On the 5th of April 2020, Downing Street announced that Boris Johnson, then UK prime minister, was in hospital with Covid-19. When he was discharged, he blamed the severity of his condition on his weight: “I was too fat”, he declared.

In this episode, we explore some of the consequences of this statement with Professor Luna Dolezal and Dr Tanisha Spratt: how it fed into the government’s subsequent Tackling Obesity campaign, and sanctioned existing patterns of fat shaming as support for the NHS. We then fit this into larger patterns of shaming in the pandemic, which often served to target those whose actions didn’t conform to wider expectations.   

For a deeper discussion of the Tackling Obesity campaign and its relation to fat shaming, see this article by Luna Dolezal and Tanisha Spratt, Fat shaming under neoliberalism and COVID-19: Examining the UK’s Tackling Obesity campaign and the chapter I was too fat: Boris Johnson and the Fat Panic by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose in Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK. Also see Rachel Cooke’s The Guardian opinion piece Why Boris Johnson's new anti-obesity strategy makes me reach for the chocolate. The Social Market Foundation report further outlines why the Tackling Obesity strategy was not an effective public health policy.

To read more about fat shaming and its relationship to neoliberalism, see Tanisha Spratt’s article Understanding ‘fat shaming’ in a neoliberal era: Performativity, healthism and the UK’s ‘obesity’ epidemic.

Thank you to Alice Waterson. Further thanks to Jennifer Allan, Ray Earwicker, João Florêncio, Tanisha Spratt and Nikita Simpson for contributing to the series. 

This podcast series is based on the research findings in the book Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK, by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose.

This podcast series was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant number AH/V013483/1.

Further support has come from the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) at the University of Exeter, the Shame and Medicine project, the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project and the Wellcome Trust grant number 217879/Z/19/Z.

Hosted by Paul McNally and produced by Develop Audio.

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