NFL Reportedly Tried To Influence Government Concussion Study

Efforts by the National Football League to cover up the long-term impact of players’ mental health relating to the violence of the sport have now been taken to a whole new level, according to ESPN’s “Outside the Lines.”

NFL Reportedly Tried To Influence Government Concussion Study

“At least a half-dozen top NFL health officials waged an improper, behind-the-scenes campaign last year to influence a major U.S. government research study on football and brain disease, congressional investigators have concluded in a new report obtained by ‘Outside the Lines’,” the 91-page report read.

Several lawsuits have previously been filed against the league due to the alleged recurrence of concussions and brain trauma sustained by players, manifested in the form of neurodegenerative diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which can result from repeated blows to the head.

This appears to be the largest effort thus far by the NFL to influence a scientific study on concussions surrounding the sport of football.

The report continued: “The 91-page report describes how the NFL pressured the National Institutes of Health to strip the $16 million project from a prominent Boston University researcher and tried to redirect the money to members of the league’s committee on brain injuries. The study was to have been funded out of a $30 million “unrestricted gift” the NFL gave the NIH in 2012.”

Once the National Institutes of Health (NIH) decided against removing the individual in question, the NFL itself pulled this funding — a decision that forced taxpayers to foot the bill.

Several former NFL players have committed suicide while afflicted with CTE.

“The NFL was warned that taxpayers would have to bear the cost of the $16 million study and that the NIH would be ‘unable to fund other meritorious research for several years’ if the league backed out,” the report continued. “The NFL offered a last-minute, $2 million payment after an intermediary suggested a partial contribution would ‘help dampen criticism.’ The NIH turned down the offer.”

Incidentally enough, the NFL itself was simultaneously redirecting $16 million in funds in order to come up with its own study on the long-term effects of repeated blows to the head, a study that was evidently going to be tilted in the league’s favor. The study was to have been funded out of a $30 million “unrestricted gift” the NFL gave the NIH in 2012. The league has repeatedly denied that it withheld funding due to objections to Stern, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery and the director of clinical research at Boston University’s CTE Center.

“Once you get anybody who’s heavily involved with the NFL trying to influence what kind of research takes place, you break that chain that guarantees the integrity, and that’s what I think is so crucial here,” U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr (D- New Jersey) told ‘Outside the Lines’. “Fortunately, the NIH didn’t take the bait. It shouldn’t be a rigged game.”

Jeff Miller, NFL executive vice president of health and safety, told investigators that the NFL voiced its concerns through appropriate channels and believed it had done nothing out of the ordinary.

The heated debate over the long-term impact of repetitive brain trauma sustained by current and former football players is surely far from over, and details will undoubtedly continue to emerge. However, one thing remains certain: the NFL’s repeated attempts to influence scientific studies borders on the unethical.