Before the deadline for submission of Policy Statements for the 2006 APHA Annual Meeting, Bob Gould and I submitted a statement on behalf of the APHA Peace Caucus urging the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.  The statement was rejected by the Joint Policy Committee (JPC) on the ground that it duplicated existing APHA policy.  We appealed that decision to the APHA Executive Committee, which upheld our appeal.  The statement was resoundingly approved by the Governing Council.  At the start of that Annual Meeting, Bob and I submitted a late-breaking statement expressing opposition to a U.S. attack on Iran.  That statement was also rejected by the JPC, but, because it was a late-breaker, there was no way we could appeal this decision to the Executive Board. As a result, the statement was not discussed at the 2006 Public Hearings or by the Governing Council.

Because we believed in early 2007 that an APHA statement expressing opposition to a U.S. attack on Iran was even more urgently needed, we submitted a somewhat modified statement before the deadline for submission of Policy Statements for the 2007 APHA Annual Meeting.  That statement was again rejected by the JPC.  We appealed that decision to the Executive Board, which rejected our appeal.  The vote was criticized by several members of the Executive Board because (1) members of JPC spoke at the Executive Board meeting in favor of rejection of the statement while the initiators of the statement were not invited to participate and (2) it was not clear that a quorum was present for the vote.  The question was raised again at the next meeting of the Executive Board, at which the appeal was upheld. The statement was discussed at the 2007 Public Hearings and debated by the Governing Council, which approved it by a 70-30 margin.  The APHA press release following the Annual Meeting mentioned several of the statements that had been adopted but failed to mention the Iran statement.

Many APHA members, including many members of the Medical Care Section, expressed concern about the process. They questioned (1) why the statement had been rejected by the JPC when there had been no previous statement explicitly opposing an attack on Iran; (2) why the JPC had refused to permit the statement to be discussed at the Public Hearings and debated by the Governing Council; (3) the role of APHA staff in the decisions to reject the statement and to omit it from the post-Annual Meeting press release; and (4) the process followed by the Executive Board in discussing the appeal and in rejecting it.  Overall, there was concern about the processes followed by the JPC in reviewing new Policy Statements and in the archiving of past policy statements; it appears to many members of the MC Section and of other elements of APHA that these processes are characterized by neglect of transparency, democratic process and a bottom-up approach to problem-solving and governance, all of which are important to public health and which APHA has highly valued in the past but have been undermined in recent years.

 Vic Sidel, Governing Councillor, APHA Past-President