Covid Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese: Why Don't We Address Systemic Obesity?

 aier |  Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the media and politicians have insisted we rely on the “judgment calls” of their proclaimed experts to guide policy. Facile but incorrect stories about lockdowns dominated. 

In March, Dr. Fauci again incorrectly predicted that doom was upon us when Texas relaxed its pandemic rules. 

Kahneman writes: “It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.” Perhaps, Kahneman is too kind. With Covid, predictions are founded on politics, not science, as Bill Maher recently pointedly and humorously explained. 

We are ignorant of our ignorance. It is time to look for new patterns in the evidence of those who have not survived.

Who Didn’t Come Back from Covid

The military was wise enough to listen to Wald. It would have been perverse to ignore the cockpit and reinforce parts of the plane that could survive bullet hits.

Policy makers, politicians, and the media have largely ignored the cockpit of good health: the human immunological system.

Maher pointed to a recent CDC study that reported the vast majority (78%) of those hospitalized or dead from Covid have been overweight or obese.

Of Americans aged 20 and over 73.6% are overweight; 42.5% are obese. (Obesity is defined as a body mass index (BMI) of over 30.) Many studies explain how obesity decreases resistance to infection. Obesity is linked to type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, which increase the odds of hospitalization from Covid. 

The Covid survival narrative has focused attention on lockdowns, masks and vaccinations. Maher pointed out the role that obesity played: “People died because talking about obesity had become a third rail in America.” Maher continued, “the last thing you want to do is say something insensitive. We would literally rather die. Instead, we were told to lock down. Unfortunately, the killer was already in the house and her name is Little Debbie.”

Little Debbie, of course, is Maher’s reference to heavily processed foods that are ubiquitous in the American diet. 

A significant factor in the startling numbers of overweight Americans is the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in heavily processed foods. 

The total per capita consumption of all sugars in the United States is approximately 150 pounds a year. Of that, the average American consumes over 50 pounds of corn sweeteners a year.

Sugar is heavily subsidized by the US government through loans, purchases of sugar, and tariffs on imported sugar. Government incentives have created a high-fructose corn syrup industry which didn’t exist prior to the 1970s. US sugar prices can be up to twice the world price.

From 1995-2020, corn subsidies in the United States totaled $116.6 billion. The subsidized and surplus corn ends up not only as processed food but as animal feed.