Comment by FabHK

Agreed on both counts.

Experts had been warning about this. See for example Bryan Walsh’s article in TIME in 2017, very explicitly titled The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic [1]. That’s not really a black swan. It was just a question of when. Note also that some countries (eg Singapore, Taiwan) are reasonably well prepared.

Next, Taleb is smart, but overrated (most of all by himself). His books can be summarised in a few paragraphs. IIRC, someone said to Murray Gell-Mann once that “nobody is as smart as you think you are” - that applies to Taleb.

[1] https://time.com/magazine/us/4766607/may-15th-2017-vol-189-n...