Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisers will meet Tuesday to discuss who should get coronavirus vaccines first.
One population they may consider prioritizing: Americans …
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisers will meet Tuesday to discuss who should get coronavirus vaccines first. One population they may consider prioritizing: Americans who are obese — a major risk factor for severe COVID-19 that some experts say has gone under-recognized. “Obesity was ignored for the longest time and overweight was completely ignored,” said Barry Popkin, an obesity researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Now the CDC is talking about both, he said. The agency has already laid out four groups that should be considered for priority: health-care personnel, workers in essential and critical industries, older adults, and people with certain underlying medical conditions — including “severe obesity.” But it’s unclear to what extent the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will prioritize this group. There’s been much discussion about how underlying medical conditions such as hypertension and Type 2 diabetes are associated with higher risk of dying from the coronavirus. But these conditions are most frequently found in people who are obese — making it difficult to discern whether the medical conditions or the obesity were the biggest factors at play. The evidence, Popkin argues, points to extra weight as a bigger risk factor than any individual comorbidity. That’s because people who are overweight or obese have more body fat — which is more hospitable than other tissue to the coronavirus — and they suffer from reduced lung capacity. “Being an individual with obesity independently increases the risk of influenza morbidity and mortality, most likely through impairments in innate and adaptive immune responses,” according to a paper Popkin wrote over the summer, which analyzed 75 studies on the connection between COVID-19 and body mass index.
