The real churn of betting happens not in the backrooms of sportsbook businesses but deep within the servers of companies that bettors haven’t heard of at all.

Even before Covid-19, companies and nonprofits had been promoting the benefits of digital and biometric IDs. The need for a speedy and comprehensive vaccination campaign has emboldened them, to the point that privacy campaigners are increasingly discomfited.

Without vials, needles or adjuvants, a vaccine is just a fine formula, a cure in search of its disease. When a Covid-19 vaccine is finally approved for manufacture, the rush to stock up on ancillary products will be unprecedented.

For the first time since 1869, Mendeleev’s periodic table will cease to be an unfinished work, a map with borders yet to be filled in.

A good casting director would have marked Nirav Modi for the role of heistee, not heister.