Did you consider the obvious possibility that there are 30k deaths reported because it is
not in fact self reported? Whoever told you that wasn't being honest. VAERS reports aren't even mostly self reported. Go browse through the reports. You'll discover they mostly come from medical professionals.
But even for the ones that are self-reported, so what? If someone is filling out complex forms with specific details of an injury that they think was caused by the vaccine, that is an important signal.
"I strongly suspect that data has been influenced by people’s political beliefs and isn’t an accurate representation of real events."
Absolutely correct! The vast majority of people have been told that doubting the vaccines is not allowed and will result in immediate and severe retaliation by ideological extremists, who are entirely committed to defending the public health bureaucracy. The historical underreporting factor was something like 40x but ideology and politics has surely hugely increased it now.
Obviously what you're claiming is the opposite - that for some reason huge numbers of people have been filling out bogus, untrue injury reports. It's a delusional belief. Go find evidence of that and then we'll talk.
Until then the evidence is on the side of massive under-reporting of a major tragedy by people who ideologically cannot or will not accept that The Science is made up of liars and incompetents.