ADA Says Booted Meeting Attendees Violated Code of Conduct

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) said it concluded its review of events that occurred during its annual meeting in June, but those who were thrown out of the meeting aren’t satisfied with the answer.

ADA hasn’t made its report public, but announced the findings in a press release. It described the review as “independent,” conducted by its audit and governance committee at the request of its board of directors.

It concluded that the five ADA members who were booted from the meeting while handing out copies of an editorial critical of the Trump administration — who became known as the New Orleans five — were “removed due to conduct that disrupted the event and violated the ADA Attendee Code of Conduct.”

The content of the editorial being distributed, which had been previously published in the ADA’s flagship journal Diabetes Care, was “unrelated to their removal,” according to the press release.

Also, there was “no evidence that a call was placed to the New Orleans Police Department by anyone from the ADA,” the release stated, noting that the officers had been contracted by the event security provider, which “took appropriate actions in response to the disruptions.”

Steven Kahn, MBChB, the lead author of the editorial who was removed from the meeting, charged that the review wasn’t truly independent because two of the committee members are on the ADA’s board of directors.

Kahn also said that it’s “unclear what aspects of the code of conduct we in fact violated.”

He added that he and the four other attendees removed from the meeting — Maureen Gannon, PhD, Aaron Kelly, PhD, Justin Ryder, PhD, and Desmond Schatz, MD — have not seen the report despite requesting a copy.

“In the end, very few answers have been provided and lots of questions remain,” Kahn said in an email to MedPage Today.

David Nathan, MD, a renowned diabetes expert at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said he was interviewed by the committee and told them that ADA “behaved shamefully” during the events of the annual meeting, but believes those comments were not taken to heart.

“I was clearly not effective, as the press release suggests that the ‘independent review’ is only going to be a whitewash of the events that began on June 5,” Nathan told MedPage Today. “I fear for the survival of this once admirable institution.”

According to the ADA release, the committee interviewed 28 people who were involved in or had firsthand knowledge of the events of June 5, including the five attendees who were removed. It also reviewed videos, emails, text messages, news articles, and editorials to “develop a comprehensive factual understanding of the events.”

ADA said it will now implement new initiatives to “strengthen how we serve the scientific community,” including improving internal and external communications, enhancing guidance for event staff and volunteers, and strengthening policies and procedures related to large meetings, among other initiatives.

In an op-ed in STAT, ADA CEO Charles Henderson emphasized his organization’s work on pushing back on federal funding cuts to diabetes research.

“The ADA has also made numerous public statements calling out the current and former administrations for cutting diabetes prevention programs, reducing research support, and decreasing healthcare coverage,” Henderson wrote. “We intend to keep making those comments when federal actions undercut the diabetes community.”

“What often goes untold is that most proposed cuts to diabetes research have thus far not materialized,” he added. “Diabetes research funding has been kept largely whole against those proposals, because our community fought for it.”

MedPage Today broke the story that Kahn and colleagues were removed from the meeting, and published a video showing security officers and police confronting the researchers on June 5. A local police officer pushed one of the attendees, with Louisiana State Police following close behind, and a security officer forcibly removed a stack of editorials from Kahn’s hands.

A few days later, two ADA leaders resigned from the organization: President-Elect Jennifer Green, MD, and Scientific Sessions Planning Committee Chair Mark Atkinson, PhD.

On June 10, Henderson issued a video apologizing to the five attendees who were removed from the meeting, and to the broader diabetes research community.

Just over a month later, ADA declined to publish a packet of editorials about the events of the annual meeting in Diabetes Care, of which Kahn remains editor in chief. Instead, the journal’s deputy editors published the packet on Zenodo, the science repository developed in 2013 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, to share everything from preprints and datasets to presentation slides.