THE scientific community has responded to the Covid-19 pandemic in a way that would have been thought impossible earlier. Within only 12 months, we are now likely to have a set of vaccines for Covid-19. This is an astounding achievement, as the fastest vaccine development till date was mumps which took nearly four years. Equally important is that the first four vaccine candidate frontrunners – Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca, Gamaleya – have all shown efficacy well-beyond the target of 50 per cent success rate set by the regulatory agencies.

A COVID-19 vaccine is back in the news with the recent Pfizer's press release claiming 90 per cent efficacy from the very early figures in the Phase 3 trials of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. BioNTech is the German company that Trump had attempted to buy, leading to a furore in Germany. Pfizer, the US pharma giant, is now its partner, with US big capital successfully wooing the German company where Trump's crude tactics had failed. The figures are from a Pfizer press release, so the scientific community has little to analyse independently Pfizer's claims.

THE Department of Science and Technology has sponsored a model, described as a “Super Model” that – according to the governmental hype –claims India’s lockdown was highly successful and we perhaps have reached herd immunity. The media has widely reported that according to the DST Super Model, the lockdown saved nearly two million lives, and by February 2021, even without a vaccine the epidemic in India will be over.

THE Nobel Prize in physics this year has been shared by Roger Penrose, the mathematical physicist, for his work on the theoretical basis of black holes, and Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez, two astronomers, who led independent teams, for verifying the existence of such a black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.  Penrose showed that the consequence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is the formation of black holes, not simply of collapsing stars, but also in certain dense regions of space.  Such black holes capture everything: nothing can come out, not even light.

AS the pandemic marches through the world, a number of countries seemed to have given up the fight against Covid-19, and are now waiting for a vaccine to stop the pandemic. With cases exceeding 32 million, and more than a million dead, the world economy has taken a bigger hit than at any other time in the last century.Countries like the US and India are now showing the highest numbers in terms of total and new cases.