A11
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2021
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Vaccination news
Shot No. 4?
Hospital workers:
No shot mandate
Novavax: Large study finds
COVID-19 shot about 90% effective
Federal judge in Texas: Get vaccinated or find a new job
BY JUAN A. LOZANO AND BRIAN MELLEY
Associated Press
HOUSTON — Jennifer Bridges,
a registered nurse in Houston, is
steadfast in her belief that it’s wrong
for her employer to force hospital
workers like her to get vaccinated
against COVID-19 or say goodbye
to their jobs. But that’s a losing legal
argument so far.
In a stinging defeat, a federal
judge bluntly ruled over the week-
end that if employees of the Hous-
ton Methodist hospital system don’t
like it, they can go work elsewhere.
“Methodist is trying to do their
business of saving lives without giv-
ing them the COVID-19 virus. It is
a choice made to keep staff, patients
and their families safer. Bridges can
freely choose to accept or refuse a
COVID-19 vaccine; however, if she
refuses, she will simply need to work
somewhere else,” U.S. District Judge
Lynn Hughes wrote in dismissing a
lawsuit filed by 117 Houston Meth-
odist workers, including Bridges,
over the vaccine requirement.
The ruling Saturday in the closely
watched legal case over how far
health care institutions can go to
protect patients and others against
the coronavirus is believed to be
the first of its kind in the U.S. But it
won’t be the end of the debate.
Bridges said she and the others
will take their case to the U.S. Su-
preme Court if they have to: “This is
only the beginning. We are going to
be fighting for quite a while.”
And other hospital systems
around the country, including in
Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via AP, file
Demonstrators at Houston Methodist Baytown Hospital in Baytown, Texas, on
June 7 wave at cars as they protest a policy that says hospital employees must get
vaccinated against COVID-19 or lose their jobs. A federal judge dismissed their
lawsuit, saying if workers don’t like the rule, they can find new jobs.
Washington, D.C., Indiana, Mary-
land, Pennsylvania and most re-
cently New York, have followed
Houston Methodist and have also
gotten pushback.
Legal experts say such vaccine re-
BRIEFING
Les Schwab opens
500th tire store
Les Schwab Tire Cen-
ters said Monday that it
has opened its 500th tire
store, a milestone the Or-
egon company hit after
decades of steady ex-
pansion.
The latest store is in
West Jordan, Utah, a sub-
urb of Salt Lake City.
Founded in 1952 in
Prineville, Les Schwab
Tire Centers grew slowly
in its early decades but
took off in the 1980s and
’90s, adding nearly 13
stores a year during that
stretch. It grew steadily
after the turn of the
century, but a bit more
slowly in the past few
years.
The Bend-based retail
chain stretches as far east
as Colorado and as far
south as Bakersfield, Cal-
ifornia.
The Schwab family
sold the business last
year to a California invest-
ment firm called Meritage
Group. Meritage has not
said whether it plans to
aggressively expand its
retail footprint.
State employment
website goes down
The Oregon Employ-
ment Department’s web-
site for posting economic
data went offline over the
weekend, apparently be-
cause the state neglected
to renew the registration
for its domain name.
The loss of Oregon’s
qualityinfo.org page
didn’t affect unemploy-
ment claims, which are
managed on a separate
website. After an inquiry
from The Oregonian on
Monday, the department
said it now has renewed
the domain name. The
site was back online Mon-
day afternoon.
But the outage is an-
other embarrassing tech-
nological lapse for the
department, which stum-
bled repeatedly in 2020
amid a flood of jobless
claims triggered by the
pandemic.
Qualityinfo.org hosts
the employment de-
partment’s monthly
announcement of the
state’s unemployment
rate, information about
regional economic condi-
tions and analysis by the
department’s economists.
Businesses, lawmakers
and others use the data
to make decisions about
strategy and policy.
— Bulletin wire reports
quirements, particularly in a public
health crisis, will probably continue
to be upheld in court as long as em-
ployers provide reasonable exemp-
tions, including for medical condi-
tions or religious objections.
Vaccine maker Novavax said Monday
its COVID-19 shot was highly effective
against the disease and also protected
against variants in a large study in the U.S.
and Mexico, potentially offering the world
yet another weapon against the virus at a
time when developing countries are des-
perate for doses.
The two-shot vaccine was about 90%
effective overall, and preliminary data
showed it was safe, the American com-
pany said. That would put the vaccine
about on par with Pfizer’s and Moder-
na’s. The Novavax vaccine, which is easy
to store and transport, is expected to play
an important role in boosting supplies in
poor parts of the world.
That help is still months away, however.
The company, which has been plagued
by raw-material shortages that have ham-
pered production, said it plans to seek
authorization for the shots in the U.S., Eu-
rope and elsewhere by the end of Septem-
ber and will be able to produce up to 100
million doses a month by then.
Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & John-
son vaccines are already authorized for
use in the U.S. and Europe.
See Vaccines / A13
Astoria
WHERE PARKLETS HELP
BUSINESSES SURVIVE
— Associated Press
Note left on
parked jet
becomes a
pandemic
time capsule
BY KATIE FRANKOWICZ
The Astorian
BY HANNAH SAMPSON
The Washington Post
I
The scene in the desert
was “chilling, apocalyptic,
surreal” as Delta pilot Chris
Dennis arrived to drop off a
plane for storage at South-
ern California Logistics Air-
port in 2020.
