Police dragged five diabetes researchers out before the NIH keynote

The Editor of the Journal Got Ejected for Distributing His Journal

On June 5, 2026, five scientists were removed by police from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans during the American Diabetes Association's annual scientific sessions. The timing was precise: the ejection happened moments before Jay Bhattacharya, Trump's director of the National Institutes of Health, was scheduled to deliver the keynote address. Bhattacharya cancelled. A senior NIH adviser stepped in.

What the Researchers Were Actually Handing Out

The five — Steven Kahn (editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care and University of Washington professor), former ADA president Desmond Schatz, Aaron Kelly of the University of Minnesota, Justin Ryder of Northwestern, and Irl Hirsch of UW — were distributing reprints of an editorial published April 29 in Diabetes Care. The editorial condemned the Trump administration's freezing of at least $450 million in NIH research grants, $66 million of which came directly out of diabetes-specific funding. It was not a preprint. It was not a rejected submission. It was content published by the ADA's own journal, at the ADA's own conference.

The ADA cited a code-of-conduct rule against "protesting" as grounds for removal. Aaron Kelly told MedPage Today: "They physically grabbed us, forced us out of the conference center, and now are telling us we can no longer attend this meeting. They're taking our lanyards."

What the Thread Said — and Didn't

The HN discussion in the thread split cleanly on the framing. A high-karma commenter was direct:

"Headline is weird. It's not a copyright thing, as I had assumed. It was because it was an editorial criticizing how the administration is running the NIH." — longtime HN participant

Another commenter flagged the logical contradiction at the heart of the ADA's position:

"Some questioned how handing out reprints of an editorial published in the ADA's own journal, at the ADA's own annual conference, could be construed as a violation of that code." — HN commenter quoting the source

A dissenting voice argued the venue had a legitimate interest in order:

"What would happen if everyone who's paper was rejected could just wander around passing it out and pitching it to random passerby's? I think almost everyone who attends conferences would not want that." — HN commenter on conference norms

The problem with that framing: this paper was not rejected. It was the journal's own editorial, accepted and published weeks earlier.

The Principle at Stake

The ADA framing — that distributing a peer-reviewed editorial is "protesting" — sets a precedent that any content inconvenient to a conference sponsor or invited speaker can be suppressed on procedural grounds. What changed here is not copyright law or conference ethics; it's that a scientific society's leadership apparently decided that its own published scientific opinion could be treated as contraband inside its own building. The Streisand Effect is already running: the editorial is being downloaded and shared far beyond whatever reach a few reprints would have achieved.