Bat Flu is guilty of "fat-shaming"

The LA Times has discovered yet another group being discriminated against by COVID: Fat people. 80% of those hospitalized are “morbidly obese, which just shows … something.

The paper does acknowledge near the end the article that the higher COVID death rate isn’t entirely due to biases against fat, binary, people of color:

In a 2020 article in the journal Metabolism Clinical and Experimental, the authors noted that weight bias is still widespread among healthcare providers and that the higher a person’s body mass index, the more negatively that person will be viewed.

“The implications of weight stigma are particularly alarming in the context of COVID-19,” they wrote. “Individuals with obesity are especially likely to delay care, or avoid it completely, because of bias and humiliation experienced in healthcare settings.”

Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician who teaches at Harvard Medical School, is one of the paper’s three authors. The pandemic, she said in an interview, has “compounded and magnified weight bias and stigma” in the United States “in addition to the other inequities we see.”

But after that, Stanford parts company with the fat acceptance movement. She does not use the word “fat,” instead preferring “people with obesity.” She recognizes obesity as a disease and points to research that shows it as a risk factor for the coronavirus.

“Obesity is characterized by chronic inflammation,” she said. That condition “is now interacting with an acute inflammatory process, SARS-CoV-2. ... The acute inflammation of a cytokines storm does not interact well with a chronic inflammation from obesity.”

Cytokines are a protein that the immune system uses to fight disease. In some COVID patients, the immune system floods the body with cytokines, which attack blood vessels and fill lungs with fluid.

Obesity has been linked with severe COVID-19 outcomes since early in the pandemic. Research published in March in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found COVID patients with obesity are more likely to be hospitalized, spend time in the intensive care unit, be put on a ventilator and die.

D’uh.

Twitchy’s got the story, but this post summarizes it nicely: