The US has a Covid death rate that is 15th highest out of >200 countries, and about four times higher than the global average. 12 countries which border, or are close to Ukraine, have Covid death rates higher than the US (Ukraine, with only 38% vaccinated, is only 37th worse). Because of financial incentives in the US to die of Covid, some investigators are looking at excess deaths instead. And while Covid-caused deaths have fallen dramatically, excess deaths have continued in most industrialized Western countries, which is somewhat surprising since usually the death rate falls after a pandemic as the most frail have passed. In 2019 total deaths in the US were 2.85 million; in 2020 there were 3.38 million deaths. However two-thirds of Covid deaths came after the introduction of the vaccines in 2021 and 2022, according to the CDC. Norwegian researchers found that countries had excess death rates than correlated with vaccination rates ("but correlation does not necessarily mean causation"). Proper comparisons would be between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations after the vaccines were introduced and after Omicron.

Excess (non-Covid) death rates are running between 5 and 15% above normal in 2023 in many (most?) countries (John Campbell has kept up with this topic while ignored by State Media); in the US a 10% increase in excess deaths would be about 300,000 more deaths in one year, not much above Covid numbers (1.18 million between 2020 and 2023) . Moreover these excess deaths are not mostly confined to the Elderly, as with Covid deaths.