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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27423262/

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Harvard Medical School Stages Panel On “Unruly Bodies” That Is A Masterclass of Medical Misinformation and Denialism About Obesity’s Health Risks and GLP-1s

“Well, free Luigi, for one,” Roxane Gay, artist in residence at Harvard Medical School’s Media, Medicine and Health program and a visiting professor in the HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, notably said at the program’s Against the Pathology of Unruly Bodies panel tonight, as she lambasted the evil of health insurers.

Da’Shaun Harrison, the theorist and author, denounced the “GLP-1 apocalypse.”

The evening was rooted in sweeping and fervent medical denialism about the health harms of obesity by a group of people who by and large saw GLP-1s as an existential threat to their identities rather than as an effective, if imperfect, solution to a chronic medical problem. The panelists uttered streams of misinformation about medical research and practice that went unchallenged, despite the fact that this was a Harvard Medical School event.

Ironically enough, Gay lambasted people who “do their own research” about measles vaccines and who simply “look for people who are going to affirm their worldview.” This was precisely what this evening was about, except it was for people who see any effort to treat obesity as an offensive and stigma-infused challenge to their personal dignity.

The rule of the evening was that the medical establishment should, for the most part, not seek to treat obesity and that it should instead do everything in its power to meet the needs of and cater to fat patients as they are. (The fat-acceptance movement uses the word “fat” rather than obese, just FYI. I’m using their words.)

Harrison, fresh off what he said was a “two-week-long @FoxNews anti-Da’Shaun run,” said quite a number of astonishing things about body fascism, which he managed to tie in both to Zionism and Nazism.

The book he’s writing is called Body Fascism. In it, he said, "I intend to take the reader through the years 1930 to present day, thinking through the ways that neoliberalism has cojoined with or has worked very closely with neo-fascism to create the conditions where a GLP-1 is possible to be deployed politically as a fascistic tool to eradicate fatness. And so I’m thinking specifically through five Western countries and Western-backed countries like the U.S., Israel, Britain, Nazi Germany, and France.

“Thinking through the ways that the Israeli formation of the new Jewish body, through the several councils that Eisenhower and Nixon and Michelle Obama helped create to indoctrinate fat children into a culture of fitness to be prepared for military… So that’s what the book is about, and how basically we’ve been preparing for a Trump since 1930s, and that’s why we’re here now.”

GLP-1s, Harrison said, were the latest iteration of a century-long, fascistic effort to engineer bodies to serve in the military on behalf of imperialism.

“Fascism,” he said, "is the very foundation of the Western society, the very foundation of the U.S., through the transatlantic slave trade and through colonialism, and so body fascism is to me the perfecting of such a state, wherein everything that we know about how bodies are supposed to exist in the world, are supposed to function as, and are supposed to look like, has been perfected and overemphasized in modern society, as a way to discipline and punish… fat folks and fat bodies.

"This practice of forcing people into manipulating or changing or shifting how they look is oftentimes about making bodies militarizable, building up a military to defend an imperialist state… A lot of doctors, medical professionals, and folks who collaborate with them, be it through the government or media or whatever, are advocating for atrocities that are directly impacting our citizens, but also citizens around the globe.

“GLP-1s I think at this point act as the very next iteration of that, that says by choosing to not be on the GLP-1, not only are you choosing to not be a patriot or not defend the state, you are also in many ways suicidal.”

Fresh off his appearance at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago, Harrison had plenty of criticism to spare about Israel, Zionism and Jews, saying:

“I’m hesitant to say this because I don’t want to sound combative, but I do think it’s important to name that in this moment where Zionists are conflating their Jewishness with this Zionist formation, it is very important to name that you, white Jewish person, are in fact white, and your Jewishness does not cancel that out.”

He was referring to a generic white Jewish person, and no one in the room. That said, his assertion was remarkable given that Gay had said the following about her wife roughly 30 minutes prior, referring to the different experience she has going to the doctor as an obese black woman compared with her thin white wife:

“So it’s partly racism because she is of the Caucasian flavor, but she’s Jewish, and so that for me cancels it out,” Gay said. “And she’s thin.”

No one in the room seemed to draw the connection between Gay and Harrison’s remarks.

Gay falsely claimed the following: “Most medical facilities do not have the appropriate equipment for 70 to 80% of the American population.” She meant that 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. But that does not mean that no one who has a BMI over 25 can fit into basic American medical equipment.

Panelist Ragen Chastain, who holds the Guinness record for heaviest woman to finish a marathon, said of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the major GLP-1 manufacturers: “They want weight stigma to be defined as just the poor treatment of fat people, and absolutely not defined as the pathologization of fat people. So it becomes a message of, well, we don’t want fat people treated badly, but we absolutely must eradicate them from the earth and make sure no more ever exists.”

No one stopped to suggest that prescribing a GLP-1 to a fat patient does not eradicate them, it just makes them thinner, and might save them from death. Instead, the panelists tore into research finding that obesity is tied to a higher risk of death and that GLP-1s are, for example, tied to lower rates of certain cancers. So much of what they said was false, misleading or lacking context.

A 2016 Lancet meta-analysis of nearly 11M people, for example, found that the risk of death rose steadily above a BMI of 25, with hazard ratios of 1.45, 1.94 and 2.76 for the three obesity classes. And yet Gay and Harrison both made glib remarks about the notion that they might “have a snake tomorrow” or “die tomorrow… from a car accident,” so why should their doctors make suggestions about their health going south due to their obesity?

Suffice it to say it is remarkable that Harvard Medical School (where my dad did his surgical residency and fellowship, incidentally) is putting on a panel this rife with misinformation.

https://nitter.click/thestustustudio/status/2105465727226438126

🚨 At tonight’s Harvard Medical School event, artist-in-residence Roxane Gay responded to a question about the health insurance industry with “Free Luigi.”

Minutes earlier, Gay admitted she uses concierge medicine after deciding to “throw money at this problem” and “buy my way out” of ordinary healthcare.

Gay, incidentally, is former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s first cousin.

We all know Harvard is morally bankrupt at this point, but this was a great reminder.