Lanyards Confiscated, Researchers Removed
On Friday in New Orleans, five scientists were physically escorted out of the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting. Their offense was distributing printed copies of an editorial – a peer-reviewed piece already published in the journal Diabetes Care on April 29 – to attendees gathered near a scheduled NIH speaking session.
The editorial in question criticizes the Trump administration’s ongoing cuts and attacks on scientific research. It had already passed editorial review and been published through standard academic channels. Handing out reprints of it at a medical conference cost five researchers their credentials and their access to the event.
Who Was Removed and Why It Matters
The five ejected researchers are not fringe figures. Steven Kahn is a professor of medicine at the University of Washington and serves as editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care – the same journal that published the editorial he co-authored. Desmond Schatz, a former president of the ADA itself, is based at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Aaron Kelly is a pediatrics professor at the University of Minnesota. Justin Ryder is affiliated with Northwestern University, and Irl Hirsch is also from the University of Washington.
The five had positioned themselves outside a room where NIH director Jay Bhattacharya had been scheduled to deliver remarks. Bhattacharya ultimately canceled his appearance, and a different NIH official spoke in his place. The researchers were distributing the reprints as attendees filed in – before any speech, before any disruption, in a corridor of a conference center.
What followed, according to Kelly’s account, was not a polite request to stop. “They physically grabbed us, forced us out of the conference center, and now are telling us we can no longer attend this meeting,” Kelly told MedPage Today, which first reported the incident. Conference staff also took their lanyards – the physical credentials that grant access to a professional medical gathering these researchers would ordinarily have every reason to attend.
The Document at the Center of It
The editorial distributed by Kahn and his colleagues was not a protest flyer. It was a reprint of a formally published academic article from Diabetes Care, a journal published under the ADA’s own umbrella. The piece appeared on April 29 and took direct aim at federal interference with scientific institutions. Passing out a copy of it at a diabetes conference – one organized by the same association that publishes the journal – is, by any conventional reading, an act of academic speech, not misconduct.
The ADA has not publicly explained its decision to remove the researchers. What is clear is that Jay Bhattacharya, whose scheduled appearance drew the researchers to that corridor in the first place, was not present when the ejections happened. His cancellation meant the scientists were removed from a hallway outside a talk that never occurred, for distributing a paper that already exists in the public scientific record.
A Conference Floor as a Contested Space
Kelly’s statement after the ejection was pointed. “Censorship is real. America needs to stand up. Scientists, stand up. Physicians, stand up,” he told MedPage Today. Those words now circulate in a media environment where federal research funding cuts, agency restructuring, and political pressure on scientific bodies have already reshaped the conditions under which researchers work.
The setting adds a particular edge to the incident. The ADA’s annual meeting is not a peripheral gathering – it is one of the primary venues where diabetes researchers, clinicians, and institutions converge to share findings, hear from federal health officials, and maintain the professional networks that sustain the field. Being barred from it, lanyards physically removed, carries weight beyond symbolism. It affects access to colleagues, sessions, and data that professionals in this space depend on.
Five of those professionals – one of whom literally edits the journal whose reprint got them expelled – are now on record saying they were grabbed and forced out. That is a remarkable sentence to write about an academic medical conference in 2025.
Kahn, as editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care, had co-written the editorial through the same institutional structures the ADA oversees. The organization effectively removed the editor of its own flagship journal from its own flagship conference for distributing his own published work. Whether ADA leadership addresses that contradiction publicly, or says nothing at all, is now the next data point to watch.
Kelly’s lanyards are gone. The editorial is still in the public record.
