“delaying the standard would likely cost many lives per day”
I’d be interested to see how they prove that. Population-wide mortality rates do not seem to have gone down since the inoculations were introduced. All I’ve read or heard to explain that have been speculative rationalizations. This is the sort of thing you hear from people who are only interested in winning an argument, not in seeking the truth of a matter.
A simple understanding would be that a 75% inoculation rate ought to reduce average mortality by 75%. We should have pretty much licked this thing by now.
When you calculate the percentage of people who have immunity - either surviving covid or having a vax, we are somewhere in the range of 70% to 88% of the population. By all nominal estimates from othe infectious diseases we should be on the cusp or over the edge, falling into “herd immunity” and the pandemic should be dying off to endemic levels. If not, then they’re lying, and or they’re lying about the vaxes. Probably both.