Crap. Scotts mad

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Everybody is at the ADA conference in New Orleans. Not me. I was just curious what happened, so I wrote to one of our 'betics this morning…

" Late, late last night (I think I was asleep), I think the BBC broadcast a blurb that two of you got in some trouble in New Orleans. It wasn’t anything serious, but I smiled because some diabetics somewhere started so much trouble that they made international news.

It was doctors! Doctors started trouble. Those crazy cats! It was over research funding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNbBDrceCy8

:joy: :joy: If anybody gets the title of that paper they were pushing, I’ll read it because the police confiscated it and that’s hilarious. Behave yourselves today, diabetes criminals."

**Then I had a busy day. I come back in the eavening. **
Scott had written this,

"So the ADA may have thought that what Yale University historian Tim Snyder has called “obeying in advance,” was good for the ADA, but it makes the org look cowardly, craven and collaborationist.

This is unlikely to be viewed positively within the scientific community."

Fred Ledley had written,

"…diabetes researchers, including the editor of a leading journal, were removed from the field’s premier conference in New Orleans on Friday morning, after handing out copies of an editorial criticizing the Trump administration’s “dismantling” of the biomedical research enterprise.”

“the incident occurred outside a conference hall where a keynote address had originally been scheduled to be given by Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, at a gathering organized by the American Diabetes Association. A group of about 10 researchers, including some of the field’s leaders, were quietly handing out printouts of an editorial published in Diabetes Care, a journal the association publishes, according to three of the participants. Security and police told them to leave at the direction of event organizers…” by Carolyn Johnson at the The Washington Post"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/06/05/diabetes-researchers-ousted-conference-after-criticizing-trump/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzgwNjMyMDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzgyMDE0Mzk5LCJpYXQiOjE3ODA2MzIwMDAsImp0aSI6ImEyZmMwMGIwLTI0YTQtNDU5ZS05NzgzLWM0ZjZmODVhYjhjYiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9oZWFsdGgvMjAyNi8wNi8wNS9kaWFiZXRlcy1yZXNlYXJjaGVycy1vdXN0ZWQtY29uZmVyZW5jZS1hZnRlci1jcml0aWNpemluZy10cnVtcC8ifQ.aIc_fnWWf0Xd7x5WmnWCGFvkO7cD8oxNtcfA1xCQOAY

What does all this mean, Spies? I don’t understand.

This research stuff has gotten super political, but putting that aside, I think one of these docs was from the University of Minnesota. What was his name? That’s my hood. I need that name. But I can’t access the articles a 2nd time w/o paying. Stupid paywall!

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Here it is…

" A video taken by MedPage Today shows Kelly, a pediatric obesity expert from Minnesota, being shoved by an officer wearing a badge of a local Constable’s office, with Louisiana State Police following close behind. A plainclothes security agent rips the editorials from Kahn’s hands."

Crap.

Crap.
This is bad for business somehow.
This morning the original video was unadulterated. The Minnesotan yells, “I’m being censored,” which was funny. But the new orleans music they overlayed on it is also funny.

I don’t really understand what all this is about, but whatever it is, it’s unhelpful somehow. I feel glad that it’s a doctor and not a diabetic. Crap. What are my guys up to? Maybe I should stop egging on the doctors. Minnesota is already worked up about the feds. Minnesotans have a bunch of pent up energy all the time from being snowed in for so many months. I need to be more sensitive torwards my community and maybe take a break from pouring gas on the fire. It’s cultural - we are calm & polite & self deprecating, and we just rage out. We call it, “Going all Viking Berserker.”

“Viking Berserker” is slang for a mental health condition that is common to the Finnish. It’s actually called Explosive Rage Syndrome…maybe. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m worried my state is going to explode during the elections. But I don’t have any idea how to prevent it.

I’ve been trying. I think I’ve had some success. But there have also been some real failures to talk people down.

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These are my questions:

QUESTION 1.) I feel like the feds cut research money across the board. I think they cut everyone. I think they were looking for places where money was potentially draining out of the system into neferious rat holes of nothingness. I feel ike they found a couple of those places, but it was probably WAY more hassle than it was worth. Despite that, if you sent a professional lobbyists down to their offices and asked them to give the money back a couple of times, they did.

