Police Remove Diabetes Researchers From Conference

Police removed five researchers from the annual American Diabetes Association meeting in New Orleans on Friday as they distributed copies of an editorial criticizing the Trump administration for decimating America’s biomedical research enterprise, MedPage Today first reported.

One of the researchers, Steve Kahn, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington, co-authored the editorial in Diabetes Care, which he edits. He told The Washington Post he planned to hand out 1,000 copies to encourage researchers “who feel their livelihoods are threatened by what [the National Institutes of Health] is doing to science” to fight back.

Video taken by MedPage Today shows police confronting the researchers, trying to snatch the editorials and shoving Aaron Kelly, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

“They physically grabbed us, forced us out of the conference center and now are telling us we can no longer attend this meeting,” Kelly said. “They’re taking our lanyards. It really has come to this in America. Censorship is real.”

Kahn was supposed to present at the conference, which ends Monday, but will not be allowed to, The Washington Post reported. He told MedPage Today that after police ejected him and his colleagues, they were warned, “if we come in again we will be arrested.”

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya was scheduled to give the conference’s keynote address but pulled out at the last minute; one of his senior advisers filled in instead.

In a statement to The Washington Post, the ADA said that five people were removed “for violating the conference code of conduct, which they agreed to during the registration process. Our conference code of conduct expects that all participants will conduct themselves in a professional and respectful manner … These attendees were escorted out by our onsite event security because they demonstrated behavior not consistent with this code of conduct.”