Elderly people, smokers, and patients with cardiovascular disease or obesity are at a greater risk for severe COVID‐19 (Chakravarty et al., 2020; Hamer et al., 2020; Nishiga et al., 2020), and these patients, and relevant model animals, have been found to have increased expression of respiratory and cardiovascular ACE2 (Cai et al., 2020; Somineni et al., 2014). Here, ACE2 is linked to obesity due to melanocortin 4 receptor deficiency.