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‘Health insurance industry is equal opportunity evil,’ Roxane Gay says
Rutgers University professor Roxane Gay called for the liberation of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering the United Healthcare CEO, at a fat liberation panel hosted at Harvard Medical School.
When asked a question about the healthcare industry, Gay responded, “Free Luigi, for one,” according to a video of the panel posted to X.
Mangione is on trial after allegedly murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024.
Gay, who serves as an artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School, also told the audience, “The health insurance industry is equal opportunity evil.”
“They are terrible for thin people, for fat people, for white people, for black people … They just want to prioritize profit over bodies and health,” she said.
Further, she criticized people who “do their own research” about vaccines and “look for people who are going to affirm their worldview.”
Gay serves as the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She is the cousin of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who resigned from her position following criticism for numerous plagiarism allegations.
Panelists at the event, titled “Against the Pathology of Unruly Bodies,” discussed “the intersection of fatness and healthcare,” according to a description of the panel on Instagram.
They also discussed “the way fat bodies are pathologized by medical professionals with grave consequences, and how medical professionals can more ethically treat fat patients as people rather than as problems to be solved,” the post states.
Several X users criticized the event and Gay’s comments.
Independent journalist Benjamin Ryan called the event a “Masterclass of Medical Misinformation and Denialism About Obesity’s Health Risks,” in a post on X.
He noted that another panelist, author Da’Shaun Harrison, said “Fascism, is the very foundation of the Western society, the very foundation of the U.S., through the transatlantic slave trade and through colonialism.”
Harrison said “body fascism” is society’s rigid set of rules for how bodies should look and function, used as a way to punish fat people.
Ryan said it is “remarkable that Harvard Medical School (where my dad did his surgical residency and fellowship, incidentally) is putting on a panel this rife with misinformation.”
Citing the National Library of Medicine, he added that “Obesity is associated with a higher risk of death that worsens the fatter someone gets, as much as the Harvard Medical School panelists would prefer to deny it.”
MORE: Nearly half of young adults call Luigi Mangione’s actions ‘acceptable’ in new poll
