In January 2020 Nick Moakes, chief investment officer of the Wellcome Trust, noticed a sharp difference between the muted response of the stock market to the emergent coronavirus and the charitable foundation’s own prognosis.
Moakes’s colleague Sir Jeremy Farrar, a world-leading epidemiologist and the then director of Wellcome, the UK’s largest provider of non-governmental funding for scientific research, was one of the earliest to warn of the virus’s significance.
“We thought this is really odd, because markets are doing nothing, and yet we’re being given a bunch of signals here, which tell you that the markets are way too complacent,” Moakes, 61, recalled.