There have been conspiracies put forth about covid, but with various other vaccine mandates already in existence I don't know how it would ever have made sense to call it a conspiracy that we'd add one more. Nothing's changed, qualitatively.

What's different here is that prior vaccine mandates were never weaponized into a mainstream culture war, so before this they weren't controversial to most and we rarely thought of them.

Given that culture war hesitancy over this vaccine was expected early on, I think it was predictable that employers and venues would need to require it in order for it to reach enough of the population to be effective.