 11: The patient would sit on the barstool of the kitchenette
Speaker 11: and I would take blood from them. And I had
Speaker 11: to pack up all the specimens in these boxes with
Speaker 11: dry ice in it to keep them cold, and they
Speaker 11: had to be there at CDC within twenty four hours.
Speaker 11: I then had to get those specimens to the post
Speaker 11: office before the post office closed.
Speaker 1: Gyan was working fourteen hour days during her trip to
Speaker 1: San Francisco, conducting interviews and drawing blood samples herself. It
Speaker 1: didn't always go smoothly.
Speaker 11: This one young man came in who was very tall
Speaker 11: and built like a football player, and as I was
Speaker 11: putting the needle into his arm, he fainted and fell
Speaker 11: on top of me. We both fell on the floor,
Speaker 11: and I tried to pull the tourniquet from his arm
Speaker 11: because it was bleeding. All the blood was coming out
Speaker 11: and I couldn't get it. And I finally pulled the
Speaker 11: needle out, and when I pulled it out, I stuck
Speaker 11: it into the palm of my left hand.
Speaker 1: Geynan didn't know whether she had just given herself the disease.
Speaker 1: Sitting in the hotel room covered in someone else's blood.
Speaker 1: She improvised, I.
Speaker 11: Tried to squeeze my palm of my hand to get
Speaker 11: any blood in it that might have gone in there.
Speaker 11: I was not sure what I was going to do here.
Speaker 11: I was in San Francisco with all sorts of needles
Speaker 11: on the counter and a man unconscious in my room
Speaker 11: with blood all over him and me.
Speaker 1: Finally, the man woke up and apologized.
Speaker 11: He said he always faced at the sight of blood.
Speaker 11: So I asked him if he would stay on the
Speaker 11: floor while I got the specimens, because I needed to
Speaker 11: get those specimens, and I did.
Speaker 1: The incident would haunt Geyan for several years, especially when
Speaker 1: she developed a lesion on her arm that looked like
Speaker 1: it could be Capasi sarcoma. Her secretary at the time
Speaker 1: was so afraid of catching it that she quit. It
Speaker 1: was not until nineteen eighty five that a blood test
Speaker 1: showed that Guynan had not been infected. When Guyinan and
Speaker 1: her colleagues on the CDC Task Force analyzed the data
Speaker 1: they had collected, one finding stood out people with diagnosed
Speaker 1: cases had had way more sexual partners over the course
Speaker 1: of their lives.
Speaker 4: Than the control group.
Speaker 1: The finding seemed to bolster the hypothesis that members of
Speaker 1: the task force had held from the beginning that the
Speaker 1: new disease was a virus that was transmissible through sex
Speaker 1: and could therefore infect anyone, not just gay men. According
Speaker 1: to Kerrn, that was the reason the CDC never adopted
Speaker 1: the term gay related immune deficiency or GRID, which was
Speaker 1: used in much of the early media coverage.
Speaker 10: Doctors have even coined a new word for these conditions, GRIDS,
Speaker 10: gay related infectious diseases.
Speaker 1: For the most part, though there was no early media coverage.
Speaker 1: Jim Curran again, there was virtually no coverage in the
Speaker 1: mainstream media in the first year or so. The people
Speaker 1: who did good coverage were people with the New York
Speaker 1: Native the gay publications, but there was essentially nothing in
Speaker 1: the New York Times or nothing on mainstream TV. Even
Speaker 1: the scores of new cases were discovered and the number
Speaker 1: of deaths continued to climb, the biggest news outlets in
Speaker 1: America barely followed up on the CDC's early reports from
Speaker 1: the summer of nineteen eighty one. Then that winter, Kerran
Speaker 1: heard from a veteran health reporter at the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1: He said he wanted to write a long story on
Speaker 1: the disease, so Kerran flew to New York to meet
Speaker 1: with him.
Speaker 14: I remember having lunch with him at Uncle Ty's Hunan Juan,
Speaker 14: and we talked for hours, and he wrote this very
Speaker 14: long story in the Wall Street Journal and they wouldn't publish.
Speaker 14: So he called me back and he said, they think
Speaker 14: this is just a story about gay men, and this
Speaker 14: is the first time I've ever had a story turned down.
Speaker 1: Current pushed back, noting that the disease almost certainly didn't
Speaker 1: just affect gay men, and I.
Speaker 14: Said, well, there is heterosexual transmission two very likely couldn't
Speaker 14: totally prove it, but we're having good examples of it.
Speaker 14: So they published a very short article that said heterosexuals
Speaker 14: get aids two.
Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal article was published on February twenty fifth,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, under the headline new often fatal illness
Speaker 1: and homosexuals turns up in women coma heterosexual males. Over
Speaker 1: the course of the coming year, as the article's central
Speaker 1: thesis became increasingly evident, more media outlets began to pay attention.
Speaker 5: Federal health officials consider it an epidemic, yet you rarely
Speaker 5: hear a thing about it.
Speaker 1: In August, CBS ran its first ever nightly news report
Speaker 1: on the epidemic.
Speaker 6: It's a disease first detected in the gay community that
Speaker 6: has now spread beyond that, a disease experts are now
Speaker 6: calling a national epidemic. There is a one in five
Speaker 6: chance a victim will die within the first year of
Speaker 6: the illness.
Speaker 1: The report included an interview with Bobby Campbell, conducted seven
Speaker 1: months after his appearance on the Gay Life radio show.
Speaker 3: It was devastating, you know, at that time, I was
Speaker 3: twenty nine years old.
Speaker 6: For Bobby Campbell, it is a race against time. How
Speaker 6: long before he and others who have this disease finally
Speaker 6: have answers, finally have the hope of a cure.
Speaker 1: The CBS report noted that while most of the known
Speaker 1: cases have been found in gay men, other groups were
Speaker 1: starting to get sick too.
Speaker 6: Now It's been detected in Haitian refugees and in some
Speaker 6: people with hemophilia, a disease that prevents blood clotting so
Speaker 6: the patient needs frequent blood transfusions.
Speaker 1: Soon, these high risk groups were nicknamed the four HS.
Speaker 1: Homosexuals heroin users, haitians, and people with hemophilia. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, gay related immune deficiency no longer seemed like
Speaker 1: an accurate descriptor. In September of nineteen eighty two, the
Speaker 1: CDC gave the disease its permanent name.
Speaker 5: Acquired immune deficiency syndrome. It's mysterious, its deadly, and its
Speaker 5: baffling medical science. Once thought to affect only promiscuous homosexual males,
Speaker 5: AIDS is now spreading in epidemic proportions to other segments
Speaker 5: of the population.
Speaker 1: With that, AIDS was officially not just a gay disease,
Speaker 1: at least as far as most doctors and scientists were concerned.
Speaker 1: In practice, though, the wider world remained largely indifferent, and
Speaker 1: what little public discussion there was of AIDS often continued
Speaker 1: to place the blame on gay men.
Speaker 16: Gays are being called all the dangerous and violent group
Speaker 16: that corrupts children and infects the community with AIDS.
Speaker 1: It's probably obvious why I wanted to make this podcast,
Speaker 1: Living through COVID nineteen. I wanted to know what it
Speaker 1: was like the last time American society was transformed by
Speaker 1: a deadly virus. I wasn't expecting easy parallels. I just
Speaker 1: wanted to know how it felt to live through it,
Speaker 1: the early years in particular, and what it had to
Speaker 1: tell us about the thing we've all been living through lately.
Speaker 1: As you'll hear over the course of our series, there
Speaker 1: are certain things all epidemics have in common. The confusion
Speaker 1: and fear, the scapegoating and paranoia, the difficulty of addressing
Speaker 1: a new existential threat that requires human beings to change
Speaker 1: their behavior en Mass. Marcus Conant, a pioneering AIDS doctor
Speaker 1: you'll hear more about later, says the echoes between epidemics
Speaker 1: are unavoidable.
Speaker 17: It's well documented from the time of the Black Death
Speaker 17: in thirteen forty eight. With almost every epidemic, people respond
Speaker 17: to the epidemic in exactly the same predictable ways. The
Speaker 17: first thing they do is they deny that it's even occurred.
Speaker 17: You know, it's not happening, and then they want to
Speaker 17: blame someone for having caused it, as if that will
Speaker 17: make it not have happened and go away.
Speaker 1: Still, the AIDS crisis was and continues to be a
Speaker 1: singular disaster. This is in large part because of who
Speaker 1: got sick and died first, but it's also because of
Speaker 1: who responded and who didn't. I feel compelled to say
Speaker 1: that our series will not offer a comprehensive picture of
Speaker 1: everything that went wrong or everyone who was affected. Our
Speaker 1: goal is just to be specific, to try to understand
Speaker 1: why this particular epidemic unfolded the way it did, and
Speaker 1: why has been allowed to kill more than thirty million
Speaker 1: people worldwide. For Jeffrey Green, the experience of being a
Speaker 1: doctor changed completely once he began treating people with AIDS.
Speaker 1: He had gone into medicine and specialized an infectious disease
Speaker 1: because you wanted to cure people. Now, somehow, just a
Speaker 1: few years into his career, his job was to tell
Speaker 1: young patients there was really nothing he could do.
