Do you know anyone who fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole during COVID? What are they doing now?

Keep in mind that when talking about covid, a conspiracy theory is just a fact that hasn't become verified yet. When there were rumours of heart complications due to some vaccines, it was blamed on "preexisting health conditions" (god I never heard that phrase so much in my life as during covid) and anyone who blamed it on the vaccines was just a crazy quack conspiracy theorist antivaxxer. Then, lo and behold; turns out they were completely vindicated when some vaccines did in fact, cause heart complications. Now, I was not one of those conspiracy theorists. I simply believed that there hadn't been enough time between the outbreak to the rollout of vaccines for the medication to be completely 100% tested, naturally because time was of the essence. I was also too young to be eligible for the vaccine that was being rolled out to the elderly and sick first (I also saw a lot of theories that it was being tested on weak subjects first to see if there were any major complications in a short period of time. The disabled and elderly were guinea pigs). So I couldn't get the vaccine. In the meantime, I had covid once; the delta variant. This was between lockdowns and It was at my partner's brother's (already reduced to 60 people) wedding reception. Normally I'm a reserved and introverted person so weddings are so rare I can say I've only been to that one as an adult and teenager and I'm 26 now, so catching It was just unlucky. I wasn't going out partying and spreading germs like the media made It seem. It was just a worse cold but I've also had much worse colds on top of that. My partner at the time had severe laryngitis, and I actually said to them "I'd rather have covid that what you have" because they were genuinely crippled by it. They had the vaccine to please their grandma (at the time suffering from Parkinson's) and my partner's mum made her take it "just to make grandma happy" because she bought into all the news stuff and was constantly glued to her phone every single day, reading and fretting over things that often weren't true or highly exaggerated for dramatic effect. Meanwhile, I was hiking up hills when my "isolation" ended and I could manage that just fine. No shortness of breath or this mysterious "long-covid". Then I just decided that if I can survive it, what's the point in a vaccine? It seemed unnecessary after that. Also, important to mention that the vaccine does and did NOT stop people from carrying and spreading it; contrary to popular belief that people not taking the vaccine were just selfish and putting other people in danger. They weren't. I had covid a second time, this time from work from one of the residents because I work in a care home. Hot bed for contagious diseases. This was Omicron, and was so tame I barely even noticed it until I did a test and it was positive. This was waaaay after the second lockdown so this was when covid was already starting to fade from memory and be forgotten about. A big reason I also didn't want the vaccine was because of the media manipulation and peer pressure that was feeding into it that also wasn't compatible with my previously stated opinion that there wasn't enough time to test it properly. So not only did I have the choice of putting it in my body or not, but I was also made to feel ashamed and harassed for not doing so. This made me dig my heels in even more because fundamentally you should not need to feel bullied to take any kind of substance, especially one that has a spotty record. This was mostly from the elderly in their classic attempt at ageism, blaming young people for spreading it because the news was fear mongering and constantly showing graphs of affected age groups... But also failing to mention that young people were the "key workers" expected to go to work during a global pandemic. So for a few years, I was constantly subjected to ageism from my dad and my partner's family including her grandparents and mother. One thing covid taught me is how the elderly treat the news and media as gospel, as if they could never do any wrong at all. Just gobble gobble gobble, gobble up all of that tasty propaganda, fear, and prejudices that old people just love so much. It got to the point where I was no word of a lie starting to hear them parrot back exactly what someone said on the news like it was verbatim word for word; that's when I knew the propaganda had very deep roots. Old people are sometimes ageist but the pandemic was the worst of it, because they genuinely saw every young person as if they were a walking sack of disease or something. Every old person would avoid me, cover their faces, not even talk to me. This one time, there was a very narrow pedestrian trail with three old people talking either side of the path. I had no choice but to walk between them to which the old man commented sarcastically "six foot seven inches, that's two metres". I literally had no choice, what do you want me to tell you to move and have your conversation somewhere else? I even saw this lady walk halfway up someone's driveway covering her face like dracula just to avoid walking past me, and this was long enough after covid for it to seem like an exaggeration and overreaction. This was when I became cynical of the whole thing and everyone who took it seriously. Don't get me wrong, I took it seriously enough but it just made me realise a lot about people. In normal life before the pandemic and even today, people don't mind stepping on your toes, rubbing shoulders, and spitting in your face day to day. But when their own health is at risk, all of a sudden those same people are concerned about social distance and pretending to protect other people? I realised that people were only protecting themselves and highlighted the extremely selfish behaviour inside most people; not the unity and community that they would have you believe. They like to draw comparisons between the pandemic and the blitz during WW2 and that classic British behaviour of British people "coming together", but it wasn't like that at all. It was less community and calm rationing of resources and more like panic buying and treating everyone; even your own family like a leper. The dark side of everyone really shone, but it was thinly veiled as some noble sense of sacrifice for the greater good of all. What a joke it was. And on top of all of this, I wasn't a conspiracy theorist. I just had far too many negative interactions during the pandemic that I became cynical and jaded with the whole ordeal. It was the best time of my life because everywhere was empty which suited an introvert like my just fine on the rare occasion I actually did leave the house, but my mum however, was very much the conspirator. She genuinely believed there was some kind of social control going on, or that the vaccine (not yet proven) caused health complications. Every conspiracy out there, she was part of it. Now with us both not having the vaccine, she thought I was still on her side and she would constantly rant to me about all these posts or theories she found on Facebook, to which I would just nod and falsely agree to keep her happy. Even I have to admit some of her theories were definitely very far out, but imagine my surprise (and her ecstatic vindication) when some of those theories turned out to be fact.