They've got so many viable excuses to fall back on though. Economy, vaccines, weaker variants, other countries have opened up. They could even make up some completely new narrative if they really wanted to about how they're going to get overtaken by India if they don't open the economy up or how they were running some two year lab experiment to ascertain long term effects for the good of the people and just release some hastily made paper supporting their findings. I don't know, it just seems really weird that these individuals would feel so threatened to roll back on it when it seems to be causing them more problems than its worth.