If he was drawing a comparison in terms of total cost as you claim then “not being able to handle them the same way” is like saying that the sun is warm because ice is cold - one has nothing to do with the other. If you really want to fight this windmill you’ve constructed, at least find counter arguments within the same category. A comparison in terms of cost is rooted in numbers, so unless you have some numbers to provide, you have no rebuttal. I’d argue that obesity is costing the public *more* when it comes to cost of treatment, for reasons I will delve into below.
You’re right - the two diseases are not the same. Obesity leads to 4 out of 10 lead causes of death in the U.S. - heart disease (659k annually), cancer (599k annually), stroke (150k annually) and diabetes (87k annually). It’s also a comorbidity in more diseases than I could possibly list, including COVID 19 - it lowers your survival rate of just about anything, even random accidents. Imagine fracturing a bone when you’re 400lbs, Jesus wept. It costs billions every single year, and it’s not going away because there’s no vaccine for being fat.
The contention was made that obesity is not contagious because it’s not caused by a pathogen, but rather by greedily chomping through enough calories to feed a platoon. Science disproves that notion by outlining behavioural mechanisms that make it contagious, much like many other self-destructive behaviours. A lot of young people start smoking because their peers are smoking - it’s the exact same “thought virus”, if you will. I came in to make that point, and that point stands, as you’ve provided no evidence to disprove it (not that you could, the phenomenon is pretty well-established). Obesity puts an enormous strain on public healthcare by directly leading to a myriad of diseases that require long-term care and are often not curable - insulin-dependent diabetes isn’t going away just because you saw the light and changed your diet, you’re stuck with it.
If you *wanted* to issue a mandate against obesity, all you really need is a set of scales in front of every McDonald’s and hand out weight passports. How is that any different than officers with thermometers and vaccine passports, as seen in China? There are people driving around right now with breathalysers in their cars, if you can’t imagine similar measures being waged in the fight against excessive consumption of grease, your imagination isn’t very vivid. Should we do that? No, because that’s an invasive limitation of people’s inherent freedom to do whatever they fancy with their bodies, even if it is self-destructive… kind of like refusing to get vaccinated in spite of overwhelming evidence that the vaccines are safe and effective, and will protect you against a given pathogen to a large extent.
Fat people stay fat because they have fat on their brain, and unless they have a sudden epiphany and realise that breathing has gotten much harder compared to what they remember from their youth, they will continue to overeat, and their mere existence in society will propagate obesity in their social circle. People who refuse to vaccinate because they think vaccines have heavy metals in them or some such nonsense, have lead on their brain. They will not vaccinate regardless of what measures you propose and they will continue to be at an elevated risk of infection, propagating the pathogen in their circle if they do become infected. Both of those groups have the freedom to do so, whether you like it or not.