“You cannot improve the health of someone who repulses you because you aren’t seeing them as fully human.”
The addition of high BMI to Covid-19 vaccine eligibility criteria has pros and cons, writes Virginia Sole-Smith in a compelling op-ed in Elemental. While fat people are at some heightened risk for Covid-19, she writes, putting high BMI in the same eligibility category as pulmonary disease, cancer, and heart disease also perpetuates fat stigma. And fat stigma, as she’s written previously, impacts the care that fat people get for Covid-19.
“But people living in bigger bodies don’t automatically experience limitations as a direct consequence of their weight,” she writes. “They are more vulnerable to Covid-19 for a different reason: stigma. And we should be clear that this is what we’re vaccinating against when we tell fat people that their body is a ‘comorbidity’, a disease waiting to ally itself with this other disease, and conspire against their survival.”
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