Mayor Wu is standing defiantly behind her administration’s decision to enforce tougher Covid-19 vaccination requirements for city employees and for access to indoor venues in the new year. While public polling has consistently shown that Boston residents strongly support preventative measures, including masking and vaccine proof, the mayor has been confronted with loud protests, including from some city workers.
Last week, Wu announced that patrons and staff at indoor spaces in Boston — including restaurants, bars, nightclubs, fitness facilities, and entertainment venues — will need to show proof they are vaccinated starting in mid-January. The city will also require that its own employees get a first dose of a vaccine by Jan. 15 and second shot a month later.
The new policies— collectively dubbed the B Together initiative— triggered ignorant, racist insults directed at the mayor, the daughter of immigrants from Taiwan, on the city’s 3-1-1 app and via phone calls to City Hall, she said.
“I’ve seen my face photoshopped on all sorts of images,” Wu said during a radio interview on GBH last week. “There’s constant calls associating me with the same hateful, racist, xenophobic language that the former president used in describing the virus and its origins and who was to blame,” she said, a clear reference to Donald Trump. “And, unfortunately,” she added, “this isn’t something that I bear alone.”
Boston officials plan to create the city’s own proof-of-vaccination app, modeled after the Key to NYC app in New York City. Wu said she has been in touch with New York officials, where a similar vaccine requirement has been in place for months.
“This step will help increase our vaccination numbers, which we know is the best way to keep our community safe and thriving,” Wu said. “Although Boston’s vaccination rates have been high, we continue to see serious disparities by race and by age, allowing Omicron and other new variants to spread in our communities. Vaccines are the most powerful tool in fighting this pandemic, once again, and they’re the most powerful tool to allow us to recover as a city and to truly be together.”
Wu’s announcement last Monday at City Hall was disrupted at times by protestors who chanted, used whistles, and, at one point, sang the “The Star-Spangled Banner” as officials described the new policy and their reasoning behind implementing it.
The protest included members of Boston First Responders United, which opposes vaccine mandates, and a heavy contingent of pro-Trump activists. The group was among those who later confronted the mayor when she visited the BPD Area B-3 police station on Dec. 23. In that incident, several protestors sought to block Wu’s vehicle from leaving the Blue Hill Avenue station as others shouted insults and harangued the mayor while Boston Police officers moved to protect her.
Wu said Boston officials are “in conversations with all of our city unions to proceed along all the processes that are required.” She said more than 90 percent of the city’s workforce is fully vaccinated and that she is “confident that that number will continue to grow as we host on-site clinics in partnership with each of our departments.”
Boston’s planned outreach and support efforts for businesses include a series of webinars and what Wu’s office described as “a weeks-long campaign to educate residents and businesses about the new policy, utilizing city outreach workers and inspectional services.
Free, at-home rapid antigen test kits remain available for city residents at select Boston Public Library branches and community centers. BPS students were also sent home before school break with two free test kits. The move came as Boston Latin School notified parents of a spike in Covid-19 cases (36 over the past week), with most of them being reported on Dec. 23.
“The uptick and clustering of positive cases in just the last two days is extremely concerning,” BLS Head of School Rachel Skerritt wrote in the letter to parents. “Many of these cases are the result of unmasked or improperly masked contact between students outside of school time, including weekend social events and contact amongst some of our athletic teams.”
