Numbers were based on faulty data, military spokesperson says

U.S. military members experienced concerning spikes in miscarriages, cancer and other serious health issues in 2021, according to an Instagram post that grabbed attention with a big red "SOS" image attached.

The Jan. 28 post referenced the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database, or DMED, saying, "there has been a 300% increase in DMED codes registered for miscarriages in the military in 2021 over the five-year average." The five-year average was 1,499 codes for miscarriages per year, the post said, and there were 4,182 such codes for the first 10 months of 2021. There was an almost 300% increase in cancer diagnoses and a 1,000% increase in neurological issues, the post says.

But these figures are wrong. They resulted from a glitch in the database, a military spokesperson said.

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

The Defense Medical Epidemiology Database provides authorized users access to "epidemiologic data on active component service members" and is contained within the Defense Medical Surveillance System.

The database was cited by Ohio attorney Thomas Renz on Jan. 24 during a COVID-19 panel discussion led by U.S. Rep. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. During the five-hour hearing, titled "COVID-19: A second opinion," Renz said that three "whistleblowers" he represents provided him with these figures based on medical codes from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database.

Those figures were then shared in news articles in conservative media, such as The Blaze and Just the News.

But Peter Graves, spokesperson for the Defense Health Agency’s Armed Forces Surveillance Division, told PolitiFact by email that "in response to concerns mentioned in news reports" the division reviewed data in the DMED "and found that the data was incorrect for the years 2016-2020." 

Officials compared numbers in the DMED with source data in the DMSS and found that the total number of medical diagnoses from those years "represented only a small fraction of actual medical diagnoses." The 2021 numbers, however, were up-to-date, giving the "appearance of significant increased occurrence of all medical diagnoses in 2021 because of the underreported data for 2016-2020," Graves said.

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The DMED system has been taken offline to "identify and correct the root-cause of the data corruption," Graves said.

An Instagram post said that miscarriages among military members were up 300% in 2021 over a five-year average, and that cancer diagnoses were up 300% and neurological disorders were up 1000%.

However, the numbers used to compute the five-year average were greatly underreported, giving the false impression of a significant increase in 2021, a spokesperson for the Armed Forces Surveillance Division said.

The database has been taken down to identify and correct the problem.

We rate this claim False.