Take this for what it’s worth. I didn’t believe it at the time and my team and I laugh about it still.

About a year ago we were interviewing candidates to come join my team as a chief marketing officer. One of the candidates who applied worked at the John Hopkins institute that was responsible for gathering all of the global data on COVID infections and all that. He claimed as part of his job he was on weekly calls from the start of the pandemic with Fauci, the CDC, WHO, national agencies and comparable international agencies in other western countries.

In the middle of this explanation of his previous job descriptions he just says nonchalantly, that “it was clear to all of those leaders that COVID was created and released deliberately by China to wipe out its old population and to be used as a bioweapon against the west.” And then he just moved on blithely to the next topic. The three of us interviewing him all looked at each other and were like, “wait, what did he just say?!?” but he kept talking and was oblivious to our reaction and moved on. He loved to hear himself talk.

We didn’t hire him and we never had a chance to follow up, but we still chuckle about that “truth bomb” in the middle of a random interview.