Funny thing - a few years ago I saw the list of actual flu deaths from the CDC on the American Lung Association website, for ten years. It went from around 600 to 800 up to a high of around 1200 flu deaths a year. Oddly, that info is no longer to be found.
The 35K deaths a year is pure made up nonsense. Then in 2009 with the new swine flu strain which really was much worse than regularly flu, many people did not take it seriously because of the CDC’s fake number of flu deaths.
Now they’ve come down off the 35K number to, last I read, 25K, but it’s still b.s.
Their current stats count in most pneumonia deaths as flu deaths regardless of the ‘cause’ of pneumonia. I actually have gotten pneumonia from seasonal allergies. Had I died, that would have ended up a flu death stat.