blog.interceptfund.com/p/ending-respiratory-infections

The article is discussing common respiratory infections like colds and influenza, but the cited U.S. mortality figure is not drawn from a category limited to those illnesses.

• The Our World in Data series cited for respiratory infections explicitly says the measure includes tuberculosis and COVID-19 and reports deaths from respiratory infections and tuberculosis. That is a much broader category than the common respiratory viral infections discussed in the paragraph.
• Official NCHS/CDC leading-cause-of-death data for 2023 show that COVID-19 accounted for 1.6% of all U.S. deaths, while influenza and pneumonia were not even in the overall top 10 causes of death. So a statement that the common respiratory infections under discussion account for “around 7%” of major-cause deaths is not an apples-to-apples use of the underlying data.

In other words, the problem is not that respiratory infections are unimportant; it is that the 7% number comes from a broader bucket that includes diseases outside the scope of the claim, especially COVID-19 and tuberculosis.