Bill Maher's ongoing "fatphobia" exposes the government's absence of sincere covid-phobia
Rather than focus on Maher's smarmy deliveries, internalize the real lesson: Uncle Sam was never worried what the coronavirus might do to us*—especially the most vulnerable
On the August 5 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, the host returned to one of his favorite peeves: How the people in charge of the country’s health policies and advisories have been pretending for years that the consequences of the ever-rising U.S. prevalence of overweight and obesity are actually not that harmful or even harmful at all. This is despite frequent media references to the cold statistical truth.
(Should anyone care, Maher’s lingering appeal to me is his habit of hosting at least one guest every episode whom at least half the country, including me, believes should be taken to outer space without delay and flung violently downward onto the spikes of a wrought-iron fence.)
Maher says—sort of—in the segment below that the normalization of Americans “doing the Thanksgiving-pants thing every day” in the name of avoiding fat-shaming has essentially created a nationwide anti-army of thumb-sucking, rosy-cheeked, pigeon-toed shambling slobs, with too much value placed on not hurting people’s feelings at the expense of both individual and public health.
Maher observes, correctly, that the recent Wokism-propelled shift from “fat acceptance” to “fat celebration” is an unprecedented phenomenon, with this movement categorically dismissive of data linking overweight and obesity to adverse health outcomes—data about as hard to find as Twitter users whose bios boast pride flaglets.
Maher pans the terms “body positivity” and “health at any size,” identifying these (again correctly) as terms used solely by people who, after abandoning the idea of achieving the body size or shape they aspired to, have given up on weight loss altogether—but still feel the need to maintain Instagram accounts so they can angrily post about how happy their newfound freedom makes them. (Actually, those are not close to Maher’s words, but they’re close enough and what he would have said if he’d explored the fetid social-media diverticula occupied by hobbyjoggers before recording the episode.)
Fundamentally, Maher doesn’t care how fat anyone gets; like me, he reckons that people’s bodies are theirs and theirs alone to treat as temples, trans trash bins, or something in between. He’s just uncomfortable with the needless mass quasi-delusion that being really fat carries no health risks, and that declaring being obese just another “way to be” is not the magic spell or medical hack fat-positive people pretend it is.
Maher—surely drawing inspiration from this warm advisory from January—pointed out that the emergence of the coronavirus represented a perfect opportunity, maybe even an imperative, to emphasize that obesity leaves the immune system a badly depleted dynamic machine. Researchers ascertained early in the “pandemic” that overweight and obese people were far more likely to not survive COVID-19 and otherwise become seriously ill from the virus.
Here’s where Real Time got these numbers, and here’s the abstract of the source paper, which was not a clinical trial—researchers can’t really give people covid on purpose unless they work in Wuhan, China—but a statistical analysis of 75 different studies (i.e., a meta-analysis).
Expressed differently, the above figures mean that the researchers determined obese people to be 2.13 times as likely to be hospitalized with covid, 1.74 times as likely to wind up in intensive care with covid, and 1.48 times as likely to die from it. And paper was published in November 2020, about eight months after the first almost-lockdowns in the U.S.
U.S. and worldwide health officials were immediately aware that the coronavirus would disproportionately sicken and kill overweight people; all such pathogens do, and it was only a matter of degree. By mid-September of 2020, the Centers for Disease Control was already publishing data warning of the severe dangers COVID-19 presented to this sizable subpopulation.
The CDC wasn’t the only source predicting lower vaccine responses for the overweight and obese, although that turned out to be practically moot when the vaccines and boosters failed to prevent virial transmissions, which the President of the United States himself publicly declared they would. A study (actually another meta-analysis) of over 600,000 subjects published in August 2021 found terrible outcomes for the obese that mimicked those in the November 2020 paper cited indirectly by Maher: They were 2.73 times as likely to become infected with the coronavirus as the non-obese, 1.72 times as likely to be hospitalized, 3.81 times as likely to experience “severe disease,” 1.66 times as likely to wind up on a ventilator, 2.25 times as likely to be admitted to intensive care, and 1.61 times as likely to die.
