Biden administration pressed on why advocacy for healthier lifestyles isn't part of COVID mitigation strategy

In Thursday's White House press conference, press secretary Jen Psaki was questioned on why the Biden administration has not included a push for healthier lifestyles in their COVID-19 response.

"We have seen an effort from few other countries to include a push for living a healthier lifestyle as part of its pandemic response. There's been studies indicating efforts like weight loss to help prevent some of the more serious effects of COVID-19," said Shelby Talcott of the Daily Caller.

"Why isn't the President included a push for healthier lifestyles in his COVID messaging, in addition to pushing Americans to get vaccinated?" she asked.

"First, we rely on the advice and guidance of our public health officials on how to best protect yourself from hospitalization and death from COVID. And we know that the most effective steps anyone can take are to get vaccinated, get boosted, wear a mask, and those are the steps that we're certainly focusing on. If they decide those are steps that are warranted and have a huge impact on outcomes and they want to share those we'd certainly echo those, but we really refer to our public health officials and experts," responded Psaki.

"So there hasn't been advice from he public health officials that the president's been speaking to?" Talcott asked.

"Again, we do — we do briefings with our public health officials every week, multiple times a week, and I think what's most important to note is what we know is most effective, which is getting vaccinated, getting boosted, wearing a mask, And those are the — those are the components and the steps that we're really focusing our attention on encouraging," Psaki said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, the agency which has provided most of the COVID-19 guidance throughout the pandemic, they state that "adults with excess weight are at even greater risk during the COVID-19 pandemic."

They state that being overweight or obese "can make you more likely to get severely ill from COVID-19. The risk of severe COVID-19 illness increases sharply with elevated BMI."

They also state that individuals identified as being obese may have triple the risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19.

In addition, they state that obesity is linked to impaired immune function, and a decreased lung capacity and reserve that can make ventilation more difficult.

"More than 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in the United States between the beginning of the pandemic and November 18, 2020. Models estimate that 271,800 (30.2 percent) of these hospitalizations were attributed to obesity," the CDC wrote.

Additionally, children who are obese were found win a study to be 3.07 times higher risk of hospitalization, and 1.42 times higher risk of severe illness, according to the CDC.