As I think I've said elsewhere I find it interesting how conspiracy sorts seem to assume nobody puts anything in any kind of context - as you say
existentialist , critical evaluation.
We don't believe things because we 'blindly trust authority', people generally take things in context, and, if they're not a conspiraloon
on a balance of probabilites. Do i trust the government? No. Are governments faking COVID 'to control us'? On a balance of probability, no, it makes no sense at all, given COVID makes it hard to govern on so many levels (lost tax income, need to subsidise, supply chain issues etc) and also given that international governments can't agree on a fucking thing it seems highly unlikely they've managed a conspiracy that would have to involved tens or hundreds of thousands of people with every single one keeping schtum.
Could a pharmacuetical company have concocted COVID so it can profit from vaccines? This is actually a more plausible one in the sense there's a clear beneficiary, but still strikes me as a poor way to do business, plus we're not existing in a movie where you can apparently develop your evil designer bio-weapon and simultanously the vaccine to it while either not testing it on anyone or somehow secretly testing in on 100,000s people without anyone noticing.