The New York Times used to occasionally gnash its collective ass-cheeks over America’s triumphant slide into lip-smacking superbloat, even using versions of the f-word:
As you’ll recall, though, the ‘rona wasn’t the only novel 2020 disruption to the usual order. In April, Wokism—having gradually sunk its tendrils deeper into America’s media and educational institutions before and throughout Donald Trump’s presidency—officially achieved its first #1 ranking by the entire liberal press in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. This is when we* started to see ridiculous concepts like “Whiteness” legitimized and grifters like Alison Desir leveraging the murder of Ahmaud Arbery months earlier for undisguised personal gain.
Because Wokism is fundamentally about social vandalism and individual status gains rather than social betterment and collective material gains, the notion of “fat” as a primary identifier intensified. The Wokish see fat people as a marginalized group—impossible in a country with an adult population that’s mostly overweight, but automatic in Instagram-context because of the enormous value of self-victimhood. Anyone who is overweight now has license and even encouragement from others to use the Internet to willingly post pictures of themselves in next to nothing so they can complain that the world sees them as ugly, or worse, invisible.
The sad part is that a lot of women seem to fall into this without realizing they’re doing it, with an initial earnest effort aimed at overcoming personal insecurity soon engulfed by a need to collect followers and likes, to defy, to dramatize, to externalize blame while making the self the center of all that is or could be. This is the attitude of “fat celebration” Maher laments—especially in young people, who can delay most of the worst consequences of any choices they make today for a good while.
That’s probably why once the coronavirus struck, the Times backed off its use of the f- and o-words and decided to quietly start substituting “those with poor diets” for “the overweight and obese” while continuing to bemoan “diet culture.”
Now for the good part.
Keep in mind what has been happening around you for the past two years, though these memories are fading with startling speed, and in particular since the first coronavirus vaccines were rolled out in the spring of last year.
In early March of 2020, the world lost its mind. Most of this was understandable; almost everyone alive is a common citizen, and common citizens have common minds tuned into common propaganda-disseminators masquerading as news outlets, and are just not very good at rejecting lies from government sources—even when each one of these people could, if prompted, recall countless instances of obvious, large-scale lying by Uncle Sam.
The coronavirus was never going to be transmissible in passing outdoors. “Novel coronavirus” doesn’t imply a novel physical micro-structure. But we had nonsense like this anyway.
I remember resolving to “do my part” like everyone else at that time despite various pointless regulations, because almost nothing makes me feel better and more widely loved than staying at least six feet away from anything on two legs. But it was clear that the virus was going to burn through the citizenry and kill at least a million people within a couple of years. It was just as clear that most of them would be old, chronically ill, and compromised by addiction and other unpleasantries.
This is not to trivialize a single death that would not have otherwise happened. Thousands of grandchildren never got to say goodbye to grandparents who succumbed at 78 instead of 82 or even 79. But there was absolutely every indication early on that certain people needed to protect themselves a lot more attentively than did others, and obese people were and are clearly in that category. The media were screaming at people to mask up, stay home, social distance, all in the name of protecting others, but that was the extent of the tailored advice.
So why didn’t the CDC invite the cable channels and newspapers like The New York Times to emphasize to overweight people that they were at special risk of not only getting and transmitting the disease, but being badly ravaged by it?
Well, the CDC did publish some advice, sort of, even if it looks like something Rochelle Walensky’s AD/HD nephew produced and uploaded after stealing her password.
Some of the reasons for the lack of meaningful government action in this area are obvious. One is that even if everyone in the country made losing weight an absolute priority and all but starved themselves, some of them would still be fat. Some people’s bodies really don’t let them drop below the BMI cut off for “overweight” (25.0) and many struggle merely to not be “obese” (30.0). And I’m not talking about people who “overeat” for largely emotional reasons, including boredom. I mean people who fight hard to achieve a weight that still leaves most of them self-conscious in public settings.
The incentives for people, especially women, to lose weight in Western societies are too large to even calculate. Becoming thin is a nonstop obsession for millions of people just in the U.S. If it were remotely easy or merely somewhat difficult for everyone, then almost everyone who wanted to be thin would be.
