We can list the US Food and Drug Administration’s bureaucrats among the “experts” who have made poor choices regarding policies related to the COVID-19 epidemic.
However, a recent tweet demonstrates beyond all doubt that few (if any) responsible adults remain at that agency.
Its social media arm decided it was a great idea to promote #NationalChocolateCoveredAnythingDay.
The scathing responses to the tasteless tweet must have been shocking to the juvenile-minded agency promoters. However, they were heartening for me, as they demonstrate that many Americans are very aware of COVID risk factors….despite the hapless FDA efforts.
Other responses were just as delicious.
I would like to help the FDA out by making some suggestions. How about highlighting the role of obesity in COVID-19 outcomes!
Overweight and obese people have suffered the worst effects of COVID-19 at disproportionately high rates. Now there is emerging science to help explain why.In October, a group of researchers, mostly from Stanford University, published a non-peer-reviewed study finding that COVID-19 may infect fat cells directly, a novel discovery that suggests overweight and obese people may be at increased risk for severe disease and long COVID.“[Our study’s] data suggest that infection of fat tissue and its associated inflammatory response may be one of the reasons why obese individuals do so poorly when infected with SARS-CoV-2,” Dr. Catherine Blish, a professor at Stanford University Medical Center and a lead author on the study, told Reuters.
The FDA could also feature tweets focusing on Vitamin D and its role in warding off infections.
The link between vitamin D and coronavirus first appeared in a paper by Northwestern University researchers in April 2020 (the results still have to undergo peer review). They looked at publicly available hospitalization, recovery, and mortality rates along with reported pre-pandemic vitamin D levels from 10 countries, including the US. The authors noticed that elderly patients with low concentrations of vitamin D in their blood had higher COVID-19-related mortality in six of the countries in the sample. In the end, the authors suggested that the deficiency could be a potential risk factor for severe COVID-19 infection.A slew of other COVID-centered data on vitamin D followed later in 2020. David Meltzer, the chief of hospital medicine at the University of Chicago Medicine, also conducted a retrospective analysis of vitamin D levels in 489 hospitalized patients a year prior to COVID. His results, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in September of 2020, revealed that patients with low vitamin D levels were 77 percent more likely to test positive for COVID-19.
Perhaps the officials at the FDA could make it a new years resolution to actually promote sensible and effective public health policies in 2022.
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