Well assuming conspiracies doesnt exist just because there are silly conspiracy theorists out there is equally illogical.
Now regarding the pandemic, who knows?
There is a difference between a simple conspiracy and a grand conspiracy. A simple conspiracy would be a handful of executives of a Fortune company conspire to defraud employees or investors or both by manipulating books and FTC reports. A small few people can realistically hold a conspiracy together, at least for a while, so long as nobody every talks about the reality outside of their tiny "in" group. However, the ability for any conspiracy to actually hold is inversely proportionate to the number of people "in" on the conspiracy. A grand conspiracy is a fallacy; the pandemic is a perfect example, so too is the "moon landing hoax" and "flat earth hoax" and "9/11 was inside job." We can logically deduce these are functionally impossible to sustain, because the sheer number of people who need to be "in" on the conspiracy to keep it alive and sustained would be in the millions if not higher.
Perpetuating a "fake" global health crisis would involve every government leader, their cabinet, and all the staff who support them. It would absolutely need to include functionally every highly-degreed medical practicioner and their support staff, along with essentially every medical research facility and every employee therein. Then doctors offices in every country in the planet, then the companies making the "fake" vaccinations in every country they exist, and then all the employees of those companies, and the 3rd party financial auditing teams wanting to know where all the money actually went (since it didn't go to actually buying hardware and supplies for mass-producing the fake hoax vaccination.)
The moon landing hoax isn't much different. Every employee at NASA, all the Northrom Grumman / Lockeed Martin / whoever else helped actually build the entire Saturn 5 and Apollo program physically, basically every amateur radio user who was listening in at the time (you can't "fake" radio delay of the few hundred thousand miles away PLUS the doppler shift involved with the multides of geo-disparate monitoring positions on Earth.) You'd then have to include every amateur astronomer who owns the basic LIDAR equipment to play with bouncing light off the mirrors which were placed on the moon. Later, you'd then after to invovle every other government entity (non-US) who has a reasonably capable telescope in Earth orbit, or has flown something past the moon, or in orbit of the moon, to ensure they fake the showing of the various landing sites. The sheer number of people invovled in this grand conspiracy is beyond containment for more than 50 years.
Flat earth as a conspiracy? JFC. Every space agency, basically every pilot (professional and private), every sea-faring agency whether private or corporate, essentially every government, every scientist who studies weather (cuz weather orbits the planet too!), every amateur and professional astronomer and observataory and research organization... At this point we've named about one tenth of world's population or some shit.
9/11 was an inside job? Everyone who supposedly planted those bombs, every employee who walked past someone planting the bombs (good news, they're dead now right? ugh.) Every government agency who planned and funded that, every firefighter and investigator who looked at the scene and didn't find explosives, every legit civil engineer who knew what a demolished building would look like. Then you gotta consider every person on each of the planes that didn't crash or were empty or whatever bullshit, plus the pilots, plus the airline, plus the ATC folks watching those planes "secretly land" or swap out or whatever.
These are grand conspiracies, and they're literally impossible to maintain at this scale. You cannot keep millions of people completely silent on anything; shit we can't keep a few dozen people properly under NDA to avoid leaking new details on upcoming imbargoed GPUs and CPUs details. Any grand conspiracy you come upon can be immediately hand-waved into bullshit with five seconds of deductive reasoning on how big the "in" population has to be to sustain it.
An existence of a problem creates the need for a solution and those that can provide the solution are usually large companies and governments who are mainly controlled by people with interests. They will seize whatever opportunities come out of them at the expense of the people, if the cost/benefit ration facilitates it.
To some degree, we must all begrudgingly admit to this. The
hope is there are enough external checks and balances to keep the benefits limited to those who might try to profit from an otherwise humanitarian problem.