How can that not be a reasonable inference considering the now known action of the virus in the two linked articles? You think you need clinical trials to prove that its better to not be obese with this virus when we know its behavior?
Pfizer didn't do any hospitalization prevention studies, but they reasonably assumed, based on infection rate, that it was probable that it would protect against hospitalization. I think you can make the same type of assumption in this case.
That has nothing to do with obesity or health in general. Leave politics out of it. Its irrelevant and only clouds judgement with emotional responses.
They still have no idea if mutations are coming from vaxed or unvaxed.
And if you accept that, "you need to stop/limit viral replication to prevent mutation", it makes the fact we have no early treatments after two years even more ridiculous. "Go home and let the virus replicate until you can't breath, then we'll do something when you get to the hospital." Thats been our treatment plan.
I'm not saying its one way or the other. The point is, we don't know.
"We observed that obese people are likely to have worse outcomes" is different than "losing weight will protect you against hospitalization." The first result I linked regarding the outcomes for overweight people hospitalized (better outcomes., pre-COVID) illustrates that. We don't need a clinical trial, we have other data we can look at, and sure enough there's strong correlations between vaccine status, income, and obesity as well as between vaccine status and hospitalization and outcome. So what we do know is that getting vaccinated is something easy you can do that, no matter your weight, provides protection against hospitalization. I would suspect if we were also looking at other health conditions (history of smoking, lung disease, alcohol consumption, diabetes, etc, all things that also correlate well to poverty) we could see some strong correlations between those and positive health outcomes.
Unless we had data on people from similar socioeconomic status and could compare outcomes for people who lost weight vs people who did not and their hospitalization, we couldn't make an inference on whether losing weight provides any protection. Does that make sense? That's also not a clinical trial, btw, it's a review of available data. The more confounding factors (other things happening that can change the outcome) the less we can make an inference based on a point of data. Again, we know shark attacks and ice cream sales both rise sharply at the same time, but once we consider other factors (people buy ice cream and go to the beach more in the summer) it lessens the likelihood that we can make any inference about the correlation.
We don't have early treatments (yet.) We can't magically make them appear. There have been hundreds of studies looking at sugegsted interventions, from the same old snake oil (vitamin megadoses, hydroxchloroquine, ivermectin) to some novel drugs and antivirals, but no success yet. Merck is seeking approval for a pill (antiviral) that they've been working on since May of 2020 IIRC, but there were some complications early on. You can read more about it here:
Molnupiravir was initially heralded by public-health officials as a game-changer for COVID-19, but full clinical-trial data showed lower-than-expected efficacy.
www.nature.com
It is incredibly frustrating that we don't have good early interventions for most respiratory viruses. That's why vaccination is important.
I tend to think the overlap between political affiliation, poverty, obesity, and health outcomes is extremely important, because there is absolutely aa political element to the response, how leaders talked about the importance of our response, which leaders spread misinformation or tried to cut funding to rural healthcare networks. I keep hoping that by bringing it up maybe people will see how good responses and a strong investment in our health infrastructure benefits us all.