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

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.