The New York Times has an interview with Whole Foods founder John Mackey that includes a couple of interesting passages. On the coronavirus:
there's a very high correlation between obesity and Covid deaths. And one of the reasons the United States has had more of a problem with Covid is simply that the comorbidities like diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, they're just higher in the U.S.
This is an interesting interpretation to find in the New York Times, which elsewhere in its news columns has been busily insisting, along with the Biden presidential campaign, that the reason the United States has had more of a problem with Covid is, as one recent New York Times news article put it, "Mr. Trump's vast failures on the coronavirus pandemic."
I took a look at obesity prevalence by country and at Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 population and at the observed case fatality ratio, and I did not see any obvious patterns. I did see that in deaths per 100,000 population and in observed case fatality ratio, the U.S. is doing better than several other countries, by a John Hopkins analysis. That somewhat undercuts the "it's all Trump's fault" analysis. Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Spain all have higher deaths per 100,000 population, and Trump is not president there. Mexico, France, Iran, Spain, Peru, Romania, Indonesia, Columbia, and Brazil all have a higher observed case fatality ratio than the U.S. does, and Trump is not president in those places, either. That's not to say that there are ways Trump or state and local officials in the U.S. might have handled the pandemic better, but it is to say that there are some logical weaknesses in the effort to attribute all the deaths to what the Times says are Trump's "vast failures on the coronavirus pandemic."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does say that "having obesity puts people at risk for many other serious chronic diseases and increases the risk of severe illness from COVID-19." It may be that if one really wants to assess the effect of political leadership on Covid-19 outcomes, one needs to somehow adjust for the age and preexisting health status of the population. I haven't yet seen such a comparative analysis.
Okay, back to Mackey. On profits: "Profits aren't evil. Profits are good. Profits are what funds progress in our society. So taking away the profits and redistributing them is win-lose, a zero-sum game."
