WHATSAPP, a company owned by Facebook since 2014, has issued a new privacy policy changing its data-sharing rules, which will come into effect by February 8, 2021. In this new policy, WhatsApp has declared that it will share data with Facebook, its parent company, about users' chats, connections, location and device information, transactions and payments. It will also share data of our interactions with other businesses that use Facebook as a platform. The public outcry over the new privacy policy has prompted an exodus to much safer alternatives like Signal.

THREE journal publishers have filed a case in Delhi High Court for blocking Sci-Hub and Libgen in India. These two websites provide free downloads of research publications and books to research scholars and students. This is not an attack on pirate sites, as the publishers claim but a war against students and researchers in India, who do not have access to these high-priced journals.

A VIRTUAL Climate Ambition Summit attended by around 70 government leaders was held on December 12, 2020 on the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement (PA). This Summit, organised by the UN, France and the UK, was expected to push governments to declare deeper emission cuts than their commitments under PA in the lead up to the next Conference of Parties (COP 26) in Glasgow next December.

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.