According to Al.com, Jeremy Fischer, an ethics and philosophy professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, has resigned over the school's reopening plans, declaring them inadequate to protect people from COVID-19 — and furiously comparing them to the infamous Tuskegee experiment.
"A professor who regularly smokes cigarettes in class would be reprimanded and eventually fired for endangering public health," wrote Fischer. "But as COVID-19 hospitalizations surge in Alabama, classrooms packed tightly with scores of unvaccinated students wearing cheap, ill-fitting masks strike me as a far greater and more urgent danger to the public health than secondhand smoke." He said that the school's decision should be condemned "alongside the 1918 flu and the Tuskegee Study."
The Tuskegee study involved observing the natural progression of syphilis in Black men.
During the course of the study, researchers denied treatment to their test subjects, even though a treatment was available at the time. Instead, the test subjects were lied to, told they were being given a treatment for "bad blood" and allowed to remain sick.
The reopening of schools has become a fraught issue around the country as the Delta variant of COVID-19 has exploded, putting pressure on institutions to require vaccinations. The University of Alabama has ignored a petition from faculty demanding masking and social distancing requirements, and remote work or unpaid leave for those worried for their safety.
