Quick notes: Vaccine efficacy | Amateur sleuths...

• Low efficacy: Early adopters of Chinese vaccines see case surges; China plows ahead anyway.



• Amateur Sleuths Expose Entrenched Media: For most of last year, the Wuhan lab leak idea was largely dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right.
  
  The Washington Post in early 2020 accused Senator Tom Cotton of "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." CNN jumped in with "How to debunk coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation from friends and family." Most other mainstream outlets, from The New York Times ("fringe theory") to NPR ("Scientists debunk lab accident theory"), were equally dismissive.
  
  The people responsible for uncovering this evidence are not journalists or spies or scientists. They are a group of amateur sleuths.. One of them is a 20-something Bengali man who calls himself The Seeker, an expert at searching the back alleys of the web



• Dr Monali C. Rahalkar and Dr Rahul Bahulikar: How an Indian scientist couple worked to trace origin, course of COVID-19.
  
  "Mysteriously, several databases of WIV which were online are now offline. The most important of all was a viral database which had information about 22,000 coronavirus samples, 16,000 of them from bats! This database went offline in September 2019. The reason, according to Shi’s statement to a WHO-China joint investigation team, was that there were more than 3,000 hackers. The question is, what were the hackers seeking in September 2019, when there was no trace of the pandemic?"



• TecHalli: New name for erstwhile 'silicon valley' Bengaluru



• G7 tax consensus and India's Digital tax: India had in 2016 introduced a 6% equalization levy on advertisement services by offshore digital firms to Indian businesses. Last year it expanded this to cover other e-commerce supplies by non-resident firms but at a lower 2%. It covers all sorts of digital e-commerce transactions in India and transactions which use Indian data.
  
  Six countries, including India, are on a US target-list for retaliatory tariffs. China never allowed foreign social media companies and hence is exempted from punitive tariffs by the US!




• Rights for nature: How granting a river ‘personhood’ could help protect it. “Designating the river as a legal person was the clearest message we could send.. The idea that nature is a sentient being isn’t new to Indigenous and other traditional peoples. The vision of the Innu is that Nature is living. Everything is alive,”



• Russia did it first: Sans space and vaccine, best inventions by Russians to know about