It was March 23, less
than two weeks since the
fast-spreading coronavirus
had been declared a pan-
demic. Passenger numbers
were spiraling. Airlines were
slashing flights and laying
up their unused planes.
In a Facebook post at the
time, Dennis shared photos
of what he saw at the air-
port in Victorville, Califor-
nia: Long rows of Delta and
Southwest jets parked on the
runways under a cloudy sky.
In one, a somber Dennis ap-
peared in the foreground. “It’s
hard to fathom how many
aircraft Delta has until you
see that many of them parked
in one place,” he said later in
a Delta news release. “When
we got in line, it looked like
an optical illusion. It just kept
going and going. I don’t know
how to describe it — it was
shocking.”
The final picture in the
Facebook post was of a
note penned by Dennis, a
first officer, to an unknown
eventual audience. Delta
called it a “pandemic time
capsule” that waited out the
past 15 months behind a
tray table in the cockpit.
f Lisa Parks charted it
out, it would immediately
be obvious when she in-
stalled the parklet outside
Brut Wine Bar on 10th Street
in Astoria.
By-the-glass and bottle
sales shot up and continue to
climb. Most days she’s open,
old and new customers flock
to the tables she’s arranged in
the semi-enclosed outdoor
seating area located in park-
ing spaces on the street.
The chairs in the parklet
might slant with the street,
and sometimes there’s a light
drizzle falling — Astoria
in the spring — but no one
seems to mind.
“It’s like being in Europe,”
customers tell her.
Astoria loosened require-
ments for parklets last year
as coronavirus pandemic
restrictions cut into the abil-
ity of downtown bars and
restaurants to serve custom-
ers and turn a profit. The city
of Bend did the same.
The parklet program has
stayed a pilot program since
the Astoria City Council first
launched it in 2015. The busi-
ness owners who have taken
advantage of “parklets: the
pandemic edition” have in-
vested sparingly — some
barrels as tables here, basic
seating there. They aren’t sure
what will be allowed when the
pandemic ends and city lead-
ership reviews — and possibly
Hailey Hoffman/The Astorian
Lisa Parks sits at a table in her new parklet outside of Brut Wine Bar in Astoria.
reconsiders — the program.
But for the summer, at
least, the relaxed rules and
the parklets are here to stay.
The lenient parklet poli-
cies, as well as relaxed rules
on sidewalk seating, were
intended to help businesses
weather an unprecedented,
tough economic situation,
said Megan Leatherman, As-
toria’s community develop-
ment director.
Even as things open up
and tourists flood the city on
sunny days and weekends,
“there’s still an economic
hardship,” she said, “and I
don’t see that going away this
summer.”
Details could change
The details about what
might be allowed in parklets
could change post-pandemic.
Under program guidelines,
coverings are supposed to
go away when the city ends
its emergency declaration,
Leatherman noted.
At that time, the entire pi-
lot program also goes back
to the City Council for eval-
uation “and to determine if
parklets should continue in
downtown Astoria,”
according to city documents.
Both Parks and Michael
Angiletta, the primary owner
of Blaylock’s Whiskey Bar,
where another parklet is lo-
cated, are waiting for firmer
guidelines before they invest
more heavily in their parklets.
The components of the
Blaylock’s parklet are inten-
tionally sparse for now.
“Would I like to make it
nicer? You betcha,” Angiletta
said, “but I need some confi-
dence that it’s something we’ll
be able to continue to do in a
sustainable fashion.”
See Parklets / A13
See Delta / A13
Girl Scouts have millions of unsold cookies
BY DEE-ANN DURBIN
Associated Press
The Girl Scouts have an un-
usual problem this year: 15 million
boxes of unsold cookies.
The 109-year-old organization
says the coronavirus — not thin-
ner demand for Thin Mints — is
the main culprit. As the pandemic
wore into the spring selling season,
many troops nixed their traditional
cookie booths for safety reasons.
“This is unfortunate, but given
this is a girl-driven program and
the majority of cookies are sold
in-person, it was to be expected,”
ONLINE
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view it at bendbulletin.com
said Kelly Parisi, a spokeswoman
for Girl Scouts of the USA.
The impact will be felt by lo-
cal councils and troops, who de-
pend on the cookie sales to fund
programming, travel, camps and
other activities. The Girl Scouts
normally sell around 200 mil-
lion boxes of cookies per year, or
around $800 million worth.
Parisi said Girl Scouts of the
USA did forecast lower sales this
year due to the pandemic. But
coronavirus restrictions were con-
stantly shifting, and the cookie or-
ders placed by its 111 local coun-
cils with bakers last fall were still
too optimistic.
As a result, around 15 million
boxes of cookies were left over as
the cookie season wound down.
Most — around 12 million boxes
— remain with the two bakers,
Louisville, Kentucky-based Little
Brownie Bakers and Brownsburg,
Indiana-based ABC Bakers.
See Cookies / A13
Girl Scouts of New Mexico Trails via AP
Henrique Valdovinos, left, and other health care workers at
the Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mex-
ico, receive a donation of cookies as part of the Girl Scouts’
Hometown Heroes program.