Amy Hamm: For these socialists, Ozempic is a tool for ‘genociding fat people’

A pharmacist holds a box of Ozempic. Photo by George Frey /Bloomberg

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At least one radical activist is making the claim that the weight loss GLP-1 inhibitor drugs, such as Ozempic, are being used as a weapon of genocide against fat people.

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Speaking at a Chicago “Socialism” conference last month, author Da’Shaun Harrison gave a talk titled “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State (Health Fascism Series).” Harrison claims to be a “public intellectual” and self describes as “a queer and trans afropessimist and anarcho-communist.” 

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The Socialism conference, which enforced a mandatory N-95 mask policy, was described by organizers as “a four-day conference bringing together thousands of socialists and radical activists from around the country to take part in discussions about social movements, abolition, Marxism, decolonization, working-class history, and the debates and strategies for organizing today.” 

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Harrison’s talk, of nearly an hour, contained a dazzling smorgasbord of pseudo-intellectual social justice and identity politics jargon. Clips of the talk have gone viral online, no doubt because they serve as fantastic reminders of the whackier-than-parody parallel universe inhabited by those on the fringes of left-wing politics and academia.  

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“In the years following COVID-19, drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound and Mounjaro moved from endocrinology clinics into mainstream conversation and were praised as breakthroughs that could finally solve what other medicine, policy and culture have long understood to be an intractable problem: fatness,” said Harrison. 

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“The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic. Not because individuals take them, but because the conditions under which they become necessary are shaped by a world fixated on genociding fat people. This is a structural critique that asks what happens when the conditions produced by capitalism, by public health, by the state apparatus, and by anti-black desire align around a single bodily ideal that leaves little-to-no room for diversion and punishes any body that does. Whereas earlier diet drugs were often associated with vanity or addiction, GLP-1s are positioned as responsible medicine, promising relief rather than restraint. But to understand why the deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic requires turning to Frantz Fanon’s account of black flesh under colonial surveillance,” said Harrison.  

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Far from being a lone extremist with these views on “fatness,” Harrison is part of an entire branch of academia called “fat studies.” That is also the title of an academic journal, where Harrison is published and which “explores the way fat people are oppressed, the reasons why, who benefits from that oppression and how to liberate fat people from oppression.”  

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A 2012 article in Fat Studies cited one academic who wrote that former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama’s public health initiative to reduce childhood obesity, Let’s Move, was not about healthy kids but was instead a “government-endorsed ‘genocide’ of fat people.” 

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The primary feature of genocides is that people are killed during them, hence the Latin suffix “-cide,” which refers to the killing part. Apparently, it must be said that transitioning from obesity to thinness, whether via GLP-1s or diet and exercise, does not equate to having been murdered. In fact, the opposite may be true: obesity can drastically reduce one’s life expectancy, while losing weight can increase lifespan.  

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Being obese is associated with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, strokes and cancer. It is also associated with reduced fertility in both men and women, and with increased risk of maternal and fetal complications in pregnancy. Encouraging a population to live longer, and to potentially have more children, is clearly the opposite of a genocide. Unfortunately, such facts — and most facts, it seems — are not very convenient for today’s grievance-peddling activist class.