According to a recent study by the Australian National University (ANU), Chinese surgeons, working at state-run civilian and military hospitals, have been cutting out prisoners’ hearts and lungs while they’re still alive. This practice, according to the researchers, has been going on for more than three decades. It is a part of an illegal organ harvesting scheme being conducted in connivance with the Chinese government.
Media reports suggest that Australian National University (ANU) researchers combed through thousands of Chinese medical papers and concluded that surgeons were killing prisoners during surgery including some “prisoners of conscience” who had not been certified to be brain-dead. These surgeons are reportedly recruited by the state to kill prisoners through organ transplant surgery.
The term ‘braindead’ refers to someone who will never regain consciousness or begin breathing on their own without the assistance of a ventilator.
Matthew Robertson, a politics student, who led the study said, “We found that the physicians became the executioners on behalf of the state and that the method of execution was heart removal. These surgeries are highly profitable for the doctors and hospitals that engage in them.”
Matthew Robertson and Jacob Lavee, a cardiac surgeon and professor at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine examined 2,838 papers on transplant procedures in China between 1980 and 2020 and discovered that in 71 cases, brain death was not properly established before organ removal.
“If the reports we examine are accurate, they indicate that heart and lung procurement by the surgeon was the proximate cause of the prisoner’s death, thus directly implicating the surgeon in the execution,” the researchers said, fearing that the true figure may be much higher because inconclusive results are omitted from reports.
“While we don’t know exactly how these prisoners end up on the operating table, we can speculate there are multiple troubling scenarios as to how this happens,” Robertson told the Australian Financial Review.
Notably, in June 2021, a group of UN independent experts expressed their concerns at allegations of organ harvesting carried out on minority groups including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians, in detention in China.
“The most common organs removed from the prisoners, according to the allegations received, are reportedly hearts, kidneys, livers, corneas, and, less commonly, parts of livers.” This type of medical trafficking allegedly involves health-care professionals such as surgeons, anaesthetists, and other medical specialists”, the express had claimed.
In fact, this was not the first time that the UN had raised the issue of illegal organ harvesting in China. Indeed, similar concerns were raised by the UN with the Chinese Government in 2006 and 2007, however, without an adequate response.
