Unwitting Organ Donors
In order to understand this article, I am going to ask you to believe in the impossible. We are told that doctors train for years to save lives, but that might not always be the case.
Recent investigations have shown something truly frightening: The organ donation program for the recently deceased is severely flawed.
The body breaks down quickly following death. Even minutes can mean the difference between a transplant that succeeds and one that fails. You cannot just rob graveyards and build a body.
In fact, it seems that if you wait until the person is dead, you might not get any viable organs at all.
Now this is a simple cost-benefit analysis on the part of the hospital of which life is most worth saving.
And in places like Canada and Britain, where the government controls healthcare, it is probably even worse. We already have countless cases of doctors refusing to let patients, even children who are dying, from leaving the hospital to get treatment elsewhere.
One example of this was back in 2018, when British toddler Alfie Evans was not able to leave the United Kingdom before doctors withdrew life support to get care in Italy. Pope Francis even personally intervened to try and save the child’s life.
Our neighbors to the north have Medical Assistance in Dying, in which a person may be offered euthanasia rather than medical treatment.
These cases highlight a disturbing question: Whose life is prioritized, the patient’s or the system’s? After all, why would the doctors try to save you if you are more valuable as organs than as a person?
While these controversies are most visible abroad, the US faces its own ethical challenges in medical malpractice. A man from Florida was initially included in the deaths from COVID-19 even though he died in a motorcycle crash. This man died with COVID, not from COVID. There were federal dollars associated with the number of reported deaths from COVID. How many other people were reported to have died from COVID just so that the hospital could get the money?
This is relevant because the same type of doctor who would lie about the cause of a patient’s death could lie about whether or not they are actually dead before organs are harvested.
The doctors need to be paid for removing the organs and safely transporting them. If financial incentives can influence death reports, it raises concerns about who benefits when life ends.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is supposedly initiating reforms to stop this once and for all. These reforms would include ensuring that the person is actually dead before organs are removed. Such a change seems only logical.
“Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying,” Secretary Kennedy said. “The organ procurement organizations that coordinate access to transplants will be held accountable. The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that 103 cases (29.3%) showed concerning features, including 73 patients with neurological signs incompatible with organ donation.
At least 28 patients may not have been deceased at the time organ procurement was initiat-ed— raising serious ethical and legal questions, DHHS reported.
Evidence pointed to poor neurologic assessments, lack of coordination with medical teams, questionable consent practices, and misclassification of causes of death, particularly in overdose cases, DHHS said.
Each number represents a person whose life may have been cut short prematurely. This is something out of a nightmare, and unlike something from Stephen King, we cannot just hide under the bed and pretend that it is not real.