“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.

I'm eth newbie..just learning
(working on @farcaster)

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.

*mike rainbow voice* yo, uh, did you guys see this Italy stuff?!

there were people at work (irl) that acted like they hadn't even heard of it when italy shut down

I distinctly remember telling my parents that the "just a 2 week shutdown, don't worry" was gonna be bullshit

I bought a bunch of toilet paper and then left NYC for the beach thanks to that balaji tweet.

reminds me how my relative in HK was saying there was a weird flu & cough going around late 2019, people were starting to get worried because these people were brought to ER and not recovering at all

I found out about it randomly in late December 2019. 

After a break up, I was just starting to become online too much, learning about finance and self-help stuff + getting in the gym

was actually a good time for reinventing oneself 

feel like i round tripped most of that progress tho lmao it has been a wild ride ossified between irl and the deeply informed/connected