Analyzing COVID vaccine inequity through an obesity lens - Los Angeles Times

Bougon’s medical record at Kaiser shows she is morbidly obese; as an activist, she prefers the word “fat.” Her experience with medical providers has been one incident of size stigma after another, she said, like the time she went in with a scratched cornea and was told to lose weight.

Studies link higher body mass index, or BMI, with increased risk for severe COVID-19, including higher rates of hospitalization.

Other research shows weight bias can keep larger-bodied people from seeking and receiving appropriate care.

At the same time, the pandemic has highlighted a clash between the medical establishment and the fat acceptance movement, between those who use clinical terms such as “obesity” and “overweight” and those who proudly describe themselves as “large-bodied,” “people of size,” “fat,” and even “super fat.”.

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.

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.”.

Obesity has been linked with severe COVID-19 outcomes since early in the pandemic.

Being overweight may boost risk of severe COVID-19, CDC warns.

Being overweight may boost risk of severe COVID-19, CDC warns.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said people who are merely overweight, not just the obese, may be at high risk of a serious case of COVID-19.

“I would hope that people in the health-at-every-size movement embrace the science,” Stanford said, “and learn about the pathophysiology of obesity as a disease.”.

But activists in the fat acceptance movement dispute such research, arguing that the weight bias people with an elevated BMI endure in medical settings also shows up in medical studies.

The March study published by the CDC lists five limitations, among them: “Hospitalization risk estimates might have been affected by bias introduced by hospital admission factors other than COVID-19 severity, such as a health care professional’s anticipation of future severity.”.

In other words, said Ragen Chastain, who is the author of “Fat: The Owner’s Manual” and has written widely on weight bias in medical research, “If fat bodies experience something more than thin bodies, fat bodies are to blame, rather than the unequal treatment fat people receive due to weight stigma.”.

She and the NAAFA board are focused on “creating a more inclusive fat community.” They also are addressing the impact of COVID-19 on people of size.

“I started to think almost immediately about what it would look like for me as a fat Black person,” said panelist Da’Shaun L.

Harrison, whose exploration of race and weight, “The Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness,” will be published in August.

“I know how the medical industry engages people who look like me,” Harrison said, “who show up with bodies like mine, with skin like mine, right?”.

“Especially as a kid, it was very damaging for me,” Harrison said.

“Wow, you’re so big,” he said to Harrison by way of introduction?

About 10 weeks after the first Californian died from COVID-19, the state Department of Public Health posted on its website a new 36-page policy called “California SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic: Health Care Surge Crisis Care Guidelines.”?

“When you discriminate based on people’s weight and size,” Sendziak said, “you’re disproportionately affecting people of color.”

No matter what she has gone to the doctor for, she said, her physician would prescribe the same thing: weight loss

The things, she said, that feel like a “punishment for being fat.”