However, even looking at 'deaths with covid' I think there is a problem, in that governments made a decision to count people who died WITH covid as the same thing as dying OF covid. They are not the same thing.
So, on death certificates they put covid down as the cause of death if the person tested positive, regardless of what caused the death. If a person who had tested positive but died in a car crash, this would be added to the covid death statistics. This is to say the data is 'muddy'.
Perhaps it is even better to use simple death counts, regardless of the cause. Were they up in the first year, and down in the second, as you would expect? If they were down in the first, but up in the second, there is surely a case to answer as to whether the vaccinations have caused harm.
Answer: they reduced harmful outcomes by orders of magnitude. It is stupid to suggest that this is in question.
Nothing is harmless. Obviously a few people had bad reactions to the vaccine. Obviously it is not 100% effective. But those numbers a nothing compared to the reduction in unnecessary deaths and unnecessarily shortened, taste-free, mentally-fogged, or otherwise harmed lives.
> If they were down in the first, but up in the second, there is surely a case to answer as to whether the vaccinations have caused harm.
"If"
I didn't say they have caused harm, I'm saying we don't know. We don't have the data to know. But in the spirit of truth, this would be worth investigating.
total vaccinated: .02% + .02% = 0.04%
total unvaccinated: .2% + .02% = 0.2% (rounding to one significan digit)
The effect is that vaccines look less effective. I remember that someone was complaining about this because the number of hospitalizations with covid-19 of vaccinated people include people with a broken arm and no covid-19 symptoms.
Anyway, unless you make a massive double blind randomized controlled trial it's very difficult to separate death with covid-19 and death due to covid-19. But it is still useful to compare the numbers.
[1] Except in Peru, the number of death with covid-19 is less than 3000 per million, so let's assume death due to covid-19 is 2000 per million. Vaccines reduces the number of hospitalization x10, let's assume the same reduction applies to death. [3]
[2] The anual death rate is .7%, and everybody got delta or omicron, and it last like 2 weeks that is 1/26 of a year, so assuming independence, let's guess .7%/26 = .02%. [3]
[3] Both are very rough estimations. Don't assume they are too precise. They are just estimations to make the discussion more concrete.
About the increase of cases during the last year, another cause may be the relaxing of the restrictions. I'm not tracking the situation in UK but here in Argentina we had a very strict lockdown in 2020 and part of 2021 but now it's almost over and there are very few restrictions.