TRUE/FALSE

I have follow up questions. Like, did childhood cancer keep all their funding? Did research for illnesses without professional lobbyists lose funding? This guy was a childhood obesity pediatrician/researcher. Is that why he lost funding? No professional lobbyists? Maybe he didn’t fly to DC and ask for the money back? would that have worked? I feel like when the money dried up, the feds wanted to see a guy physically show up and say, “Please gimmie my money back,” so they knew it wasn’t draining into some rat hole somewhere. Is that summary valid?

QUESTION #2.) What does he mean by, “Researchers & phsycians rise up!”

The Tik Tok was the best, but I can’t find it.

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Here’s the paper: https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/49/6/901/164764/Misguided-Brushes-of-a-Pen-Continue-to-Dismantle

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I have only been to ADA once but the one time I went as I recall it as fairly open with most anyone who wanted to do so passing things out. Mostly junk, but also papers and making connections etc. I realize they were unauthorized, and that is an issue, but police? Give me a break. Also no offense, but no one was committing heresy here. This was well published research. The ADA should be less afraid of who they offend, and be more afraid of not speak truth. Form the sounds of it - it was truth.

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That’s helpful experience to know about, @Rphil2. I’ve never attended an ADA conference.

I still haven’t read the paper because I got busy today, but it’s waiting at kinkos for me to pick up. I only just glanced at it and it WAS pretty political. But it linked to other papers they wrote, so I kinda think it needs to be evaluated within a body of work. There’s a lot of vaccine stuff (which is not exactly ADA’s area of focus), but it bleeds into the Indian Health Service (IHS), which IS heavily involved with diabetes.

I can see both sides. The story is creating social media chaos. My initial response was that the doctors are trying to create advocacy organizations and find their voices. I want to support that. They are WAY behind the patient community on this. They do not have the sophisticated infrastructure, organizational power, or experience that our community has. They are like babys, in that way - a little naive, a little over enthusiastic, but well intentioned and with the potential for growth. I dont want to discourage the doctors, but I need to keep an eye on them. They make boo boos sometimes.

Frankly, you don’t bring your problem to the executive branch until you have done everything else in your power to solve it. That takes years. Have they done that? No, because this issue just popped up within the last couple of years. In another couple of years, it will resolve on its own. For that reason, I classify this as a boo boo out of the doctors. But I’m not gonna harsh them. Some guys just can’t read the room. It will be OK. No harm, no foul. They are trying to find their voice as a community. That’s tough. You need to talk to a lot of people in your community in order to do that. That takes years.

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Now lets talk about my boo boo.

I can tell that members of government have read portions of what I have written to the federal agencies. Or, more likley, some portions of the arguments I make, have been relayed to them. They liked those arguments and used them out of context, in the context of vaccination.

If you have ever heard your own words, a particular thing that you have said over and over again for 20 years, come out Robert Kennedy’s mouth, you might have felt a little uncomfortable. Know that I am here for you. You might have thought, “Uh oh, he has an unquenchable interest in healthcare. I have an unquenchable interest in healthcare. What I wrote interested him.”

Sparing you the details, this mess is not completley NOT our fault. In our/my defense, politicians take stuff out of context all the time when it suits them, without putting in the time and effort to really understand what they are talking about. That’s a constant peril. Also, you just shouldn’t take medical advice from someone who is not a doctor. I am not a doctor. Robert Kennedy is not a doctor. Buyer beware. The doctors have to combat all the misinformation floating around. That’s their job. But they have to kinda do it on an individual, patient by patient way while providing care. I think that is a really difficult task. I think they have reason to feel really frusterated about it.

Maybe I should write to the doctors in a little bit of detail about the logic behing what is happening. But I don’t really trust them because of the tendency for political grandstanding. Maybe I can write in an editorial way, a response to their paper, in a way that helps them. One of the difficulties with writing to doctors though is that they just completley blow patients off. That is often a problem. They can, as a community, have a tendency to be a bunch of rude ‘know it alls.’ People like that are super tough to collaborate with.

