Abstract
The slogan that ‘the virus doesn’t discriminate’ has been belied by the emergence of stark and persistent disparities in rates of infection, hospitalisation, and death from Covid-19 between various social groups. I focus on two groups that have been disproportionately affected, and that have been constructed or designated as particularly ‘at-risk’ during the Covid-19 pandemic: racial or ethnic minorities and fat people. I trace the range of narratives that have arisen in the context of explaining these disparities, in both the scientific literature and wider expert and public discourse. I show that the scientific and public narratives around these groups have differed significantly, revealing contested and competing conceptions of the basis of these categories themselves. These different conceptions have important impacts on the kinds of interventions that become possible or desirable. I show that in the case of racial or ethnic disparities, genetic narratives have been combatted by a strong focus on structural racism as a driver of pandemic inequalities. However, in the case of fatness, individualising and stigmatising narratives have dominated discussions. I suggest that, given racial or ethnic differences in prevalence of fatness, and scholarship casting anti-fatness as historically racialised, the stigmatisation of fatness disproportionately affects racial or ethnic minorities in terms of placing individual blame or responsibility for the increased burden of Covid-19 on these groups. Despite widespread acknowledgement of the role of structural racism in driving racial inequalities in the burden of Covid-19, anti-obesity rhetoric and research provides a ‘backdoor’ to placing blame on individuals from racial minorities.
Highlights
The emergence of social disparities in the burden of Covid-19 has been a defining feature of the pandemic (Abedi et al, 2021; Islam et al, 2021; Stok et al, 2021)
Some social sciences and humanities scholarship has emerged that attends to structural fat discrimination in the context of Covid-19 (Bessey & Brady, 2021; McPhail & Orsini, 2021; Monaghan, 2021; Pausé et al, 2021a, 2021b), overall, this narrative of structural fat discrimination has received far less attention than those which hold onto fatness as a biological category, whether that be coupled with personal responsibility and blame or highlighting the negative effects of weight stigma
I have shown that the narratives around the disproportionate burden of Covid-19 on racial or ethnic minorities, and those around the burden on fat people, have diverged in important ways, which indicate particular conceptions of the kinds of categories we are dealing with and license particular types of social or political interventions
Summary
The emergence of social disparities in the burden of Covid-19 has been a defining feature of the pandemic (Abedi et al, 2021; Islam et al, 2021; Stok et al, 2021). As the disparities in Covid-19 related outcomes (including risk of infection, rates of hospitalisation and rates of mortality) have become evident, this has led to scientific research investigating possible explanations for these disparities, including genetic research (examples include Hou et al, 2020; McCoy et al, 2020) and epidemiological research (examples include Garcia et al, 2021; Ruprecht et al, 2021) This has not been confined to the academic literature: there has been widespread expert and public discourse surrounding the causes and necessary remedies of disparities in the burden of Covid-19, including articles in popular media outlets such as The Guardian (Boseley, 2021; Morgan, 2020) and The New York Times (Kolata, 2020; Stolberg, 2020), as well as the dissemination of expert opinion in venues such as Scientific American (Gravlee, 2020) and the commentary sections of the Lancet (Bhala et al, 2020) and the British Medical Journal (Davies & Ghezzi, 2020; Palmer, 2020).
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