COVID-19 Outbreak Information Updates (Reboot) [over 150.000,000 US cases (est.), 6,422,520 US hospitilizations, 1,148,691 US deaths.]
Two things...calling something a conspiracy theory has always held a negative connotation, like UFO. UFO is just something that is unidentified that is flying but eveyone goes straight to aliens. A conspiracy theory is just that, a theory of conspiracy. We can theorize about anything and be proven correct or incorrect later on, that's why it's a theory. But, throw "conspiracy theory" out there and everyone goes straight to "nutjob". Second, the only thing I disagree with in your post is labelling the scientific community "mainstream scientific community". Another negative connotation that brings thoughts of "incorrectly or deceptive" information being brought forward. The scientific community as a whole is not there to deceive the public but to put forward information gleaned from research, not hunches. The "conspiracy theorists" throwing crap against the wall early on without any proof to back up their assertions did nothing but sow dissention among people. It's one thing to theorize and postulate, it's another to outright accuse and/or blame someone for something that was novel and had to be studied for the entire body of information to become known.
Ive always said and believed that UFOs and extraterrestrial beings aren't the same thing, but are two, separate concepts. One reason why most people tend to jump to "aliens and UFO's" is often a matter of subjective opinion based around the notion that honesty, I still don't think, in 2023, we have anything close to the sophisticated saucer-shaped UFO's move, coordinate their movements in physics-defying motions or at speeds that are WAY, WAY beyond mankind's current technological capabilities based on what many eyewitnesses said they saw these objects do. If that's the case, we're talking about alien civilizations that are hundreds, maybe thousands of years ahead of us in every meaningful scientific, technological and societal category and that realization, or contrast, likely gets made painfully aware to them if, whenever, or however they come here.
Believing in UFO's or extraterrestrials isn't the same thing as believing that AIDS was created in a US Plum Island Lab over the course of several decades and let out to predominantly affect, sicken, and kill millions of homosexuals, African-Americans, Latino-American. Besides, that nutjob theory, according to some Cold War CIA historians, may have begun or been proposed as a anti-West, anti-American deliberate misinformation campaign smear job by KGB spy masters in the late 1970's.
FWIW, my other arguments are more based around the idea of paradigm shifts, how throughout history, seemingly radical, unorthodox scientific theories get formulated, created, analyzed and then presented to the then-wider contemporary mainstream scientific communities and it gets ridiculed, demonized, sneered at, and its creators or scientists get discredited, only for the next generation or two finds out these discoveries were not only plausible, their wholly valid. Evolution didnt just begin with Darwin, for example. His father, Erasmus Darwin, had some pretty, radical notions that weren't exactly taken at face value or accepted by most, during his lifetime.
When you examine the case of Galileo and his theories about Earth not being the center of the universe, and was instead one of many, different universes, what's the big secret thats missing that could explain how his theories were right and how if it had been known at the time, Galileo wouldn't have been forced to recant his ideas? Gravity or gravitational force that was postulated and proven scientifically valid by Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler. Newton and Kepler's theories, essentially proved that Galileo's theories a century before were correct because they explained in explicit detail, how every planet in our solar system revolves around the Sun, and how centrifugal, gravitational forces are different and how they effect and explain why it takes longer for Mars to do a full circling of the Sun then Earth and how our solar system is balanced together. They filled in the blanks that were unknown to scientists and mathematicians of Galileo or Bruno's time.
As an historian, it amazes how so much of what the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment ideals were just "rediscovering" what had been common knowledge to the Greco-Roman world of philosophes, mathematicians, and thinkers like Pythagorus, Aristotle, Ptolemy of Alexandria, Socrates, Plato, Ovid, Virgil, or Thucydides. A lot of their scientific theories were very similar to many of the later European philosophers and scientists.
Ancient Roman class socio-economic class structure would have been *Candyland" for people like Marx and Engels if one knows or has read about how most Roman plebians, slaves lived in Third World-esque slums, experienced crippling poverty, and how ancient Roman imperial infrastructure would be the most industrialized Europe would enjoy until the 19th century. When the western Roman Empire decayed, crumbled and fell by the end of 5th century C.E., that was a perilous systems collapse that set science, notions of progress, rational discourse, politics, natural philosophy back almost 1,000 years or so.