Also, I also don’t know what fat-specific advisories would have looked like. “Stay home if you’re overweight, or avoid the thin?” Even a light suggestion of this sort would have produced chaos—fat people getting glares if maskless outdoors anywhere near a supermarket, for example. This was at a time when a lot of locked-down people were eating more and exercising less out of anxiety they never invited into their lives. I refuse to dump on anyone who packed on pounds during the early part of the “pandemic,” or any of it. I know what it’s like to want to use substances to avoid reality and all its charms even at catastrophic personal cost.
But I don’t believe that the lack of focus on encouraging the obese at least trying to become healthier—not a bad idea even when there’s no novelty-virus in the air—was rooted in either humanism or a sense of “Why bother, no one listens.” Fauci et al. simply wanted to keep the focus on universal directives from the get-go, because they were already getting the needles ready and more shots means more profits, period. Clearly, some of these universal guidelines made sense, in context. But such sweeping orders from on high also paved the way for other “everyone participates” directives, like getting vaccinated, then getting vaccinated again then finally getting covid so you can eventually be cleared for another booster and return to college, where you can get covid a second time and maybe not notice, as before.
There are other considerations, too, and they don’t flatter the government any more than the rest of its recent actions and blather. One is that Fauci et al. were never worried about younger, generally healthy people getting seriously ill in significant numbers. They didn’t care if fat people, old people, or drug addicts were breathing in everyone else’s faces. This “pandemic” was never going to resemble anything that word has historically been intended to conjure.
But besides that, the government is perfectly happy when already sick people die. Instead of addicts, fat people, and the elderly cluttering up hospitals over decades with their heart attacks and CHF and hip replacements and cirrhotic liver failure, they could all be processed into morgues around the country in relatively short order.
Medicare and Social Security Medicaid (SS was a New Deal provision) cost the government money, and when these programs were created by LBJ in the mid-1960s, they were implemented with the understanding that the beneficiaries—almost all men, as few women had jobs to retire from then—would mostly have the courtesy to die within ten years or so of no longer being productive members of society. But these programs worked too beautifully, and as a result, practically everyone’s frigging old now, with many of these fossils exercising regularly in their scheme to bankrupt the government by merely having the nerve to exist, like wizened Wokesters.1
The government would just as soon see huge numbers of technically useless people die, although too many dead bodies at literally the same time would cause headaches all over (New York City, for example, can’t keep polio out of its water or lepers out of its mayoral offices even in relatively normal times). Maybe very few individuals who work for the machine think this way, but where huge sums are involved, everyone is obliged to tacitly seek the efficiency at the guts of the borg. The government doesn’t hate fat people; it would just rather not deal with expensive, illness-prone biomass.
And always, always remember that Tony Fauci is a dog-torturer as well as a beaming pile of malevolent lies. I would be pissed off to learn that he had cheated again by dying peacefully in his sleep, that insincere grandfatherly grin frozen on his putrid face forever or at least until the javelin-style launching of his remains into a pit of hungry pit bulls.
As a closing sidenote, the level to which Americans have stooped in accepting and circulating narratives anyone can see are senseless is truly depressing. One example is the transition from “get vaccinated to keep others from getting infected” to “get vaccinated so you don’t steal hospital beds from others” once the lies from President Biden on down about the vaccines stopping transmission no longer worked even on a daft and battered public.
Zealots, typically uncredentialed polyloons with limitless spare time, really were—and still are, albeit in waning numbers—saying exactly this in somewhat different words: It doesn’t matter if the vaccines don’t work as advertised and you’ll still spread the virus even if routinely boosted; get one anyway or you deserve to be sick.
Imagine people applying such “reasoning”—nothing more than sheer programmed contempt—universally. Instead of telling your drunk buddy at the Fourth of July picnic, “Hey, don’t shoot that bottle rocket out of your ass or you’ll burn the back of your balls and wind up in the hospital, like last year,” you change it to “Hey, if you wind up in the hospital, your dumb ass will be displacing smarter people with chest pains and allergic reactions and loooonnnng covid, like Hunter Biden long.”
Yes, we Americans have a generous spirit to go with our generous appetites.
(Recommended and by no means unrelated: “The Bullshit,” by Walter Kirn.)
In Japan, 29 percent of the population is now over 65. More McDonald’s and Pall Malls, less rice and raw fish!