ADA Says Its Investigation of Meeting Controversy Isn’t Done Yet

Just a few days after the American Diabetes Association (ADA) announced that it completed its investigation into events that occurred at its annual meeting in June, it now says the work isn’t done.

Over the Labor Day weekend, the ADA issued a statement that its audit and governance committee, which conducted the investigation at the request of the board of directors, will provide “additional information” to the board that “may clarify or correct the information previously provided and could result in further actions by the Board.”

The committee “has notified the Board that its initial findings did not take into account the full breadth and depth of [its] investigation and certain interviews that were conducted after the initial findings were prepared,” according to the statement.

It’s not clear exactly which interviews the statement is referring to. Steven Kahn, MBChB, said he and the four other ADA members who were removed from the annual meeting were finally interviewed individually not long before the report’s conclusions were announced. They had previously been requesting a group interview but finally decided to give individual interviews to ensure their voices were heard, Kahn said.

On the same day the ADA released its statement, the committee also emailed the five attendees who had been removed — Kahn, Maureen Gannon, PhD, Aaron Kelly, PhD, Justin Ryder, PhD, and Desmond Schatz, MD — saying it “will be sharing additional information and potentially further recommendations” with the board.

That email did not give a definitive timeline, but the committee said it “look[s] forward to sending what will be our final report to the full Board in the weeks ahead.”

“It seems that people haven’t bought into [the initial report], and now they’re back-tracking,” Kahn told MedPage Today. None of the five attendees received a copy of the original report.

MedPage Today asked ADA which interviews were not included in the original report, what the additional actions might be, and what the anticipated timeline is. However, the organization said in an email it did not “have any additional information beyond what was shared.”

ADA did not release the report in full. Instead, it announced the findings in a press release, concluding that the five attendees were removed for violating the meeting code of conduct while handing out copies of an editorial, and that police who removed them did nothing wrong.

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, ADA CEO Charles 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.