Companies and governments always say they're not going to do something in order to get the idea of that thing into people's minds but avoid alarming them by saying it's not happening. Then since the idea has been planted in the people's minds, it can later be enacted with less alarm, because the people are already familiar with the idea. If you had never noticed it before, the pattern became obvious with covid and I'm sure anyone could think back to how everything they enacted was initially introduced to the public as something that was not going to happen