> His point is we have 364 days a year to address obesity, but - in practice - the medical community waits until the last day and tries to develop a vaccine that will allow us to stay overweight and just kill the germ.

That is a quite controversial claim and one I hope he did not make. Do you seriously mean we should not have developed a vaccine because fat people dying would have been preferrable? If we had not developed a vaccine I do not think people would have changed their habits, more overweight people would just have died.

The medical community has taken overweight very seriously and a lot of money has been put into developing weight loss drugs but it is not like CDC can magically make people eat better.

> Do you seriously mean we should not have developed a vaccine because fat people dying would have been preferrable?

I really have no idea how you could read that from those words? He's saying he wishes we had been more proactive in tackling obesity prior to the pandemic.

As you say, yes, they already do a lot, so it's still quite misguided, but still very far from how you were framing it.