Those sort of arguments are always made in bad faith. Is it surprising that <arbitrary infectious disease> was lower during the pandemic, in the midst of unprecedented lockdowns and mask mandates? Absolutely not.
The same goes for any argument that claims that COVID deaths were simply mis-classified to take advantage of special hospital reimbursements, and that people were really just dying of the standard flu. It takes almost no effort to show that the ALL-CAUSE risk of dying in America was excessively high during the pandemic years, which turns their argument from "they're just reclassifying flu deaths" into "there's a global conspiracy to submit extra death certificates for fictional people." [1][2][3][4]
