Allston man is still fuming about Boston's three-month indoor vaccination requirement during the pandemic, so he sues

An Allston man yesterday sued Mayor Wu and the city's public-health and licensing heads over the way Boston required people seeking entry to most indoor venues to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination between Dec. 20, 2021 and Feb. 28, 2022.

In his self-filed suit, in US District Court in Boston, Eric Porter charges the policy was a violation of civil rights, specifically, his First Amendment right to public assembly, his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, and his Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection.

However, Porter might have a key problem in making his case: Although he charges the policy prevented him from "accessing public accommodations in violation of his constitutional rights and federal civil rights laws," he does not provide any specifics of any accommodations he attempted to access only to be rudely turned away.

In 2023, a Boston federal judge threw out a similar suit by 19 people with a lawyer, including two Boston cops, a North End restaurant owner, a health-club owner and one of those people who would stand outside Wu's house early in the morning and scream, because none had actually proved that they either tried to get in somewhere and were turned away or were monetarily or otherwise harmed by the requirement.

This could affect his allegation that he was deprived of equal protection under the law because some Boston municipal employees were exempt from a city vaccination requirement and he wasn't.

Porter might also have problems with his allegation that Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, was legally not allowed to issue the requirement because she was "lacking legislative authorization."

Federal courts have allowed public-health authorities to enforce sweeping measures during public-health emergencies since at least 1905, when the Supreme Court issued a precedent-setting ruling involving a Cambridge minister who did not want his sons vaccinated during a smallpox epidemic.

In the more recent Covid-19 case, US District Court Judge Angel Kelley rejected an argument by the 19 vaccine deniers that  Ojikutu and the BPHC could not enact and enforce emergency Covid-19 restrictions because the commission was not created by some mayoral hand waving but by an act of the state legislature and that the US Supreme Court "has authorized states to create local bodies, like the BPHC, to take actions to protect the public’s health and [be] given deference in judicial review of those actions."