Pages

Wednesday 29 June 2022

Heartless


Jacob Lavee and Matthew P. Robertson have a grim piece in Tablet on involuntary Chinese organ donors.

China’s Killer Doctors
How the PRC’s lucrative transplant industry kills donors by removing their organs

In November 2005, during morning rounds in the cardiac intensive care unit at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, one of the authors, Jay Lavee, was stunned to have the following exchange with a patient suffering advanced heart failure:

“Doc, I’m fed up waiting here for nearly a year now while you guys find a heart donor. My insurance company told me to fly to China—they’ve already scheduled a heart transplant in two weeks.”

After processing what he’d heard, Jay responded: “Do you hear yourself? How can anyone promise you a donor heart on a specific date ahead of time? You understand that somebody must die on the very same day that you will undergo this surgery, don’t you?”

The patient: “I don’t know, Doc. That’s just what I was told.”


This kind of story is not new of course, but the whole piece is well worth reading. It describes a detailed analysis of an enormous number of Chinese-language clinical case reports and what was implied in a significant number of them.

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.

4 comments:

Ed P said...

In China, the state owns you 100%, so cutting out parts to mend others (who are higher up the social scale, or paying more) is seen as acceptable.

If Klaus Schwab of the WEF has his way, we'll all, worldwide, be under a similar system and vulnerable to such atrocities.

Sam Vega said...

I remember reading that under Fidel Castro, condemned prisoners in Cuba were made to give blood before being offed by the state. But not just the 470ml. we give here. Often they took so much blood that the prisoner had to be carried to the firing squad.

These are the sorts of things that we need to fight against. Not directly, but piecemeal against the controllers and the absolutists who would take us in the same direction by inches.

James Higham said...

Inhumanity is chilling.

A K Haart said...

Ed - parts for others who are higher up the social scale seems to drive it, plus those in a position to pay. Once a certain level of control is established, it isn't easy to see what safeguards we have or could possibly have.

Sam - yes, the problem is one of being taken in the same direction by inches. Very difficult to resist - so many people just accept those inches automatically.

James - it is chilling - and was once the stuff of science fiction.