This is an excellent question, but my first impression is that they aren't doing anything sneaky. I see that some of the data is labeled "per 100,000 individua

This is an excellent question, but my first impression is that they aren't doing anything sneaky. I see that some of the data is labeled "per 100,000 individuals," not deaths. Obviously, there is a specific policy push and point of view outlined in the paper, which is probably why most such papers are published. But a lot of this data is from the CDC and should be independently verifiable and from Appendix B of the paper, I see that the ultimate source is something called "CDC Wonder". https://wonder.cdc.gov/ https://wonder.cdc.gov/ And it looks like one can make a request for that data: https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D77 https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D77