I'm not seeing an increase pre-covid. What you are looking at are two lines on the same graph with different vertical axis scale.
The covid infections looks tiny but the part where you say the deaths increased before covid has ~10,000 infections per day or say at least 100 covid deaths. The difference in deaths from baseline is only like 200-300ish, which taking away covid deaths could easily be within the baseline standard deviation which many years will deviate from anyway since it's just the average.
On the other hand UK data shows basically the same overall death rate from vaccinated and unvaccinated, which could be due to the vaccine protecting from the virus but also making them vulnerable to other disease. Or lots of other reasons. Really we probably won't know for another 10 years when everybody has moved on and it becomes academic rather than political.
I'm not seeing an increase pre-covid. What you are looking at are two lines on the same graph with different vertical axis scale.
The covid infections looks tiny but the part where you say the deaths increased before covid has ~10,000 infections per day or say at least 100 covid deaths. The difference in deaths from baseline is only like 200-300ish, which taking away covid deaths could easily be within the baseline standard deviation which many years will deviate from anyway since it's just the average.
On the other hand UK data shows basically the same overall death rate from vaccinated and unvaccinated, which could be due to the vaccine protecting from the virus but also making them vulnerable to other disease. Or lots of other reasons. Really we probably won't know for another 10 years when everybody has moved on and it becomes academic rather than political.