The New York Times - Your Wednesday Briefing

By Melina Delkic

Writer, Briefings

Good morning. We’re covering another blow to AstraZeneca and checking in with India’s farmer protests, four months in.

AstraZeneca stumbles again

The announcement this week that the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine had achieved nearly 80 percent efficacy in a gold-standard U.S. trial was met with relief by the many countries relying on it.

But there was another setback. In a highly unusual move, American officials said that the company’s account of the trial’s findings may have been inaccurate. An independent monitoring board twice asked for a more rigorous approach to determining which trial participants had Covid-19, but AstraZeneca unveiled its interim results on Monday without conducting the full analysis requested.

The company defended its claims of 79 percent efficacy for its vaccine, and said it would release more up-to-date trial results within 48 hours. Global regulators have deemed it safe and effective. But the miscommunication contributed to friction as the company prepares to seek approval from U.S. drug regulators and build confidence around its European rollout.

Context: Health officials around the world had been looking to the shot’s U.S. trial, the largest of its kind, as a crucial guide to their own rollouts: It would supply more data on older people, who had not been as well-represented in earlier trials, and a more precise read on the vaccine’s overall efficacy.

Reminder: The AstraZeneca shot’s affordable price and easy storage requirements make it a crucial tool in the global effort to give people vaccine access.

Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

In other developments:

• Mumbai is conducting random virus testing, without people’s consent, in malls, railway stations and other crowded places as officials try to tamp down on a worrying surge in cases.
• Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a five-day lockdown in Germany over Easter and the extension of existing restrictions until mid-April in an effort to break a spike in coronavirus cases.

India’s farmers fight

Farmers from Punjab and elsewhere have camped outside New Delhi for four months in protest. At the heart of the dispute is a subsidy system that the government, economists and even many farmers agree is broken.

But Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s haste to remake it — his political party pushed new laws through Parliament in a matter of days — could devastate vast parts of the country where farming remains a way of life. Our reporters looked at what went wrong and take stock of the protests now.

Context: Nearly 60 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people make a living from agriculture, though the sector accounts for only about 11 percent of economic output. For many, getting another job isn’t an option.

Related: With thousands sleeping in tents in frigid temperatures and scarce resources, many of the farmers have had medical problems. One U.S. doctor whose family friend needed treatment came to help and never left, creating a clinic for the protesters that became a key community center, CNN reports.

Time magazine profiled some of the women leading the protests.

South Koreans are furious over a housing scandal

The outrage erupted after several officials from the South Korean housing agency were suspected of using privileged information to cash in on government programs.

The incident has thrown President Mr. Moon Jae-in’s government into crisis just weeks before key mayoral elections in Seoul and Busan in April, in which expensive housing is a major issue for voters.

Details: Two civic groups were the first to report that 10 officials from the Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH) bought land in an area southwest of Seoul months before the Moon administration announced a plan to build 70,000 new homes there. The government has identified 20 officials who are suspected of using insider information in the scheme, and the investigation is ongoing.

Context: Rising housing prices have long been one of the country’s biggest policy headaches, especially in Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi Province. President after president has promised to fix the issue, but real estate prices kept soaring.

Quotable: “The LH scandal shows how some people in South Korea make a quick fortune through real-estate foul play, while the rest of us can barely buy a house even if we toil and save for a lifetime,” said Park Young-sik, 29, an office worker.

THE LATEST NEWS

• Protesters have rallied across Britain in opposition to a bill that would give the police more power to crack down on nonviolent demonstrations.
• Israelis are voting in the fourth election in two years. The mood is cynical and exhausted. As one voter put it, “The only one excited about going out to vote today is our dog, who is getting an extra walk this morning.” Here’s the latest.
• A 21-year-old man has been charged with 10 counts of murder over a mass shooting in Colorado. We looked at the lives of those who died.
• Gunmen riding motorcycles killed 137 people in raids on villages in southwestern Niger, one of the deadliest attacks in recent memory in the country ravaged by Islamist violence.
• The authorities in Bangladesh searched for survivors in the ruins of a sprawling Rohingya refugee camp, one day after a fire killed at least 15 people, injured hundreds and left tens of thousands homeless once again.

A strange interloper came zooming through our solar system in 2017. Was it a comet? A cosmic iceberg? Or an alien space wreck? Astronomers this month offered the most solid explanation yet: Oumuamua, as it is known, was a chip off a faraway planet from another solar system.

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ARTS AND IDEAS

Welcome to BookTok

TikTok’s influence is selling thousands of books. Some enthusiastic readers — mostly women in their teens and 20s — are posting videos of themselves reading or recommending novels. Occasionally, they sob into the camera after a particularly devastating ending.

“It becomes this very emotional 45-second video that people immediately connect with,” the director of books at Barnes & Noble told The Times. “We haven’t seen these types of crazy sales — I mean tens of thousands of copies a month — with other social media formats.”

One example: “The Song of Achilles” by Madeline Miller. Sales spiked after a popular TikTok video last year, and the book is now selling roughly nine times as many copies a week as it did in 2012, when it won a prestigious fiction award. The book is currently third on the New York Times best-seller list for paperback fiction.

Seeing the potential, some publishers have begun paying — or sending free books to — users with large followings. The fees range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per post. For now, though, most of these videos remain unsponsored, happening organically.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

Crunchy tofu coated in panko and sesame seeds pairs nicely with a coconut-lime dressing.

Lana Del Rey’s sixth major-label album, “Chemtrails Over the Country Club,” finds the singer “scaling back, seeking more insular insight,” our reviewer writes.

See the Meroe pyramids — around 200 in total, on the east bank of the Nile — in Sudan.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: The “L” of L.A. (three letters).

You can find all our puzzles here.

That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — Melina

P.S. The Times introduced its 2021-2022 class of fellows, who come from across the U.S. as well as Britain and Vietnam.

The latest episode of “The Daily” features a food critic who lost her sense of smell from Covid-19.

Sanam Yar contributed reporting. You can reach Melina and the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

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