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Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:
I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."
A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.
One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.
(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)
In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.
And they take the black pill.
COVID skepticism does not neatly map to "edge" for a few reasons.
If it comes to "conspiracy" or "forbidden knowledge" then it instantly runs into the problem of equal and opposite conspiracy theories. Take someone living in Sweden. That person is a trusting, humble person who believes everything their government says. They do not care for forbidden knowledge The exact opposite, therefore, of an archetypical covid skeptic. Except... Their government IS covid skeptic, and thus they are too. They think all the countries doing lockdowns and forcing masks on people's faces are somewhere between silly and tyrannical, because this is the consensus in Sweden. And, like the rest of the world, Sweden has it's "conspiracy theorists", except in Sweden that means supporters of the mainstream narrative on covid, or zero covid advocates, who accuse the Swedish government of, approximately, a conspiracy theory to kill Swedes.
Are Swedes edgelords? Quite the opposite, in my experience.
No matter what position you hold on Covid, you almost necessarily must believe at least some conspiracy theory. Either Sweden's government is engaged in a conspiracy to kill people with covid, or another pro-lockdown regime is engaged in a conspiracy to needlessly perform lockdowns. Either Fauci conspired to stop people wearing masks, or conspired to make people wear masks.
As for aesthetics, the policy of... doing nothing, lacks a distinct, sharp edge to it. Far less cool than throwing everyone into lockdown and making them wear apocalyptic symbols. If you wanted a world of edge, the aesthetics of lockdownism certainly have a sci-fi evil supervillain edge to them. The contrasting aesthetic is usually middle-aged casual wear and when covid skeptics want to go edgy they do so by adopting the aesthetics of their opponents.
If my goal was edgy, I'd know where I'd plant my flag.
I think there's a third position- that the elite and decision-makers really just did not know how to handle it, and their various decisions and mistakes were more them running around like chickens with their heads cut off. That would stand in opposition to the more conspiratorial claim of them being strategic about using Covid response for ulterior motives, which I've never bought into. They want people going to work and buying stuff, they don't want to destroy the economy simply because they are evil. These measures, bad and ineffective as they may be, were not motivated by a greater plan for social reform.
I would consider that to be a non-conspiratorial approach to opposing Covid measures.
It's this. My observations of Finnish decisionmakers, including in some cases direct conversations with them, basically have given me an image of a process where various politicians have, more than anything, just make the problem go away so they can get back to doing what they were planning to do or advance before the pandemic, which typically would be one or several reforms or laws that often were conclusively derailed by the pandemic, either timewise or budget-wise.
However, this then led to varying ideas of what "making the problem go away" meant at various stages; at one stage it was possible to believe that just utilizing restrictions would be sufficient to get back to normalcy, this initially looked promising when Covid numbers dropped low in summer 2020, then when you had new variants you had more restrictions, when those didn't seem to work and looked like harmful for economy (bad! if the economy is bad you can't do your projects and get thrown out!) it was easy to fall for the idea that masks are the trick to keeping people out and about while combatting the virus, when that didn't do the trick it was time to buy into the vaccine hype and believe that would make the problem go away, when the vaccine hype started getting exposed as hype and there was no more willingness for restrictions it was time for more vaccines, then vaccine passports, when that didn't work there were restrictions after all etc.
In the end, the whole process just unravelled, everyone got Omicron, the Ukraine War occupied the national headspace etc. and now there's no masks, restrictions, and almost no new vaccinations, either. Of course they could have done that from the beginning, but once the process got going, it was pretty hard to step off directly - the masks, the vaccines, the passports etc. were all presented as tools for stepping off the hamster wheel softly and indirectly, but of course they then all had their own issues. And as for just doing nothing, well... what if the Long Covid was real? Then the problem would essentially never go away - there would be a permanent constituency of people disabled by Covid and their relatives ready for the blood of the politicians who were to blame, ie. you.
Combine them with an endless amount of Parks & Rec style bureaucracy turf wars (litres of ink have been spilled in the local media about territorial struggles inside the Finnish equivalent of CDC and between the CDC-equivalent and the Ministry of Health, etc., and I've also heard stories about ministers pushing for whatever measures they have that don't affect the operations of their ministry, or alternatively might keep their people safe from Covid) and what you get is less a conspiracy and more a SNAFU.
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