What the CDC Says About Obesity and COVID-19 by Dr. Joseph Mercola
A July 25, 2021, article1 by Joel Hirschhorn on Trial Site News highlights what he refers to as a “missed public health opportunity.” Hirschhorn is a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, and a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.
Even though we’ve known for well over a year that obesity is one of the most common and most significant risk factors for COVID-19 (aside from age, which you have no control over), public health authorities have ignored the issue and failed to provide guidance on how to reduce excess weight.
“Would not fighting obesity qualify as a valid prevention approach to curbing the ill effects of the COVID pandemic?” Hirschhorn asks. “Could the reason for government’s lack of aggressively pursuing an anti-obesity campaign be a bias for promoting vaccines? It seems a likely explanation.”
He points out that studies suggest vaccines tend to be less effective in obese individuals,2 and if that holds true for injected gene therapeutics against COVID, then the shots may turn out disappointing results, seeing how 42.4% of Americans are obese.3 This, Hirschhorn says, would be all the “more reason to have the public health system deal more directly with obesity to curb serious impacts of COVID.”
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Charting the Obesity-COVID Connection
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while slow to put some of this information out, has in fact detailed the connection between COVID-19 severity and obesity. On its “Obesity and COVID-19” page,4 the CDC frankly admits that obesity is associated with worse COVID-19 outcomes. The agency also lists obesity and excess weight as a risk factor for severe COVID-19 infection on its medical conditions known to worsen COVID outcomes page.5
Its March 12, 2021, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report6 (MMWR) also addresses obesity and the risk for hospitalization, ICU admission, mechanical ventilation and death.
In summary, obesity increases your risk of severe illness and triples your risk of hospitalization. It impairs your immune function, decreases your lung capacity and increases your risk of ending up on invasive mechanical ventilation — a treatment strategy shown to kill more than half of all patients. Obesity is also associated with chronic inflammation that can disrupt thrombogenic responses to pathogens.
According to the CDC, modeling suggests 30.2% of all American adults hospitalized for COVID-19 up until November 18, 2020, could be attributed to obesity,7 and the greater your body mass index (BMI) the higher your risks for a poor outcome gets. The connection between obesity and COVID-19 is particularly strong in people younger than 65.8
In its March 12, 2021, MMWR,9 the CDC reports that the risk for hospitalization, ICU admission and death were lowest among patients with BMIs of 24.2 kg/m2, 25.9 kg/m2 and 23.7 kg/m2 respectively, increasing sharply with higher BMIs. (Overweight is defined as having a BMI of 25 kg/m2 or greater, while obesity is defined as a BMI of 30 kg/m2 or greater.) The risk for invasive mechanical ventilation increased in tandem with BMI, starting at 15 kg/m2.
Although BMI is the classic research tool to assess obesity, it has limited clinical value as it can be seriously off, especially if one has loads of muscle mass, as it will be incorrectly interpreted as body fat. An accurate body fat assessment is likely a far better tool to use. The key, however, is accuracy, as many inexpensive bioimpedance devices that determine body fat are not that accurate.