The doctors believe patients, particularly children, are being harmed. That’s entiley possible. But it’s also possible that harm can still be prevented. Harm is not certain yet. They believe that they are doing patient advocacy. Are they doing it in the right way? I would say, “no.” Not in this case. You should always be apolitical because political winds come and go. They blow this way and that. You want to advocate for things that hold true no matter which way the wind of today blows. That’s more effective.

One option for them is to go in and explain the details of the medical ethics, within this context. Policy work is about educating your representatives. They aren’t doing that. They are attacking. They are making personal attacks. That’s not effective and stands to provoke additional harm.

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They appologized to the reearchers, @Rphil2. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/121701?xid=NL_breakingnewsalert_2026-06-10&mh=cff4ecd8dd763684b34e02df75b5b33b&zdee=gAAAAABqJWiJD281uOoO3AQF1OEON9vSZK4Dx_91RQisPxEqGP6uIF75OxHiUXTBiNTIKLYHRN9zPh1cKg4nKemmskNGdmdI-SCSNuhtClzTuELDsRe1y20%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ADAapology_061026&utm_term=NL_Daily_Breaking_News

The big unknown here was, “Where they being obnoxious?” Hard to say because we weren’t there, and as you say, it’s not unusual to hand out literature.

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There is some additional information. The article they were passing out was an opinion item that published in the ADA flagship publication. This was not some insurgent article or even an item ADA had not preapproved. It was approved, and published by the very people who asked them to leave.

So why were they told to leave? Were they being escorted out to keep an unauthorized document out of the gathering? That seems unlikely, Had they violated some embargo on publication? No, it was already in the public discussion space.

It seems that they might have violated two issues. 1. they might have violated the copywirte on the articile (this is likely) or even more likely they were embarssamet to the main speaker.

Regardless the final results is not yet known. I suspect it may not be fully known for many months to come, as the reverberations continue. More officials have resigned since the incident and no doubt others will refuse to join since the controversy will steer people away. We will hope that no matter the outcome high quality science will still be practiced.

We need scientific inquiry not nonsense like this.

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There is definitley a fight between NIH and the feds. I saw this today.

I find all of this super difficult to navigate.

Like, imagine that you are Kennedy and you say that a lot of work is bogus and unreliable. Imagine that you have personal skepticism about vaccinations and medication efficacy. Imagine that you are recieving a lot of information from the diabetic patient community about the recent medical device recalls. It would be very easy to draw analogy between medical device failures and possible/suspected failures in more traditional medical treatments.

It’s tricky to navigate because you can’t make a long list of medical system failures and then expect people to just trust that the system is operating as desired in other contexts.

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This is just another nasty hammer being swung against science. Look at the instigators mentions. Laura Loomer, among them. When the entire ecosphere depends on satisfying conspiracy theorists anything is possible.

The key here is to watch the outcome not the indictments. The scientists are foreign and easy targets. Wait and see the outcome.When the outcome happens we will see if the scientists are convicted or harassed out of the profession.

Talent drain is real.

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True. It takes forever for this stuff to play out in court.

Holy crap.

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We already know that there is a lot of academic fraud. I’ve been discussing that with a diabetic medical director for some years now. I hope it doesn’t extend into NIH.

I’m reviewing some materials related to that, and Adam Smith’s widley ignored book - The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Maybe that helps.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-there-so-much-fraud-in-academia/

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-does-a-composer-feel-after-the-world-premiere/

I need to be able to talk about why integrity and medical ethics matter economically, I think. Why does integrity in the markets matter to diabetics? That’s really what this whole mess is about. .

The problem is that they are finding fraud everywhere - even in defense. One of the problems has always been that when I walk into industry, I find fraud everywhere.

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I’ve never read Smith. Of course I know he underpins capitalism just as the Plimsoll Line underpins ships. I shall read, interspersed of course with my re-reading of Vance.

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Help me out if you come up with any good PR that helps us.

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I can only offer humour. I can’t spell that humor because it reminds me of a Clockwork Orange. Sorry, that’s aqueous humour.

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