1. Your local newspaper's source for stats was your state or the Feds (who get the data from the states). There is no data source independent from governments.
2. Yes, the deaths data is inflated to some degree by including people who died of other causes, but happened to also be Covid positive. It also oversimplifies, by not distinguishing between people with other medical problems who were pushed over the edge by Covid and those who simply died of Covid. All that is only news on places like DU where they don't want to hear it,
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3. Influenza vaccines are not designed and tested from scratch every year. Each influenza vaccine given in any given year was developed years or decades ago. The difference year to year is which strain health officials believe (based on early data) will be most in circulation. Production of the vaccine for that influenza strain is then ramped up (a months-long process that dictates when the guesstimate "has to be" made) and then distributed. Sometimes the early guesstimate is more or less correct, and sometimes not.
Development of the Covid-19 vaccines all began, at the earliest, on January 10, 2020, when the DNA sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was leaked to the world by somebody at a Chinese university (i.e. an unofficial act). The vaccines then went through all the test phases - something influenza vaccines did years or decades ago. In the case of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, they are the first two vaccines using mRNA technology to be approved for use (I hope you haven't bought the anti-vaxxers'
mRNA reprograms your DNA BS).
In short, the several influenza vaccines were all developed long ago, while the various Covid vaccines were all developed, at most, 13 months and a week ago.