Rumours of organ harvesting in China go back a while, notably with regard to members of the persecuted Falun Gong sect. Since the 1980s organs have been removed from executed prisoners, but the current level of transplants now far outstrips the number of executions. So where are these organs coming from? In the West long waiting times of months or years are the order of the day for those needing an organ transplant, but in China waiting times are minimal - a matter of days. Could the source of these organs be detainees? It's not just the Falun Gong nowadays: there's also the huge number of Uighurs - over a million - held in "re-education" camps in the most brutal conditions.
According to Martin Elliott, a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon with a long professional involvement in transplantation, the evidence is overwhelming. Both the China Tribunal and the later Uyghur Tribunal - people's tribunals looking at overlooked past or ongoing atrocities - found it "beyond reasonable doubt" that this organ harvesting was indeed happening on a massive scale.
The China Tribunal heard a great deal of evidence from previous camp inmates not only of torture, but also of “medical tests.” These comprised blood tests, for which consent was not obtained, no purpose given, and no results reported; physical examination; and ultrasound scans, again without obvious rhyme or reason. To perform successful transplantation, the tissues of the donor and recipient must be matched to minimize the chance of rejection. Blood tests are necessary. Ultrasound scans give a good indication of structural integrity and health of an organ. Inmates were understandably very uneasy about these tests. They were never told their purpose, and some of their peers had “disappeared.” They put two and two together. We asked ourselves if there might be another rational explanation to test the inmates (a search for infection, for example, to see if they were “fit” for torture), but none was forthcoming. We concluded that forced organ harvesting had taken place and that the donor pool was likely made up of camp inmates, largely the Falun Gong.
The Uyghur Tribunal heard remarkably similar evidence, but on an even larger scale. Under direct orders from President Xi Jinping, hundreds of thousands (perhaps well over a million) Uyghurs had been detained in camps in Xinjiang in appalling conditions of cruelty, depravity, and inhumanity. Many had been tortured in the most brutal ways and over long periods of time. Inmates of both sexes had been raped or subjected to extreme sexual violence by police and by people who were paid to carry out such attacks in the camps. Solitary confinement was commonplace.
Detainees were forced to take drugs that affected reproduction, and pregnant women were forced to have abortions, even in the late stages of pregnancy. Like the Falun Gong, Uyghurs were forced to have blood tests and other medical examinations without explanation. Many people were “disappeared.” While there was no direct evidence of forced organ harvesting, it is suspected....
These two people’s tribunals have judged the PRC to be guilty of heinous crimes against large numbers of its people, not only abusing them but also using them as an extractive resource without consent: a resource for labor, a resource for physical gratification, and a resource for organs....
For the unethical officials in the CCP, a large population of imprisoned people offers an extraordinary research resource of potential human subjects. If consent to participate in studies is not necessary and authority is total, then anything is possible. It is common knowledge now that China has created a massive DNA database of the Uyghur population, nominally for security purposes. But what else might it facilitate? Such large-scale genomic analysis is currently beyond the means of Western scientists and pharmaceutical companies, but as the search for more personalized, targeted therapies evolves, it is this DNA data which could provide clues for new agents. Once the drugs have been designed, safety and efficacy trials could easily be carried out on the detained population. Xenotransplantation is also a reality now: Witness the recent pig heart transplant into a human in the United States. But what if gene-modified pigs could be farmed, and you had a large, detained population of humans who could be included in transplant trials at scale?
I do not need to remind readers of this magazine of the horrors of medical experimentation in concentration camps. But the potential for a repeat nightmare at scale exists today in China, and we must be vigilant. As Global Rights Compliance has proposed, it is vital that organizations—academic, medical, and business—that work with equivalent Chinese (or other nations’) institutions do three things: First, establish a human rights commitment to prevent involvement in unethical practice (including transplantation); second, conduct human rights due diligence processes to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for unethical medical or transplantation risks; and third, disengage from any relationship where such unethical organ transplantation is not preventable, mitigatable, or remediable.
Transplant medicine in the West relies on transparent data sharing between donor and recipient teams, with relevant donor and recipient data being held centrally by a national authority. Prioritization is equitable and waiting lists are managed. Risk stratification is made possible. There is a solid audit trail, meaning that the origin of the donor organ is both clear and confirmed to be ethical. It is important to be able to track such data back to the donor if diseases develop in the recipient. Such auditable transparency is what the international medical research community must demand of China.
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