Smaller bodied people *systematically* received earlier antiviral treatment than larger bodied people. Controlling for this difference eliminates impact of obesity on H1N1 fatality. Obesity kills, but the critical mediator is not biology, it's bias.https://t.co/nSiYEUKhkx

— rfrosencrans (@rfrosencrans) August 1, 2020

I see and note this. I haven’t read the paper and probably won’t soon (too much else to read).

I am very suspicious, though, of studies where factors are “controlled” out. It’d take more time to examine than I have, however. Just all too often scientists “control” for the very thing they should be examining, befitting the biases of the time. I do think there is anti-obesity bias in health care. I’m not saying it’s there for a good reason, but I understand why it’s present: obese people have worse outcomes across a wide range of diseases and conditions, and many conditions could be vastly improved and sometimes eliminated by just losing weight (examples: diabetes, PCOS, asthma, etc.)

I know to the fat acceptance types all of this can be explained somehow by bias, but that seems just excuse-making, considering The Health Effects of Overweight and Obesity.

All that said, obese people should get equitable treatment in health care and elsewhere, too. But I don’t want it to become a “dangerous truth” that there are risks to obesity. We already pretend that too much that is the case is not — let’s not allow this to become yet another area of absurd pantomime.