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By now, we’ve all breezed over the rapidly diminished and forgotten grievance industry of the American left. We simply don’t have time for the petty fixations of the social-justice bourgeoisie. As quarantined journalists strolling through bucolic gardens in their second homes and celebrities in bathwater peppered with fresh rose petals remind us — our current crisis is the great equalizer.
Nevertheless, social justice warriors persist to flail their way into the conversation, however feebly, and their buddies in the media still give them whatever airtime is left over. So far, they’ve hit all the boxes, except one. They’ve declared the Chinese coronavirus transphobic because non-essential surgeries, like vaginoplasties and titty chopping, are suspended in order to free up hospital resources for the sick and dying. Trans activists assert that gender-reassignment is, actually, ‘life-saving’ — never mind that the identical suicide rates for both pre-op and post-op transgenders don’t appear to back that claim up.
The virus is also homophobic. Last month, over 100 national organizations that volley for the homosexuals signed a letter bringing attention to factors that place the gays at a higher risk for coronavirus complications. Those factors included the fact that gays smoke cigarettes at a whopping 50 percent higher rate than the general population and also account for the majority of HIV cases. Even the New York Times has been rotten with comparisons between the Aids epidemic and coronavirus, as if HIV kills less the one percent of the infected and just waits for victims on doorknobs. Nightlife promoters in New York even fought to keep gay sex clubs open, worried that if they close it might lead to higher suicide rates. Come to think of it, that one might be true.
The virus is also anti-woman, as divorced Atlantic writer Helen Lewis reminded us in March. It erases the great advances of feminism by trapping women in their homes, forcing them to confront the oppressive realities of cooking a meal and spending time with their children. In New York, the virus kills men at twice the rate of women but for the Helens of the world that’s perhaps the silver lining to this whole fracas.
The virus is also hateful toward immigrants — a submicroscopic little xenophobe that forces illegals at the border to self-deport over fears of becoming infected in detention centers. In Britain, Muslim immigrants account for 25 percent of COVID-19 deaths while representing four percent of the general population.
Then there is the sacred cow atop the left’s escritoire of curiosities, the group which, based on actual science, is at greater risk of complications and death if infected with the virus: the obese.
France’s chief epidemiologist, Prof. Jean-Francois Delfraissy, commented this week, ‘We’re worried about our friends in America, where the problem of obesity is well known and where they will probably have the most problems because of obesity’.
Leave it to svelte, priggish France to jump on any opportunity to call out American fatness, but he’s right. The higher than average per-capita deaths in New Orleans and Mexico are believed by experts to be linked to obesity. New Orleans is one of America’s fattest big cities; Louisiana has an obesity rate of 65.8 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Days ago, the CDC reported 78 percent of coronavirus patients in intensive care units had underlying health conditions that prominently included diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In Italy, 75 percent of the dead had high blood pressure, 35 percent had diabetes and a third had heart disease, all medical conditions associated with obesity. The obese have also been known for some time to be at far greater risk for flu complications, and studies show the obese carry the flu virus and spread it around for a much longer time than those who are not obese.
Each day the news shows photos of people we’ve lost to the virus. While 800 might die in a single day in New York, the four or five singled out by the networks seem to favor focusing on the young, as if to ramp up that extra bit of fear in the general population. And yet, I’ve noticed, most those young people appear to be quite overweight — and I don’t intend for that observation to be callous in any way.
You don’t catch diabetes from a handshake. To acknowledge personal lifestyle choices and cultural differences is the ultimate blasphemy of progressive doctrine. Imagine if, instead of spending millions of the rapidly-depleting state budget on a ‘COVID-19 racial disparity task force’, as kooky Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer announced this week, she frankly told the public it all comes down to personal lifestyle choices — eat well and exercise and you’ll probably survive the next one. Fat people of all colors, ages, genders, and sexualities need to be extra careful.
