Thread by @techreview

On January 24, while Southern California’s ICU was at 0% capacity, a group of businessmen were on their way to a pandemic year rarity: an indoor, in-person, mostly unmasked business conference called the Abundance 360 Summit (A360). technologyreview.com/2021/02/13/101…

A360 was created by Peter Diamandis, the founder of the XPrize Foundation and Singularity University, and co-founder and board member of covid-19 vaccine developer Covaxx.
xprize.org/about/people/p…

In the month leading up to the event, 5,000 people in Los Angeles died.
latimes.com/california/sto…

In one of its darkest moments, California took action, issuing a temporary state-wide public health order that banned all gatherings until regional ICU capacities rose above 15%.
covid19.ca.gov/stay-home-exce…

Diamandis, who has an MD from Harvard Medical School and science degrees from MIT, neglected CDC guidelines and California state law by holding an in-person event.

An hour before a scheduled interview with MIT Technology Review, Diamandis published a blog post about the conference, stating it wasn’t really a conference at all, but rather a “virtual studio-broadcast production.”
diamandis.com/blog/false-sen…

He also claimed to have consulted an audio-visual company to carry out the virtual production. But A360 did not apply for a filming permit, and Culver City does not currently offer them for indoor film shoots, due to the covid-19 risk.

Predictably, this event turned into a superspreader event, resulting in at least 21 positive cases. (He’s not sure.) “Someone is tracking,” he said.

In the course of reporting this story, we learned that the number might be 32 positive cases. When @eileenguo asked for a confirmation of that number, he responded “to include the family members who have had cases,” that 32 actually “seems probably low.”

While Diamandis’s blog post portrayed himself as contrite for his mistake, he would not respond to a question of whether he was aware that he was violating state laws by holding his event.

“I knew that there were challenges. But I don't know that I want to answer that on the record,” he said.

Towards the end of @eileenguo’s interview with him, she asked what this screw-up reflected of his leadership of a covid-19 vaccine company and an organization giving away $7.5 million in prize money to solve the challenges of covid-19, including encouraging mask-wearing.

“I’ll have to take a minute to think about that,” he said. “Let me send you an email.”

This story was reported and written by @eileenguo, and turned into this thread by @madisonumina.
READ the full story on this illegal superspreader event here:
technologyreview.com/2021/02/13/101…

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