"Going back to the USA, it could easily be argued that due to the deaths of many frail / elderly in 2020, better treatment knowledge, built-up immunity and milder variants, Covid deaths in the later post-vaccine period should in fact be dramatically lower anyway even in the absence of a vaccine — leading to lower overall mortality — unless some other policy intervenes to cause harm. However, in fact overall deaths in the USA rose dramatically in Spring 2020, and have remained extremely high throughout 2021 and into 2022 (note that data for recent months in the below graph are highly subject to processing delays). Not only have they remained high overall, but they have also remained astonishingly high in the 15 to 64 year-old age group, an age group in which the Covid burden is insufficient to account for more than a small fraction of the excess deaths: Whatever the cause (and it will doubtless prove to be multifactorial), this represents a massive and unprecedented public health disaster.
