Important to almost recognize it's on institutions and the people in them to be trustworthy, and yet - not.

I also know Romanian ex-pats who would not get vaccinated for similar reasons stated in the article. I would even take it further, where the prime minister in canada called people racists and sexists for not trusting his mandate policies, and as hallucinatory as that seemed, he was accurate for potentially the wrong reasons. What makes him and his cabinet untrustworthy are that they do not represent or signal virtues that are known to be trustworthy in western culture.
Everything about them is an artifact of power narratives that people from the traditional culture interpret as "fake." As an example, the PM himself is an actual actor, a cultural symbol that means "do not trust, this is an act." But this is the divide in society, where the old way of thinking is that there is distance between the represented and the real, where the new progressives have only the represented and power.

The reason we have "conspiracy theories," is that the people in instutions are in fact not trustworthy, and interestingly, they may even agree enthusiastically with that statement, because trustworthiness itself is a traditional and patriarchical concept. In the progressive view, requiring administrators to be trustworthy means requiring them to conform to traditional identities with trust signals relative to a culture they have been educated to dissolve for progress. When we talk about racism and "whiteness," it's not biological or actual skin colour, it's an abstraction or umbrella to describe the culture that is the target of criticism in marxist theory, wherein white still represents the Whites and the traditional society being dissolved, but intersectional identities are the new Red.

Conspiracy theories are the expression of mistrust of elites who are not recognized as legitimate (honest, trustworthy, annointed, etc.) because they do not conserve, reflect, or preserve the culture of the people. Elites and their allies can't say this part out loud, but they don't care, because yes, they are making permanent change, so you are either a part of the change, or you are the subject of the change.

Conspiracy theorists are in fact very accurate in placing their mistrust, because if they value stability and continuity of their culture and see their elites as not reflecting their values, and so they are a reaction to the change - hence they are the direct targets of change agents. In this sense, yes, if you demand that they be trustworthy, they are absolutely out to get you.

A lot of conspiracy theories are dumb, and many are even invented as confusion and chaff to prevent people from aligning to a coherent belief or truth that would politically activate them. However, if you have an intellectual understanding of power and politics, you understand what should be mistrusted.

If you want to understand the mechanism, what is actually happening is a new progressive elite is politically activated, and spending its effort on keeping any conservative resistance effectively neutralized using aggression, deception, and confusion to install levers for permanent change (read:control). Theory is neutralizing, and so spreading it means clouding discourse and making people give up on any truth that they could organize around and resist the change from this small cadre who are activated.

That is, so that good men do nothing.