Boston business vaccine mandates ‘not permanent,’ Michelle Wu says

Mandates including proof of Covid-19 vaccination requirements for Boston businesses are “not permanent,” Mayor Michelle Wu said, though she doesn’t have an end date for them yet.

“These protections are not permanent,” Wu said Tuesday in a press conference inside Roxbury grocery store Daily Table.

Asked if she has either a specific date in mind or numeric thresholds to hit in order to scale back the requirements that many businesses need to require patrons to mask up and provide proof of coronavirus vaccination, Wu said she did not.

Wu said the Boston Public Health Commission is in “constant contact” with hospitals and is looking at positive test rates, hospitalizations and vaccination rates.

“Our Health Commission has been working on metrics as we understand community positivity and where we may be either plateauing or coming down quickly,” Wu said.

The previous administrations of former Mayor Marty Walsh and Acting Mayor Kim Janey used “thresholds for concern” for various metrics. City Hall and its health officials planted flags at certain metrics — 5% positive test rate, certain percentages of hospital and ICU beds open, 340 daily positive tests per 100,000 residents — and kept those from fall 2020 through the reopening that came during Covid’s nadir last summer.

Asked if Wu’s looking at similar marks, she emphasized the differences of the omicron-variant-driven surge, where the disease is much more contagious — but more mild, especially with the now-prevalent vaccines that are shown to cut down heavily on severe cases and deaths.

“So we’re trying to adjust the situation,” Wu said.

Wu has continued to face protests over the raft of mandates she implemented in the onset of the omicron surge, and sure enough a few people holding signs showed up at her Roxbury event in protest.

In December, she announced the proof-of-vax requirement for businesses, as well as the rule requiring all city workers to get the jab or face potential termination. That municipal-worker requirement has been put on hold amid a pending court case.

The mask mandate came back last summer under Janey as the delta-variant surge grew.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/hnWJlY7Py