Health statistics of the U.S. military have been repeatedly changed over the past 15 months in a way that makes it difficult to gauge the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the health of military service members.
In order to measure the impact, data from during the pandemic would be compared with data from before the pandemic. Such a comparison has been undermined, however, by changes to the numbers for pre-pandemic years, as apparent from data published by and leaked from the Military Health System.
Specifically, in the data released and accessed since mid-2021, millions of additional ambulatory visits have been added to the numbers for years 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
The Defense Health Agency (DHA) hasn’t responded to multiple requests for comment on the changes.
Similar statistical reports can also be queried in real time from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which is based on an anonymized subset of DMSS data.
The Pentagon has stated that the DMED health data was affected by a technical glitch after it was migrated to a new database in August 2021. However, that doesn’t answer the question of the changes that occurred before the migration and further changes appeared after the glitch was fixed.
The MSMR reports include comparison data for two prior odd or even years. For example, the May 2019 issue included numbers for hospitalizations and ambulatory visits of active-duty armed forces personnel in years 2018, 2016, and 2014. By the same token, the May 2020 issue included numbers for 2019, 2017, and 2015.
The data doesn’t include some health care encounters, such as those provided by field medics, the MSMR reports say.
In the past, with each MSMR issue, the numbers for prior years would slightly change. That could happen for various reasons, such as some records being added late to the database. The reports also include an “Other” category that has repeatedly and substantially changed over the years.
But the MSMR May 2021 issue introduced unusually large changes to categories that don’t appear to be open to interpretation.
For example, the report showed 37,000 ambulatory visits were added to the respiratory illness category; another nearly 38,000 were added to the genitourinary category; 34,000 to the infectious and parasitic category; 15,000 to circulatory illness category; and nearly 15,000 to the neoplasm (cancer) category for the year 2018 as compared to numbers in the same categories for the same year released in the May 2019 issue.
Similar discrepancies also show in the data for 2016.
The discrepancies, an order of magnitude larger than data revisions seen previously in the reports, were first noticed by the team of Mathew Crawford, a mathematician and education entrepreneur who was parsing the data in an effort to fact-check some claims about COVID-19 vaccine side effects.
Usually, when there’s a significant change in a dataset, the responsible party issues a statement explaining the changes, Crawford noted. At least the data should be furnished with a warning that the changed figures are no longer directly comparable to the older data. Yet the Pentagon, it appears, has been mum on the changes.
To further his research, Crawford was able to obtain DMED query data from late February 2022, after the Pentagon said the DMED data glitch had been fixed.
Crawford told The Epoch Times the query results were provided by Lt. Mark Bashaw, a former officer at the Army Public Health Center’s headquarters who was court-martialed earlier this year for refusing to wear a mask indoors and coming to work without getting tested for COVID-19.
The query data generally matched the MSMR May 2021 report, except for one category—"Signs, symptoms, and ill-defined conditions.” For some reason, the query data showed hundreds of thousands more ambulatory visits in this category for all the years Crawford was able to obtain, going back to 2016, when compared to the data in the MSMR reports.
The changes to the data were great enough to have altered the trajectory on which the data had been trending. Based on the MSMR reports released up to 2020, ambulatory visits had overall trended downward since 2012 until an uptick in 2019. Based on the changed data from the May 2021 issue, the overall trend since 2015 is slightly increasing, with a major drop in 2020.
Looking at the ambulatory visits in the “ill-defined” category, they increased by less than 17 percent from 2020 to 2021, based on the February 2022 DMED queries. But if the query data was compared with the 2020 numbers from the MSMR report, the 2020–2021 increase would be more than 90 percent.
Adding to the puzzle, the May 2022 MSMR issue didn’t include the annual statistical release, which would have showed data for 2021, 2019, and 2017.
“My understanding is that this data will be available in the upcoming edition of the MSMR,“ said Peter Graves, chief of Media Operations at the DHA, in an email to The Epoch Times. ”I will let you know once it’s ready to be released.”
An email to Graves with follow-up questions has returned an undeliverable notice.
