Maybe Best Buy, but not best roof
Complaints rise over states’ inequity in shot distribution
Hopefully the Geek Squad has taken a few classes in carpentry.
A section of roof at a Queens Best Buy collapsed, rupturing a gas line below, officials said Tuesday.
The collapse occurred around 7 p.m. Monday at the Best Buy on 49th St. near Northern Blvd. in Woodside, officials said.
The side wall of a storage warehouse for the big box store buckled as the roof pancaked down to the ground.
“When we first pulled up, a side wall had collapsed and there was a heavy gas odor,” FDNY Battalion Chief Brian Deery said at the scene. “We found that the roof collapsed in and kicked out the side wall and took out a gas line.”
No one was inside the warehouse when the collapse took place.
Con Edison was brought in to shut down the gas line and the city Department of Buildings slapped a full vacate order on the building as the cause of the collapse was investigated.
“(When we arrived) we thought it might have been an explosion,” Deery said. “But an explosion would have had more structural damage. More walls would have been blown out and the roll down fence would have been blown out.”
It was not immediately clear if Monday night’s heavy winds played a role in the collapse. The winds weren’t too severe when firefighters arrived, Deery said.
The collapse could have stemmed from a structural deficiency, officials said.
NASHVILLE — Rita Fentress was worried she might get lost as she traveled down the unfamiliar forested, onelane road in rural Tennessee in search of a coronavirus vaccine.
Then the trees cleared and the Hickman County Agricultural Pavilion appeared.
Fentress, 74, wasn’t eligible to be vaccinated in Nashville, where she lives, because there were so many health care workers to vaccinate there.
But a neighbor told her the state’s rural counties had already moved to younger age groups and she found an appointment 60 miles away.
“I felt kind of guilty about it,” she said. “I thought maybe I was taking it from someone else.”
But late that February day, she said there were still five openings for the next morning.
The U.S. vaccine campaign has heightened tensions between rural and urban America, where from Oregon to Tennessee to upstate New York complaints are surfacing of a real — or perceived — inequity in vaccine allocation.
In some cases, recriminations over how scarce vaccines are distributed have taken on partisan tones, with rural Republican lawmakers in Democrat-led states complaining of “picking winners and losers,” and urbanites traveling hours to rural GOP-leaning communities to score COVID-19 shots when there are none in their city.
In Oregon, state GOP lawmakers walked out of a legislative session last week over the Democratic governor’s vaccine plans, citing rural vaccine distribution among their concerns.
In upstate New York, public health officials in rural counties have complained of disparities in vaccine allocation, and in North Carolina, rural lawmakers say too many doses were going to mass vaccine centers in big cities.
In Alabama, Missouri and Tennessee, a dearth of shots in urban areas with the greatest number of health care workers has led senior citizens to snap up appointments hours from their homes.
The result is a hodgepodge of approaches that can look like the exact opposite of equity, where those most likely to be vaccinated are people with the savvy and means to search out a shot and travel to wherever it is.
“It’s really, really flawed,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who noted there are even vaccine hunters who will find a dose for money. “Ideally, allocations would meet the population’s needs.”
With little more than general guidance from the federal government, states have taken it upon themselves to decide what it means to distribute the vaccine fairly and reach vulnerable populations.
Tennessee, like many states, has divvied up doses based primarily on county population, not on how many residents belong to eligible groups — such as health care workers.
The Tennessee health commissioner has defended the allocation as the “most equitable,” but the approach has also exposed yet another layer of haves and have-nots as the vaccine rollout accelerates.
In Oregon, the issue led state officials to pause dose deliveries in some rural areas that had finished inoculating their health care workers while clinics elsewhere, including the Portland metro area, caught up.
The dustup last month prompted an angry response, with some state GOP lawmakers accusing Democratic Gov. Kate Bown of playing favorites with the urban dwellers who elected her.
Public health leaders in Morrow County, a farming region in northeastern Oregon with one of the highest COVID-19 infection rates, said they had to delay two vaccine clinics because of the state’s decision.
Other rural counties delayed vaccines for seniors.
States face plenty of challenges.
Rural counties are less likely to have the deep-freeze equipment necessary to store Pfizer vaccines. Health care workers are often concentrated in big cities. And rural counties were particularly hard hit by COVID-19 in many states, but their residents are among the most likely to say they’re “definitely not” going to get vaccinated, according to recent Kaiser Family Foundation polling.
Adalja said most of these complications were foreseeable and could have been avoided with proper planning and funding.
“There are people who know how to do this,” he said. “They’re just not in charge of it.”
In Republican-led Tennessee, Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey said the Trump administration deemed the state’s plan among the nation’s most equitable.
Extra doses go to 35 counties with a high social vulnerability index score — many small and rural, but also Shelby County, which includes Memphis, with a large Black population.
In Nashville, Democratic Mayor John Cooper said the fact that city residents can get vaccine shots elsewhere is a positive, even if the road trips are “a little bit of a pain.”
“I’m grateful that other counties have not said, ‘Oh my gosh, you have to be a resident of this county always to get the vaccine,’” Cooper said.
Lawyers for a British tabloid that just lost a privacy lawsuit for publishing parts of a letter the duchess of Sussex wrote to her estranged father plan to appeal the ruling, they told London’s High Court on Tuesday.
Associated Newspapers, the parent company of Mail on Sunday and the MailOnline website, claims in newly filed court documents that the case deserves a full trial and that its bid to overturn last month’s ruling “would have a real prospect of success.” Meghan Markle won part of her lawsuit when Judge Mark Warby granted summary judgment on her privacy claim, eliminating the need for a big trial.
The wife of Prince Harry and former “Suits” star sued the publisher over five articles featuring excerpts from a handwritten letter to her dad, Thomas Markle, after her royal wedding in 2018. She accused the company of breaching her privacy and infringing on her copyright by reproducing parts of the letter.
One of those articles ran in February 2019 with a headline
that read in part, “Revealed: The letter showing true tragedy of Meghan’s rift with father she says has ‘broken her heart into a million pieces.’ ”
In his Feb. 11 ruling, the judge said the tabloid had misused Meghan’s private information and infringed her copyright and that she “had a reasonable expectation that the contents of
the letter would remain private.” Warby also ruled that publishing large portions of the letter was “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful.”
But the judge did not grant summary judgment on Meghan’s copyright infringement claim, saying a “limited trial” should be held sometime in the fall to decide the “minor” issue of whether the duchess was “the sole author” and lone copyright holder of the letter.
Lawyers for Associated Newspapers told the court Tuesday that Warby failed to sufficiently consider that Meghan “undermined or diminished” the weight of her own privacy by collaborating with the authors of a People magazine story about the letter and with the authors of a book that features references to the letter. The attorneys reportedly insist that further evidence would be available if a full trial is allowed to take place.
Meghan’s lawyers, meanwhile, asked the judge to order the tabloid to remove the five articles from its website and to run a front-page statement about her legal victory. They also want the company to hand over or destroy any copy of the letter it still has.
“The defendant has failed to deliver up copies it has of the letter such that the threat to infringe and further to misuse her private information remains real and, inexplicably, the defendant has still not removed the infringing articles from MailOnline,” Ian Mill, an attorney for Meghan, said in a written submission.