It didn’t have to be this way.
The condemnations keep coming four days after security officers escorted five diabetes experts out of the American Diabetes Association meeting in New Orleans for handing out copies of an editorial criticizing federal cuts to biomedical research. Expelling the doctors and scientists has shocked people in the field, and the ADA’s communications explaining it have only made matters worse, leaders in diabetes research and practice told STAT.
The organization’s aggressive response to members protesting policies espoused by the Trump administration and Jay Bhattacharya, the National Institutes of Health director who was originally the conference’s keynote speaker before backing out, alarmed longtime ADA members who fear for not just the organization’s integrity, but also for diabetes care and science.
“To me, it was inconceivable,” John Buse, a former ADA president, co-author of the editorial, and editor of ADA’s journal Diabetes Care, where it was published. “Now, it wasn’t inconceivable that somebody from the ADA might have approached and said ‘This is not cool, please don’t do this,’ but it was shocking to me that they deployed the police.”
ADA issued a series of statements over the next two days that defended its actions, but they only made matters worse, Buse and other long-term ADA members said.
