Claim: Globally, there were fewer deaths thanks to the Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J Covid vaccines than there would have been otherwise.

The current dominant theory is that respiratory viruses evolve in the direction of becoming milder due to natural selection.

"the dominant belief in evolutionary theory about disease virulence is that it depends on the mode of transmission... Though sometimes lethal at first, respiratory diseases do evolve to become milder, while sexually transmitted, waterborne or insect-borne diseases (such as myxomatosis) don’t."

"For example, I took a train this week, putting me at risk of catching Covid from a fellow passenger. But if two other people had been planning to travel on the same train, one with mild omicron and the other with severe delta, the latter would have been more likely to change their mind and stay home because of feeling unwell. That’s selection."

Assertion: There are many ways to treat Covid-19, but the official guidelines for treatment in the US exclusively rely on new, expensive therapeutics with a higher risk profile than affordable, repurposed drugs. Use of repurposed drugs would have saved more lives and is safer than a novel vaccine campaign, due to the drugs having an efficacy greater than the vaccines, and having long histories of very high safety profiles.

Below are the current NIH treatment guidelines, some new antivirals have been developed/added but for the first year or two it was just remdesivir which is very expensive and can have side effects similar to severe Covid symptoms.

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/management/clinical-management-of-adults/nonhospitalized-adults--therapeutic-management/

*note, the c19early site I linked may have some flaws in its data portrayal, at least I have seen critiques before, but it is a good hub to find a variety of studies on different treatment modalities, which is why I linked it.

Countries with more covid vaccines had higher excess mortality in the first 9 months of 2022.  Each 1% of vaccine increase is associated with a 0.1% increase in excess mortality

This needs to be compared to the number of covid deaths for the same time period, though.

A compelling Twitter thread, with receipts, that illustrates how "Our World in Data"'s Covid-19 weekly death rate by vaccination status has mislabeled the "Unvaccinated" category, which according to the actual data available, should be the "Unknown" category. It shows sources, including congressional testimony from outgoing CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, that support the assertion that data on vaccination status and hospitalizations/deaths was not collected with any reliability at a national level.

Putting this on the "Falsify" side because the "Support" side often cites this graph as evidence to support the efficacy of vaccination for saving lives, but if the graph's data is wrong/mislabeled then it would suggest that the graph is not useful for making that kind of determination. 

From the abstract:

A total of seven studies with 21,618,297 COVID-19 patients were included in the meta-analysis. The odds ratio (OR) for mortality among unvaccinated patients compared to vaccinated patients was 2.46 (95% CI: 1.71-3.53), indicating that unvaccinated patients were 2.46 times more likely to die from COVID-19.

Vaccinations Against COVID-19 May Have Averted Up To 140,000 Deaths In The United States - Published August 18, 2021 in Health Affairs

"We assessed the association between US state-level vaccination rates and COVID-19 deaths during the first five months of vaccine availability. We estimated that by May 9, 2021, the US vaccination campaign was associated with a reduction of 139,393 COVID-19 deaths."

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2021.00619 (paywalled)

While the vaccines were originally touted as "safe and effective," some statistically significant safety signals have now been confirmed, and must be considered in our calculation of whether or not lives were saved by the Covid-19 vaccines. However, according to this recent study, it appears as though side effects from the vaccines are still quite rare.

Published February 12, 2024

A global study looking at the health data of 99,068,901 vaccinated individuals (mostly in the 20–39 and 40–59-year age groups) compared pre-Covid rates of conditions showing up (expected ratios) to the rates they saw post-vaccination (observed ratios) for up to 42 days following vaccination. Compared to the expected rates, they found statistically significant safety signals in:

-Guillain-Barré syndrome (2.49 observed versus expected (OE) ratio)
-cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (3.23 OE ratio)
-acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (3.78 OE ratio)
-myocarditis (varied based on vaccine but highest OE ratio was 6.10 from a Moderna vax)
-pericarditis (also varied based on vaccine but highest OE ratio was 6.91 from a Astra Zeneca vax)

as well as statistically significant increases in various other conditions.

To get a sense fo the raw numbers, out of the 99,068,901 individuals they expected 76 cases of GBS and saw 190 cases after vax. However, from what I could find, the study doesn't give specific numbers for the baseline incidents or actual observed incidents for the other conditions, but from the graphs it looks as though the highest number of events land a bit above 10,000, which is still a relatively small number.

The study notes that the European Database of Suspected Adverse Drug Reaction (EMA) found that chances of having a neurological event following acute SARS-CoV-2 infection were up to 617-fold higher than following COVID vaccination, suggesting that the benefits of vaccination substantially outweigh the risks.