[]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/next-influenza-pa...
2003 we had SARS, 2014 we had MERS. We had (and still have) Ebola. Weve had H5N1 and H7N1 outbreaks.
We dodged many of these bullets, but only by the luck of their lack of infectiousness.
It's been staring at us in the face and yet remained in our blindspot.
For that matter, Nassim Taleb himself predicted that the American mortgage industry was, I think he wrote something like "a barrel of dynamite" or some words to that affect. But, for most people, the mortgage crisis was a black swan.
The original metaphor, though, was that no matter how many swans you looked at in Europe, and how carefully, you would have zero data to tell you that black swans were possible, until you went to another country and discovered them.
For example, the David Quammen book "Spillover" essentially predicts it, and it was published in 2013 (subtitle: "Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic").