Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by craig1f 1798 days ago
5. When unvaccinated people end up in the hospital, hospitals get stressed to their limits. This results in fewer beds for me and my family if we end up in a hospital for a different reason. This is also causing job burnout for nurses and doctors.
2 comments

Interesting.

Society bends over backwards to accomodate ever-increasing levels of obese people. The majority of baseline hospital "stress" is due to morbidities caused by, and strongly associated with, obesity.

Why are we shunning the unvaccinated, a rapidly decreasing proportion of the population, but promote plus-size models, build ever-larger movie theater seating, and denigrate "fat shaming" in response to a problem that 1. exists largely as the baseline hospital "stressor", and 2. increases among the population monotonically?

I will give you the benefit of the doubt here, and give an answer to what appears to be rhetoric. Choice of vaccine is a single binary choice that essentially creates a step function. Food, on the other hand is a continuous function with a daily effort required to decide what to eat. While choosing to be unvaccinated may be it’s own daily struggle, it’s not the same order of magnitude as the struggle not to eat.

Now as to the body positive trend. I don’t quite agree with it, but there is a current belief that body shaming tends to backfire with individual weight loss, and that being pro body helps lead to better general health.

Personally I think much of the obesity epidemic is more a mental health epidemic. There are a lot of people who use food as a short term mood enhancer, and I’m reminded of experiments with rats showing that rates of drug addiction go way down when the rats are provided with an environment that better suites their needs.

That said, the current over abundance of highly processed food is probably the hardest thing to overcome in terms of obesity. Processed foods tend to act in the body quicker than our feedback mechinisms can handle, short term feelings of full happen too late, and long term satiation is harder to maintain. I’m not sure that fat shaming isn’t in the same category as victim shaming, the real vitriol should probably be pointed at much of the food industry instead.

Do they not expect shaming to backfire against the unvaccinated?
Getting vaccinated is 1000x easier than becoming un-obese. It's not comparable.
You just compared it.
You're right... I know of cancer cases where treatment was delayed for a while due to no availability unfortunately...