Back in April I posted about a Tablet article by Martin Elliott, a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon with a long professional involvement in transplantation, on the business of organ harvesting in China.
Since the 1980s organs had been removed from executed prisoners for transplanting, but now the level of transplants is far outstripping 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. Elliott raised concerns about the strong possibility that organ harvesting was an alarming feature of China's treatment of the Uighurs.
Now, again in Tablet, Jacob Lavee and Matthew Robertson provide evidence that doctors in China’s lucrative transplant industry, rather than wait for death before removing organs, in fact sometimes go about it the other way round and kill donors by removing their organs:
Personal accounts and a sampling of clinical reports may have already convinced those who are predisposed to a skeptical view of the Chinese medical system. But until the system of mainstream medical research has put its imprimatur on the topic, the findings will not be legible to medical societies, policymakers, NGOs, or the prestige press. This is what led us to conduct a methodologically rigorous scientific study on the topic, run the gantlet of peer review, and place it in a respected medical journal, the American Journal of Transplantation, in April 2022.
Our core question in that article was simple: Are prisoners who have their hearts removed for transplantation actually dead? This question is based upon the dead donor rule, the most fundamental ethical rule in organ transplantation. The rule states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is formally pronounced dead and that the procurement of organs must not cause the donor’s death.
It's complicated - read the original article for more details - but...
In the end we found incriminating revelations in 71 studies published between 1980 and 2015 and sourced to 56 hospitals (12 military) in 33 cities across 15 provinces. A total of 348 surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and other medical workers or researchers were listed as authors on the papers. In these papers we found that brain death could not have properly been declared, and therefore, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor’s death.
Here’s a choice example from paper 0191 in our appendix: “The donor was intravenously injected with heparin 3mg/kg 1h before the operation … The heartbeat was weak and the myocardium was purple. After assisted ventilation through tracheal intubation, the myocardium turned red and the heartbeat turned strong … The donor heart was extracted with an incision from the 4th intercostal sternum … This incision is a good choice for field operation where the sternum cannot be sawed open without power.” In this admission, the surgeons are explicit that they opened the chest and observed the beating heart of the victim before intubation. In other words, this donor could not have been brain dead.
In other cases, the surgeons inadvertently admit that the victims were not intubated at all, and therefore must have still been breathing at the time. Authors of paper 0173 write: “Before the chest is opened, 100mg of heparin is injected and the mask is pressurized to give oxygen to assist breathing.” Another, paper 0463: “After the donor is confirmed brain dead, 4 cases of tracheal intubation, 3 cases of mask oxygenation, quickly establish artificial respiration, rapid median thoracic dissection …”
Why is this detail so key? Brain death requires that the donor is unable to breathe by themselves. An oxygen mask—as the papers unambiguously attest, using the Chinese term 面罩—means that they must have been able to breathe. In other words, they were alive and breathing as the surgeons cut their hearts out.
China’s crime against humanity—of massive executions by organ-procuring physicians—has been accomplished secretly under the headlights of operating rooms, and so for decades has been hard to detect. The global silence with which these crimes have been met is unconscionable—crimes similar to those of the Nazi doctors are repeating themselves in front of our eyes, and yet the world remains quiet. It is high time for Western scientists, doctors, and the rest of humanity to reaffirm the sanctity of the Hippocratic oath and give meaning to the Jewish slogan after the Holocaust: Never again.
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