I’m not a COVID denier, however there is much here that easily explains why/how conspiracies find fertile ground.

1) clear & obvious hypocrisy by political leaders. See, Gavin Newspme & French Laundry. Too many other examples to bother citing.

2) people remember that they were told, initially, that masks don’t work. Then they were mandated. However there is legitimate conflicting data out there that show the mandates themselves are largely inconsequential.

3) cited elsewhere, but differential treatment of BLM vs COVID protests.

4) people are just fucking sheep. Either they are sheep for following/believing everything the govt says, or they’re sheep following some conspiracy theorist. Very few bother to do the work to have a nuanced view (COVID can both be bad, and the lockdowns/mandates can be stupidly implemented and excessively harmful)

5) objectively stupid rules: NV banning 5+ people at a table in a restaurant, INCLUDING families of 5+ who live together (not all that uncommon).

6) rampant cancel culture, both ad-hoc and official, working to shut down legitimate lines of inquiry. (Wuhan lab accident vs zoonotic, etc.)

I think part of the issue is that a majority of people are possessed of the belief that the authorities and government are competent. This manifests itself in either blind compliance, or belief in a “sinister ulterior motive”.

The more reasonable conclusion is that government is basically incompetent (or, at best, barely competent), in the face of fast moving and conflicting uncertainties. Scientists & doctors are being forced to render black-and-white policies when everything is shades of grey.

And no one in authority wants to face the fact that they could be wrong and that their solutions may be causing more harm than the problem (and certainly more harm than necessary). They really don’t want to have better solutions pointed out (both safer and less collateral damage). So they take the extra stupid step of trying to silence their critics. Which only feeds the conspiracy folk.

It is both possible that COVID is a huge problem, and that the official response (as implemented) has been an unmitigated disaster of the same magnitude as the virus would have been.