“Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. 

And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-lab-leak.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

In retrospect, I think COVID was the last time I had an edge from the Twitter info environment. @balajis.eth was famously ahead, and it was still possible to extract useful signal from the right people. I rode out a few scary months in NYC easily because I was early and prepared. Not sure I could do it again.

Author of The Network State.
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terminally.online

Just checked and my first COVID related post was March 8. I'd been preparing in private since mid-February. I didn't feel early at all. Maybe this would still be possible on Farcaster, but probably not yet.

Ya my wife got us buying masks in January. Almost like it was a more common occurrence in China to prepare for

I was honestly the same... we actually had a presentation at work about it in January just before the Lunar New Year and by early March I was very ready to work remotely.  Twitter was actually amazing and providing a lot of very useful information quickly.