Israel second. The UK did first doses first and otherwise took its own path to vaccine distribution, some would say even exiting the EU for related reasons. Israel did what it had to do to get more vaccine doses faster, and give them out quickly.
Those two being the first two to ban travel does not seem remotely like a coincidence.
You could add that the UK ran essentially all the big clinical trials that discovered useful treatments, aside from those personally funded by Tyler Cowen. There’s an interesting and important discussion to be had on this topic at some future point—especially as to how these decision-making procedures got off the ground in the first place. I wrote a short summary of that here.
The large decline in Crypto is especially interesting, because we saw a similar thing in 2020 that at the time clearly didn’t reflect long term prospects and was based on the flows that happen in such situations. At the time I was too distracted to pull the trigger, which is quite sad. If the current move gets much bigger, then to the extent that one wants to be long, it seems like a potential opportunity to buy cheap (Not Investment Advice!).
Further in the realm of Not Investment Advice, I considered (but didn’t) shorting global markets when the Omicron news came out, and in the process of dithering the decline had already started. If some of the extreme high estimates (500%?!) in this thread are true then the decline we’ve seen so far looks like an under-reaction, but it’s not clear to me that there’s enough info to make a safe bet on that. A lot of trading ideas got floated in discussions about previous variants, but didn’t result in any firm consensus that I can recall (other than the short-selling that happened for original covid)
You could add that the UK ran essentially all the big clinical trials that discovered useful treatments, aside from those personally funded by Tyler Cowen. There’s an interesting and important discussion to be had on this topic at some future point—especially as to how these decision-making procedures got off the ground in the first place. I wrote a short summary of that here.
Further in the realm of Not Investment Advice, I considered (but didn’t) shorting global markets when the Omicron news came out, and in the process of dithering the decline had already started. If some of the extreme high estimates (500%?!) in this thread are true then the decline we’ve seen so far looks like an under-reaction, but it’s not clear to me that there’s enough info to make a safe bet on that. A lot of trading ideas got floated in discussions about previous variants, but didn’t result in any firm consensus that I can recall (other than the short-selling that happened for original covid)