Erin Farmer never considered herself overweight. The 25-year-old woman threw weight in the qualifiers for the 2016 Olympics in the United States and was an athlete in Arkansas State Division 1 – but the Texas State Department of Health Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they yea.
Farmer, like 42.5% of Americans, has a body mass index over 30, making it eligible for the coronavirus vaccine in your home state. At least 29 states have expanded their eligibility for the vaccine to people who qualify as obese.
When she learned that the metric qualified her for the vaccine, Farmer felt a mixture of emotions. On the one hand, she was ready to make the obesity label that accompanied her throughout her life, usually with negative connotations, work for her. She also felt that while it met the criteria for a person with obesity, it was an unfair categorization.
“I have been an athlete all my life,” she said. “So my weight doesn’t really reflect how I live my life and my lifestyle. I understand that people are embarrassed about it because obviously your weight doesn’t determine who you are as a person or how healthy you are.”
And data on public emotions related to obesity confirm this. Nirit Pisano, clinical psychologist and chief psychologist at Cognovi Labs, a group that uses artificial intelligence to observe public emotion and behavior around certain subjects, decided to use the company’s AI to study the subject after talking to a client who struggling to find out he qualified for the vaccine as an obese person.
“I saw a huge wave of people really responding emotionally to this, with a lot of disgust and anger,” said Pisano.
That’s because the obesity label is difficult, she said.
“It is an emotional issue for many people. And even for those who have, whether you have struggled with weight or come to terms with your weight or whatever stage you are in it with, see it in writing this way or just have a word there. “
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists overweight people among those who face increased risk when it comes to COVID-19. As many states have expanded their eligibility, they followed the CDC’s guidelines on BMI as a broad way to classify people as to whether or not they are at risk due to their size.
Sabrina Strings, associate professor of sociology at the University of California Irvine and author of “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia”, called the BMI an ineffective and offensive way to expand eligibility for the vaccine and said “there is a relationship much greater between negative results and race. “
Strings believes that vaccines should have been prioritized for race-based groups because the coronavirus disproportionately affects people of color. This is supported by data compiled by the Covid Tracking Project, which shows that black people died of coronavirus at a rate 1.4 times higher than that of white people.
But the use of obesity to expand eligibility for the vaccine follows reports that obesity is an important factor in hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19.
For example, the World Obesity Federation found that 88% of COVID-19 deaths occurred in countries with the majority of the population considered to be overweight or obese. And a study by Tufts University last month found that 30.2% of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. were estimated to be due to obesity as a primary cardiometabolic risk factor. Other factors considered in the study included diabetes, hypertension and heart failure. When combined, the four factors were estimated to be linked to more than two-thirds of US COVID-19 hospitalizations.
Strings, however, says there is no evidence that obesity is the direct cause of the increase in deaths or hospitalizations.
“When we look at these studies, what they show are correlations,” she said. “They always try to make it look like the BMI is causing these negative health outcomes. But that is not the information that statistics, especially cross-sectional data, can provide.
Emma Specter, who qualified for the vaccine based on her BMI, wrote about fatphobia and the fat shame surrounding using the metric to expand the vaccine’s eligibility.
She said she initially spent time debating whether or not to get the vaccine because she thought she could keep her away from someone who needs her most, or from a front-line employee.
“Since it was kind of answered to me that this really isn’t how it works, I can’t, you know, direct a vaccine to someone else, which is based on postal code and comorbidities. Well, once I learned that, I kind of didn’t hesitate too much, “she said.
Farmer and Specter argue that other people should be vaccinated, regardless of how they qualify.
“I think that if you have a chance to get it, you absolutely must get it not only to protect yourself, but also to protect others around you. And if that means you have to look obese or fat for the society, so okay, well, now you get the vaccine, “said Farmer. “If you are discouraged by the label of obese, I would just say that you obviously don’t connect that to your self-worth.”
Specter said that when choosing to get the vaccine, she had to understand herself and identify herself as a person with obesity. She explained that many who qualified by the metric struggled with shame and embarrassment due to the way society has characterized people with obesity.
“I think, to be honest, we cite it as a bad thing to be. And we cite fat people as lazy, unworthy and unhealthy and so many other things that are really difficult,” said Specter. “As someone much smarter than me, whom I can’t remember at the moment, said, ‘You don’t have to taste a certain level of work. You don’t have to taste excellent character. You don’t have to prove that you only eat salads. ‘”