Would love to see the incidence of this by IQ. My intuition says it spikes in slightly smarter-than-average folks.

This is the so-called "midwit" meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit

In my experience smart people are also far more likely to create elaborate self-reinforcing systems of belief that are detached from reality.

Any moron can understand the idea of a round Earth and stuff orbiting around it. It takes a genius to comprehend the sublime intricacies of ether vortex theory which explains how a flat Earth can still permit satellites to stay airborne over the plane.

I've met an extremely intelligent person who was convinced we never landed on the Moon and that Stanley Kubrick faked the whole thing and left clues to this in his production of The Shining. I've also met one who thinks the Nazis invented anti-gravity and are hiding the technology to this day in underground bases in Antarctica and South America.

That sounds a lot more like creativity than capacity to reason logically, or a number of other facets of intelligence. That's probably part of the issue, which properties of 'intelligence' we are talking about.

There are also a lot of crazy and intelligent people. I certainly know so many, it almost becomes a correlation.

Actually, the Nazi's hid on the moon wit their anti-gravity tech:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

(which is an entertaining movie if you haven't seen it).

Were they convinced, or are you convinced that they were convinced? The Kubrick thing is an old joke (which usually ends by saying he insisted on filming "on location" for the sake of authenticity)

They were convinced.

I don't either. Personally speaking, after watching the effects of disinformation campaigns over the last 7 or so years -particularly regarding Covid and vaccinations I am pretty much 1,000% unwilling to listen to any "skepticism" simply because I don't trust the source that anyone is getting their information from.

The only reasonable course I can see is to not take any chances and vaccinate early and vaccinate often.

Why would you trust the source on the side that's telling you something new, but not the side that's skeptical of it?

"Misled" is a stupid word for "we constantly learn more and should be adapting our positions."

There is zero evidence for a "haha i told you you were being misled" position. You are performing either foolish or disingenuous logical gymnastics to equate something like "adjusted recommendations accordingly" with "it was intentionally misleading the whole time."

Show me a place where people haven't adjusted their behavior as the virus has evolved, more time has passed creating more data, vaccination rounds have been administered, death rates have evolved, and exposure/infection has happened. It ain't here in liberal California, so is there any such strawman place you're arguing against in the US? Go out on the street and look around and observe that people are being rational and adapting over time instead of keeping up your silly little "haha i'm smarter than you you fell for a hoax" keyboard battle.