You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Big Ten Football to Resume with Plans to Study Hearts of Student-Athletes Infected with COVID-19

HeadlineSep 17, 2020

The United States reported nearly 1,000 new coronavirus fatalities on Wednesday, with the official U.S. death toll nearing 197,000 — by far the worst in the world. Nearly 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed over 24 hours, many of them driven by large outbreaks on college campuses.

On Wednesday, members of the Big Ten college athletics conference reversed course and said the fall football season will proceed this year — even as they acknowledged many players will contract COVID-19 as a result. President Trump celebrated the announcement, tweeting, “It is my great honor to have helped!!!”

Big Ten institutions said they would establish a cardiac registry for infected student-athletes, writing, “The registry and associated data will attempt to answer many of the unknowns regarding the cardiac manifestations in COVID-19 positive elite athletes.”

In response, sports law professor Alicia Jessop tweeted, “The U.S. has an ugly history when it comes to medical research and the Black community — from the Tuskegee Syphilis study to the use of Henrietta Lacks’ cancer cells unknowingly by her. If the Big Ten did not receive INFORMED consent from players, it will add to this litany.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top