There was, and is, a lot less rigor in COVID vaccine analysis than most other topics too. My guess as to why has less to do with relaxing analytical standards f

There was, and is, a lot less rigor in COVID vaccine analysis than most other topics too. My guess as to why has less to do with relaxing analytical standards from the community and more to do with just... data. The COVID vaccines are novel in a lot of ways, and we know a lot more now than we knew two years ago. And we're still learning. Keeping up with the science, however flawed the rigor is at this stage of minimal datasets, is what that learning is about. Keeping discussion bubbling so that the community has a general idea of what the latest reports are saying. Of course, all of that is true of RTO (and work from home) as well. As we get more data on companies that are implementing it, we can get better views of how it affects people individually, and at a macro scale from companies on up to populations. And as more companies interpret the reported effects and try similar schemes or variations thereof, all divorced from the pandemic, we'll get even better data which will, undoubtedly, show fracture lines across various demographics ranging from company output, to location, to employee cultural approval, etc. Put simply: it's dismissive to assume that discussing the latest data about a newer phenomenon is a wholehearted acceptance or tacit approval of that data. Practical academics worth with the tangible material they are given. And so long as you're discussing things on a forum rather than, say, putting plans into action, it's perfectly reasonable to take the data as given and discuss the implications of said data.