Hacker News Reader

Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

This is a lunatic conspiracy theory. Sorry.

The claim here is that vaccines somehow caused a vast increase (claimed to be greater than 10X in some categories) in the appearance of certain ICD-9 diagnosis codes in the US military in 2021.

The response from the military is essentially that the data presented to make this claim are not accurate because they don’t show accurate counts prior to 2021.

That or something like it must be the answer. If there were spikes in diagnoses at these rates in the young and healthy military population, there would have been something similar in the civilian population as well, which is also quite heavily vaccinated.

Please downvote this story. It is total nonsense.

View on HN

I agree there is bias in the story. The author clearly wants to prove something.

Given that, it seems to have some interesting points.

1) The data was severely off... for years... and was being used. This is hugely concerning. What decisions were made using this data? Why did no one notice?

2) There were 20M injuries or sicknesses diagnosed every year. That seems high. Maybe the author is wrong about who they count in the database? Could it include dependents, reservists, and national guardsmen? Are these mostly minor issues?

3) The part about pericarditis is interesting. We do know that the vaccine raises the risk of this, and covid even more so. And it's especially high for younger men, which the military is skewed towards. So why is there no increase? What were the historical causes? Is there some protective mechanism in this cohort?

I'm not drawing conclusion about the vaccine like the author did. But something is wrong with how this data is being handled and, largely, ignored.

On your (1.) - it is possible that whoever pulled the data originally did a bad job. That’s easy to imagine. No one had any reason to care about the numbers for the conditions here as long as it doesn’t affect military readiness. If the numbers were within an order of magnitude I don’t think it would have been caught. That is much much easier to imagine than some kind of vast conspiracy to hide the truth, which is what is alleged here.

The military insures several million active duty members plus retirees (I do know something about the military data from personal experience with it). It does not include the national guard if it’s the source I’m thinking of.

As a general point about health data, which I worked with extensively throughout my PhD and career up to this point, defining an episode, e.g. of myocarditis is no mean feat in this kind of data. You may have several visits to the doctor or hospital, all of which come with an ICD-9 or -10 for some condition. Is that one episode or several? Depends on the condition but it is very difficult in general to figure out with billing records. Generally rules of thumb are applied since it’s impossible to figure out in general without talking to each patient and his doctor in detail.

And again - the more important thing is that if this was happening within the young, healthy military population it would have been happening on a much larger scale in the similarly aged, vaccinated, much larger civilian population. That would be impossible to hide.

I stick to my original conclusion that this is a wild conspiracy theory.

I agree that this is most likely incompetence.

I don't agree that this shouldn't have been caught. Anybody doing a study on this data should notice that something was off, and asked themselves "why". Peer review should have similarly asked. If that's not happening for data that's off by an order of magnitude, that's a serious issue that undermines trust in our system.

"I stick to my original conclusion that this is a wild conspiracy theory."

Not sure why you're bringing this up. I never said it wasn't. My point was that by ignoring the conspiracy theory parts, there are some interesting questions here about specific pieces of data, or why some issues weren't caught. So there are subjects to rationally explore, like inattention to detail or lack of curiosity by researchers and reviews when numbers are so off, or is there a protective mechanism that explains why pericarditis did not rise as one would expect it to (based on the studies in the general population showing excess s attributable to covid and the vaccine).

"The response from the military is essentially that the data presented to make this claim are not accurate because they don’t show accurate counts prior to 2021."

The military corrected the data, but the new data either don't make sense or point to serious medical problems in the military. That's what this story is about:

>More fundamentally, it is simply ludicrous to suggest that there are this many diagnoses in the military in a given year. All active-duty soldiers have to be medically screened. Obesity, diabetes, and heart conditions are very rare, and the population is generally very young. If we really have over 20 million diagnoses every year in the military (consisting of about 1.4 million active-duty personnel), there is something seriously wrong, and that in itself is a huge story.

>Moreover, we are to believe that there are nearly 1 million nervous system diagnoses in the military every year in a fighting force of 1.4 million?

>But the more serious issue is how can a military of healthy young people have such a high baseline of pulmonary embolisms every year? One estimate of pulmonary embolism prevalence in the U.S. is between 60 and 70 per 100,000 per year. But that is almost exclusively in the elderly and sicker population. Soldiers 20 to 25 years old don’t exactly get pulmonary embolisms. So even accounting for the fact that these are diagnosis codes and not unique individuals (some might have had a few visits in a year), the numbers are way too high.

>Putting the vaccines aside, the DOD’s “new” model would literally erase the existence of COVID off the face of the planet as if we never had the biggest pandemic of our lifetime. Even if the vaccine never caused a single doctor’s visit, COVID alone had to increase the codes. Yes, the military is generally very young, and deaths and hospitalizations were relatively low, but it’s impossible to believe that especially during the vicious Delta outbreak since the summer, there was no increase in COVID-related doctor’s visits. Just long COVID alone had to register a meaningful increase.

I really do appreciate this response but to discredit this story, all it really takes is one look at the URL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com