Friday 11 December 2015

No, obesity is not like terrorism

Our hopeless Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies, has been attracting attention by equating obesity with terrorism. I've written about it for the Spectator...

Davies' defenders might argue that obesity has killed more people than Isis, but this ignores the crucial difference between self-inflicted risk factors for diseases of old age and indiscriminate slaughter of innocents. Beheadings and bombings exist in a different moral universe to high blood pressure and diabetes. Being a couch potato is not equivalent to being burned alive. An 80 year old dying in hospital is not the same as a teenager being machine-gunned in the Bataclan. Only a moral cretin could fail to see the difference.

Do read the rest.

The report Davies is promoting is actually a serious piece of work (written by other people). It is only partially about obesity and doesn't advocate much in the way of nanny state policy. The BBC is only interested in taxing sugar at the moment so they got some quotes from her (presumably at the press conference) so that they could transform a reasonably sober article into a pro-sugar tax article. To see how activist-journalism works, compare the version of the BBC report that was published in the early hours with the final product.

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