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.
Meaningless in this case since you'd also have to multiple the other past vaccines by a similar number and thus would not cause any difference int he normalization.
Most cases of anaphylaxis are considered to be related to the vaccine. It is acknowledged as one of the most common forms of death for most vaccines.
But it is also far more common in egg-based vaccines (like that used in the flu), as such its not unusually high int he case of the COVID vaccine, but certainly real.