A vaccine developed and ready to be injected in less than one year is a miracle that no research laboratory or pharmaceutical company would have dreamed of before 2020 began. Their track record has been that Jonas Salk’s lightning-fast development of polio vaccine in less than 4 years, and Ebola vaccine was approved in December 2019 after the first Ebola incidence was found in 1976, i.e. more than 40 years after. From discovery to approved vaccination is a 10-year long process involving 2-5 years of discovery research, 2 years of pre-clinical period, 5 years of clinical development at its very best, 1-2 years of regulatory approval, and then of course comes in the manufacturer. The clinical development period has its 3 phases that is creating the buzz we hear day in and day out these days. Phase I is when researchers concentrate on the question, “Is it safe?” Phase II tries to establish whether the vaccine is activating an immune response or not. Then comes Phase III when they answer
Now that Virat Kohli and Steve Smith are once again facing each other down under, a friend asked me to compare them—batting prowess and all. It was pretty late in the evening, and it would be a fair guess that I had guzzled quite a few shots more than what I should have. I cannot explain it, but somehow on such occasions a bit of Shashi Tharoor seeps into me. The comparison, as a result, went like hereunder; Kohli is all brio prior to steadying himself to face the ball. Thereafter, an uncanny blend of organization and destruction, fricassees a delectable stew. Smith appears antsier with his outre and wacky routine at the crease. You agonize whether that is an idiosyncratic boondoggle or an act of some substance. For some recondite reason though that prefatory drouks quietude in him, and readies him to lacerate the bowler: the final product a non sequitur to what was transpiring when the bowler was readying himself for the run up to the crease. Or, is it a carefully woven phantasmagor