(LifeSiteNews) — A recently published study presents evidence that China has engaged in the execution of its political prisoners via organ extraction for at least 35 years.
The esteemed American Journal of Transplantation last week published a study after reviewing 310 papers by Chinese organ procurement surgeons. The study found that 71 of these papers, published between 1980 and 2015, indicated that a proper brain death determination (BDD) was not made before organ removal and transplantation.
According to study authors Matthew P. Robertson and Jacob Lavee, the lack of proper BDD suggests that organ removal was the actual cause of death for the donor involved, providing support to ongoing claims and reported evidence that China harvests organs from live prisoners.
The research duo explained that under the dead donor rule (DDR), “ethical procurement of vital organs from heart-beating donors requires the donor to be brain dead.” Such a brain death determination, they said, can only be made as a patient is “fully ventilated” via intubation.
If a study indicated that donors were intubated only after they were pronounced brain dead, or that the donor was “intubated by the procurement team as part of the procurement operation,” Robertson and Lavee considered the claimed determination of brain death to be problematic, not certifiable, and therefore in violation of medical ethics.
While the researchers acknowledged that the Chinese papers did not indicate the identity of the donors, or mention whether they were prisoners, they concluded that the majority of the donors would have to have been prisoners, since “there was no voluntary donation system,” and because “the leader of China’s transplant sector wrote in 2007 that effectively 95 percent of all organ transplants were from prisoners.”
China claimed to end the use of prisoners as organ donors in 2015. The most recent medical paper Robertson and Lavee found was published in 2015, and they believe “there are several potential explanations for this.”
“The most benign is that the reform program indeed ceased the use of prisoners, and thus these abuses,” wrote the researchers. “Alternatively, it may be because grassroots human rights activists and researchers exposed DDR violations in September 2014, and [China] officials are attentive to international perceptions. Instructions to state-managed medical journals to cease publishing such details could have been issued, and this could explain the absence of such admissions past 2015.”
Former Canadian MP David Kilgour reported in 2015 to a European Parliament Workshop on Organ Harvesting in China that there continued to that day “large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners” — who are considered “heretical” and a threat to the power of the Chinese Communist Party — in order to sell those organs “at high prices, sometimes to foreigners, who normally face long waits for voluntary donations of such organs in their home countries.”
Robertson and Lavee noted that Chinese hospitals “continue to advertise transplant waiting times of weeks, whereas wait times in the United States are measured in months and years.”
The authors also question the Chinese claims that all of their organ transplants are now from voluntary donors, because “Chinese governmental accounts of its organ transplantation sector are often contradictory,” and the state has published “demonstrably manipulated datasets to the international community.”