Co-Authors of Paper on China’s Dead Donor Rule Violations Reveal Critical Details

In our last edition of the DAFOH newsletter, we reported on a seminal paper containing data confirming the dead donor rule has been knowingly violated by transplant surgeons in China.

“Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China” was published in the American Transplant Journal on April 4, 2002 and was the first to confirm that doctors are helping the Chinese regime commit mass murder on an industrial scale. The paper was written by Matthew Robertson, a Ph.D. student in political science at the Australian National University in Canberra who has extensively researched China’s illicit transplantation practices and Jacob Lavee, MD, founder and former director of the Heart Transplantation Unit at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel and a Professor Emeritus of Surgery at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Medicine.

In an expose in Tablet Magazine on June 27, the authors begin with Lavee’s introduction to China’s murder on demand system. In November 2005, Lavee was doing morning rounds at Sheba Medical Center when he had the following conversation 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, Lavee 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 simply replied, ‘“I don’t know, Doc. That’s just what I was told.”’

The patient did in fact go to China to get his heart.

This short but potent exchange began what was to be nearly two decades of research and advocacy for Lavee. The authors write that “Within three years [after talking with this patient] he’d spearheaded the Organ Transplantation Law in Israel, the first of its kind in the world, which prevented insurance companies from reimbursing expenses associated with illicitly obtained organs. Along with a range of reforms encouraging domestic donation, this stopped the China-to-Israel organ trafficking pipeline in its tracks.

To gather data for their latest research, Robertson, who speaks fluent Chinese, and Lavee used computational text analysis and conducted a forensic review of a database with hundreds of thousands of papers written by organ transplant doctors in China.

The authors point to several incriminating statements by these surgeons, including admissions noting that the donors could not have possibly been brain dead before organ extraction.

For additional information on the authors’ research, please watch the China Revealed YouTube video “Surgeons declare healthy prisoners ‘brain dead’ before carving them up: Study concludes.”