No, that's not how it works. The network protection statement affected everyone's assessment of the value of their pre-orders and other people's pre-orders and it affected people's decision to buy them, sell them, request refunds, and so on. There may be people who have units in their hands today who made the decision to buy other people's pre-orders because of the network protection statement. Once you do something that change something's value, other people act based on that.

Everyone with a miner in hand made decisions knowing of the existence of that statement.

(This is a general principle. In this specific case, the network protection statement was weak and basically meaningless. I'm just pointing out that the timing argument is bogus.)