Speaker 9: And I began talking to some of the oncologists at
Speaker 9: the hospital.
Speaker 4: I said, how do you guys do this?
Speaker 9: I mean, patients dying, you know, in seven months, eight months,
Speaker 9: a year, two years. I'd give him, you know, and
Speaker 9: then I feel like I've succeeded with two years' survival.
Speaker 9: And they said, well, you just add up all the
Speaker 9: years that you've kept people alive, and that's the way
Speaker 9: you have to think about it. And they pulled me back.
Speaker 9: My colleagues pulled me back.
Speaker 1: Green still has dreams about some of the people with
Speaker 1: AIDS he has treated over the years. In one of
Speaker 1: those dreams, he's running from one waiting room to another,
Speaker 1: all of them filled with dying men.
Speaker 9: So recurring nightmare that I have is running in an
Speaker 9: office that has fifteen different rooms and not being able
Speaker 9: to keep up, and I'm running from room to room,
Speaker 9: and I feel that type of in the dream, that
Speaker 9: panic attack reoccurring.
Speaker 1: Green is haunted by another image too. As part of
Speaker 1: his work treating people with AIDS, he started doing what
Speaker 1: his family doctor had done all those years ago. He
Speaker 1: made house calls. To this day, Green thinks about something
Speaker 1: he saw while visiting a patient in a brownstone in Manhattan.
Speaker 9: And I went to see him because he was dying
Speaker 9: and he was too weak to come to the office.
Speaker 9: And he had set up a cot like a hospital bed,
Speaker 9: I guess, in the middle of his aviary, which was
Speaker 9: his living room. And there were these exotic birds that
Speaker 9: you know, very large Brazilian colorful cockatoos and other kinds
Speaker 9: of fancy birds.
Speaker 4: And when I walked in the door, his partner lit
Speaker 4: me in.
Speaker 9: What I saw was a skeleton on the bed on
Speaker 9: his back, looking at the ceiling. There was a white,
Speaker 9: gorgeous bird, maybe a foot tall, on his chest, and
Speaker 9: it looked like.
Speaker 4: A bird of prey.
Speaker 9: Or a scavenger bird that was gonna wait till he
Speaker 9: died to eat him. It was I'd wake up at
Speaker 9: night once or twice a month with that image in
Speaker 9: my head.
Speaker 13: Still they fall around, they are fall and round, they
Speaker 13: are fallund me the strong GUYSI.
Speaker 12: Masie.
Speaker 1: On the next episode of Fiasco, the revolutionary first stirrings
Speaker 1: of AIDS activism in New York City.
Speaker 8: People who were sick were organizing and taking care of
Speaker 8: each other. We really weren't even looking that much to
Speaker 8: the healthcare establishment because they didn't want to deal with us.
Speaker 8: It was a whole different kind of of activism.
Speaker 1: Fiasco is presented by Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. The
Speaker 1: show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Sam Graham Felsen, Madeline
Speaker 1: kaplan Ula Coppa, and me Leon Nafock. Editorial support by
Speaker 1: Nola Wawas and Jessica Miller. Our researcher is Francis Carr.
Speaker 1: Archival research by Michelle Sullivan. This season's music is composed
Speaker 1: by Edith Mudge additional music by Nick Sylvester of God Mode,
Speaker 1: Joel Saint, Julian and Dan English, Noah Hect and Joe Valley.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is by Spatial Relations Music Licensing courtesy
Speaker 1: of Anthony Roman. Our credits song this week is They
Speaker 1: Are Falling All Around Me by Bernice Johnson Reagan from
Speaker 1: the recording Give Your Hands The Struggle courtesy of Smithsonian
Speaker 1: Folkways Recordings. Additional thanks to tro Essex Music Group. Audio
Speaker 1: mix by Erica Wong, with additional support from Selina Urabe.
Speaker 1: Our artwork is designed by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y.
Speaker 1: David Blum is the editor in chief of Audible Originals.
Speaker 1: Mike Charzik is the vice president of Audible Studios. Zac
Speaker 1: ro Us is head of acquisition and Development for Audible.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Archive dot Org, Annabel Bacon, Carrie Baker, Brandon Ellis,
Speaker 1: Alice Gregory, Chris Horton, Stephen Fisher, Ben Frisch, Akiva Gottlieb,
Speaker 1: Andrew Jacobs, Giannis Kulpa, Stephen Phillips, Horst, Willi Paskin, Lisa Pollock,
Speaker 1: Bill Rutland, Aichris Gondaraja, and Sasha Weiss. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Randy Alfred and Peter Yassi. Next week, episode two.
Speaker 13: Say Masson.
Speaker 1: V sure to let me
Speaker 12: From