Except if you understand they were being misleading, and you understand why, you also understand Covid was a real problem and that there were serious infrastructure and logistics problems that had to be dealt with. You get angry with the government for fumbling the effort, but you still get vaccinated. That doesn't justify believing Fauci and Biden cooked up Covid in a lab or that the vaccines were spiked with microchips or that masks give you brain cancer or half the stuff antivaxxers actually wound up claiming.

People literally formed resistance organizations and were warning of a global fascist takeover, we were entering an eternal police state in which the unvaccinated would become a slave underclass and if you didn't have your vaccine card you would get shot dead in the street.

All of it went far beyond simple mistrust in the government's PR.

You forgot the flip side of the predictions: that the vaccinated would end up bleeding out in the streets. I believe there were a large number of such predictions, which should have already happened.

I think this only strengthens your observation that anti-vaxxing went far beyond simple mistrust.