Of course VARES counts. What you cant do is just say "hey look I added a all the numbers in this column and got this big number"... THAT is meaningless. If you want to infer things from VARES you need a based understanding of statistics to know how to pick out meaningful patterns. It isnt as simple as adding.
Come on now, I'm pretty sure your smarter than that.. Do you seriously not understand why you'd have to normalize for the total number of people being vaccinated as a absolute minimum to be useful?
Honestly if i thought you just didnt understand statistics I might not care.. but I have a feeling your smarter than the things your saying. You must realize how not normalizing the data for background rate is meaningless.