China executed prisoners by removing their hearts: American study

A study published in the American Journal of Transplantation has claimed that there is evidence to show that Chinese state-run civil and military hospitals have executed prisoners by removing their hearts.

Researchers say that this practice violates two professional medical prohibitions. First is the dead donor rule that states that a donor must be dead before their organs are harvested. Second is the prohibition on doctors from participating in executions

The study claims that doctors turned into executioners not just for death row prisoners but also for ‘prisoners of conscience’ – people imprisoned because of their race, sexual orientation, religion or political views

While the official Chinese records examined by the researchers say that the prisoners were supposedly brain dead prior to the surgeries, the study says this claim cannot be true.

The research was conducted by Australian PhD scholar Matthew Robertson and Dr Jacob Lavee, an Israeli cardiac transplant surgeon.

Dr Lavee wrote code that downloaded and analysed 124,770 medical papers from official Chinese databases between 1980 and 2015. Then, a review of 2,838 papers was conducted for evidence that may point to ‘problematic declarations of brain death during organ procurement’.

The study says that they found evidence in 71 of these reports that brain death could not have properly been declared and that the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor’s death. The study found fifty-six hospitals and more than 300 medical workers across China to be involved.

China has however claimed that they had stopped harvesting organs from prisoners in 2015.