The Alabama department of Public Health puts posters up asking you to walk more, eat healthy, all that stuff. So, yes, obesity is a public health problem, and it's being addressed. What are you trying to say with that comment?

But we're doing way, way more than putting up posters saying to get vaccinated. For example, imagine how you'd react if Alabama mandated that every worker with a BMI above 30 had to be fired.

How does a BMI of over 30 put other workers at risk? These situations are not analogous. And unless Alabama has a far more strict proposal than the proposed federal mandate, no one is requiring unvaccinated workers be fired, only they be tested weekly, so the analogy breaks down on that front as well.

> How does a BMI of over 30 put other workers at risk?

How do unvaccinated people who work from home put other workers at risk?

I didn't say that they did? You've ignored the entire content of my comment to engage with an argument I didn't make.

You said the situations weren't analogous. I'm saying they are, because firing an unvaccinated remote worker doesn't make anyone else any safer than firing an obese remote worker does.

Except most workers aren't remote workers, and as stated in my original comment that you chose to ignore, there is no mandate that anyone be fired for being unvaccinated.

So being unvaccinated is risky to others around you while having a high BMI is not, and you suggested firing employees with a high BMI, while the mandate only calls for testing unvaccinated employees.

So again, the analogy falls apart two different ways.

Maybe it would be a better comparison if they called obese people "fat and crazy persons that endanger society by using up capacity in the healthcare system" or similar. Because this kind of speech is used by officials to describe people that don't want the vaccination.

Because obesity makes it more likely you'll end up taking up a hospital bed that someone else might need.

Obesity isn't contagious, so it doesn't really tax healthcare systems like a virus that produces exponentially increasing demands on local healthcare systems.

It's kind of like trying to compare O(n) to O(2^n) without admitting that [the system was operating fine in the O(n) regime and is falling apart in the O(2^n) regime]. My sister-in-law is a nurse practitioner and she has been reposting job listings for RNs and NPs over the past year or so offering $6k+ per week (!!!) for RNs and NPs to do stints in hospital systems under extreme load around the country.

The healthcare system manages this inconsequentially because relative to refusing a vaccine, the increased likelihood of this happening with obesity is marginal.

Prior to the pandemic (and also today during the pandemic), there wasn't a concern about people dying from treatable medical conditions because healthcare capacity was taken up by those suffering from obesity.