It just seems oblivious for the author to say that people complied because deep down they knew it was right, when that author's colleagues have written about the actual dangers these people would face if they lost their income.
> They’ve made bad decisions earlier and now may be frozen, part in fear, and unable to admit their initial hesitancy wasn’t a good idea, so they may come back with a version of how they are just doing “more research.”
This kind of decision paralysis can last for ages unless something forces it. Nobody seems to be saying that the consequences of ignoring vaccine mandates aren't real, it's rather quite the opposite: you can come up with hypothetical concerns about any low-probability event but being faced with actually losing something you care about forces that to be put into perspective. It's similar to how a fair number of people worry about air travel but hop on a plane when the alternative is a cross-country drive — rationally looking at crash statistics isn't as effective for those people as the misery factor of a long drive.
The excerpt you quoted also kind of bothered me because it presupposes that getting vaccinated immediately was the right idea. Just because someone slapped the label "vaccine" on something doesn't mean you should jump to receive it as early as possible. Not everyone wants to be an early adopter, and there's good reason for that.
If you directly confronted them about an inconsistency or them not personally following one of those rules they’d get defensive since at some point they’d staked that out as something they believed but if there was a way to say something had changed or their hand had been forced, they’d take it and move on.
This is projection. There are multiple modes of approaching communication and not everyone uses the mode where communication is an exercise in one-upmanship.
I guess you can continue to deny this kind of person exists; but it doesn't really matter what you think.
This isn't about treating communication as a contest with only one winner but rather about the subjective feeling of the person making these decisions. Having built it up into a big deal increased the costs of reversal but the mandate changes the dynamic and gives them the option of saying the choice was no longer theirs — if they get vaccinated, that's a better outcome for everyone even if they never admit the bad call.