I'm continually haunted by this wired article on the early WHO and CDC guidance on COVID:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

CDC and WHO downplayed the importance of masks and airborne transmission in the first few months of the pandemic despite evidence of airborne spread and promising data from other countries showing masks reduced transmission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_masks_during_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_States
It took them over a year to officially acknowledge and recommend serious countermeasures to aerosol transmission, by which point we already had the vaccine.

There are a few ways EA could have helped 1) funding work 5-10 years ago to help public health organizations more quickly and accurately identify high risk viruses and disease vectors, 2) making sure there were a range of different professionals including aerosol scientists, engineers, and primary care providers on the key committees at public health organizations that gave official guidance, and 3) supporting a precautionary public health messaging blitz at the first evidence of aerosol transfer, before the strictest lockdown procedures were lifted.

Open Philanthropy is the primary (only?) major funder of biosecurity preparedness in the EA community, and gave ~$65 million to the cause area pre-pandemic, $20 million of which was to Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) in September 2019 which in hindsight was very apt timing.

EA missed:

• EA community building.
  It might seem odd to say that EA missed EA community building – but even until 2016/16 there was no or minimal support or funding for community building. That is about 4-5 years from EA being a thing to EA community building being widely accepted as valuable. When I talked to people, such as senior CEA staff, about it back at EAG Oxford in 2015 it felt like the key question was: should EA risk trying to outreach to any significant amount of people or just build a very narrow small community of super talented people. To get an EA coordinator in London in 2016 we had to fundraise lots of small donations from individuals in the London EA community. It is now fairly broadly accepted that funding local and especially university outreach is valuable.
   
• Policy careers / longtermist policy work.
  I might be wrong but it was 2016/17 before 80,000 Hours began recommending policy careers as an option that was neither earning to give or direct work. And there was generally no funding for anyone trying to have an impact in the longtermist policy space (except for a one off experiment by OpenPhil to help found CSET) until maybe 2020 with the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF). Projects such as the APPG for Future Generations, CLTR, Simon Institute, and various individual EAs in think tanks, have all found that funders would or could not evaluate them or saw them as too risky. If you talked to most folk at EA orgs about this they would say, oh I don’t know about policy it sounds risky. I think this attitude is changing currently with the SFF and FTX Future Fund maybe being more inclusive.  

A key feature that makes both of these hard to evaluate as "missed" is that the ideas were not in anyway unknown to the EA community but the EA community was adverse to taking action because they were risk adverse and saw these projects as too risky. This may or may not have been the right decision. Given the EA community has not collapsed into infighting or been rocked by scandal (as many similar communities have been) I am tempted to say that EA orgs aversion to risk has been justified.

The lesson I would like EA folk to take away from this is that if we don’t want to miss things going forward (and I think we are currently missing many high impact things) then we should have a much better understanding of how projects can pose risks, what those risks look like, how they can be managed and so on.  

I noticed that many prizes / awards / contests have been announced on this Forum in the last semester - possibly more than in the rest of the last 5 years. I wonder why we didn't do it before - the case for this sort of competition has been argued for some times in the last few years, and EA Forum prize has been around for many years. So we knew that doing this was generally useful.
One of the possible reasons is that funding was a problem back then... but except for a few contests that actually involve substantial amounts of money (e.g., the blog prize), most awards are relatively cheap in comparison to most grants, and their potential benefits usually surpass their monetary value - they provide incentives and help elicit information. So it wouldn't have been a budgetary problem if 5y ago we had assigned about U$50k for the best ideas / posts / theses, etc.

One of the areas EA has hardly touched is investing.

Whether it is optimally investing capital now to be able to maximise the amounts of grants when the time is right (eg longtermist grants) or investing capital to create impact now (investments that create a net positive impact at a lower cost per unit of impact than EA grants). EA thinking is not yet applied in these areas.

The philanthropic capital which EA influences is highly impactful, but is still very limited in quantity, being only a small fraction of overall philanthropic capital. And philanthropic capital is only a very small fraction of total capital. 

If EA thinking can start to be applied to investing, the amount of capital used to create impact (although it will generally be less impactful than EA grants) could potentially raise the overall impact of EA by orders of magnitude.

Thanks. I think this can be quite useful.

Were some organisations or institutions ahead of the curve in terms of cause prioritisation relative to EA, and why do we think this was?

It might be useful to distinguish cases where an area / project was overlooked and later proved to be impactful because:

a) someone else worked on it (which suggests it wasn't neglected at all);

b) something changed: there wasn't enough information back then, or it was too far away from a tipping point (like, maybe, climate change and biorisks?);

c) nobody actually considered the project;

d) we now disagree with the former reasoning for disregarding the project - e.g., I (and I believe many others) have changed my mind in the last few years on the effectiveness of working / investing in advocacy, lobbying, politics, etc. I believe I already had enough information to think this way in 2016 (and possibly way earlier).
I'd be more interested in cases of (c) and (d) above - though, of course, these explanations will likely overlap a lot.

I think Extinction Rebellion is having a positive impact, although it might have been a mistake for EA to fund it because it might have damaged our credibility in other areas. Not everything has to be done as part of EA.

My impression is that EA could do more to make existing philanthropy more effective.

There are many existing charities that process billions of dollars[^1] per year. Many of these do not focus on effectiveness or have only recently become interested. I believe that a lot of good could result from making these charities more effective at what they do, or slightly moving their cause area to one that has more proven benefits.

My feeling is that EA did not interact much with existing "classical" charities. Maybe there are differences in worldview that prevented this? For example, many existing charities are faith-based, whereas EA seems explicitly secular. I think it would be desirable to bridge these worldview gaps if it allows EA to leverage the existing resources and networks of classical charities.

Several classical charities that I know of have recently become interested in effectiveness (and efficiency) due to donors caring more about these values. This might be another way for EA to have a large effect: influence donors so that they demand more effectiveness from their charities of choice. Organizations like The Life You Can Save do this to some extent, but focus on a few existing good charities rather than expanding the scope to the big-but-not-necessarily-effective players.

Another way of achieving this goal might be to influence development spending of countries more strongly. I know several cases where countries give part of their development budget to classic charities (e.g., Helvetas in Switzerland, Brot für die Welt in Germany). EA might be able to exert more influence in this area, similar to what EAF did for Zurich.

[^1] Sorry for the sloppy imprecision here... I hope that this post conveys my idea even without real numbers.