Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China | Hacker News Reader

Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

69 pointsDantesKite21 comments

Twitter thread for context:

"Doctors in China have been executing prisoners by extracting their hearts for transplantation, according to a new paper by myself and co-author Dr. Jacob Lavee in the American Journal of Transplantation.

we do a little thread about it."

https://twitter.com/mpr0010/status/1511512871439462406?s=20&...

> This is the only instance we are aware of where the medical profession in a country has collaborated closely, for decades, with the security apparatus to source and medically execute prisoners in order to traffic their organs.

I absolutely do not want to downplay this at all, this is a horrific crime against these individuals, their families, and human dignity anywhere.

I don't think the close involvement of the doctors necessarily makes this worse. The idea that medical workers are uniquely constrained from certain actions is a cultural norm, and at least partially a myth. Medical horrors are abundant in recent history, and I think we need a stronger mechanism to prevent them than social norms.

It is interesting to note though that in the US, the medical profession's (inconsistent) refusal to participate in executions has been one of the practical limits on capital punishment. There are a handful of states that would execute people, but no doctors will perform the necessary time-of-death procedures and so they don't happen.

But this isn't a cultural difference I don't think. There are plenty of states where doctors don't make that choice and executions proceed as desired by the state. There's also for example Israel where it's been an open secret since the 90s that organs are harvested from assassinated Palestinians.

Doctors potentially have a lot of power. I am grimly curious about the circumstances that lead them to either choice, since clearly there is not consensus across the profession even within a single country or culture.

There is a cultural difference there, which at one point was relatively small. In the past of Europe medical cadavers were supposed to be confined to the bodies of executed criminals. In China historically accounts of western doctors trying to teach noted the reception, tampering with a dead body was abhorred and living criminals were the suggested alternative. Now this is in the distant past and there has been a lot of distance and divergence since then.

The Hippocratic Oath has had great influnce in the west, perhaps related to the Greecoroman romanticization. To frankly guess why it survived as a meme was that the taboo against doctors killing sounds essential for trust and relatedly survival. A patient already gives up considerable control and leaves themselves vulnerable and doctors would be regarded with suspicion. It would make heterodox doctor orders something nobody would prefer since 'doctor but specifically without the oath against murdering patients when paid by somebody else' is really suspicious. Doctors already face grief misplaced anger for inevitable patient deaths, as a profession were already tampering with cadavers by neccessity and given prevalent theologies frankly a few steps away from being declared some sort of twisted heathen cult.

That "open secret" sounds like an outlandish combination of scapegoating Israel by local powers looking for unity and recycled blood libel. Stop and think about the logistics of assassination, which depends upon surprise and organ harvesting, a delicate and slow process. Why not kill someone with an elaborate tattoo of poisoned ink with that combination? Trying to assassinate somebody in a landlocked city using a killer whale is more plausible.

It is up there with hanging a monkey as a French spy in batshit paranoia.

The hippocratic oath is what I was thinking of when I said this constraint was at least partially a myth. Large numbers of doctors in europe and north america have willingly participated in harmful non-consensual medical experiments and executions, which are clear-cut violations of the oath.

Obviously I don't know how many more cases like that there would have been without its influence, but it's not a universal taboo even among western doctors.

For the last thing I think you're running with a very specific meaning of "assassinate" that I did not intend, but possibly shouldn't have used for that reason. Let me rephrase it: Israeli doctors have admitted to non-consensual organ harvesting from Palestinians killed by the Israeli security apparatus in the 90s. There are credible claims that this practice continues.

To me that case is similar enough that I find the original claim "this is the only instance..." distasteful. China absolutely perpetrates horrors on its citizens, but it is also clear to me that there is a manufacturing-consent process going on against China right now in english language media and social media. This is horrific but I don't think it's uniquely horrific, and I'm skeptical of trying to frame it that way.

There is a reason why it is so worry about dna and blood scan in hk; silly you may say. But given political crime can also be death sentence and but if you were just a good donor to the leader in need and 1/2 likely you are opposite to them, that will be .. sorry to say that

… kill two birds with one donation …

Do they have moral in Hans culture in spite of those kind talk of c, b and t? No I think. Given it is state sanction, it is just evil state and evil culture and evil race, unless some come up to object to these. Or just up to say it is fake news, west propaganda like Russia.

How many people has to die before we wake up to an evil 10x than Russia.

Let's not resort to personal attacks. To be honest the majority of chinese are not even Han. It's a generic label taken on by the Chinese to better create a nationalistic ideal in an ethnically diverse region. Especially so when the real Han people for the most part do not exist in China.

It’s not a personal attack. The human is expressing the truth of a quite legal grave risk to dna based identification by an authoritarian government that kills people to harvest their organs.

What difference does it make. They are still happily booking their reservations for organ transplants from their fellow Chinese citizens. The whole transplants from prisoners are stopped in 2015 news must be pure BS as apparently these transplants can be 'booked' for a specific week or date unlike most nations where you have to go on a waitlist for someone to die accidentally. People from different nations go there for these transplants as part 'medical tourism' apparently. A truly evil government and people (who seem okay with the whole thing).

Care to share a link where I can book an organ transplant tour in China?

its more like a patrimonialism vs legalism conflict. Patrimonialism is a form of coservatorism based on Confucius while Legalism is a "the end justify all means", a no morality philosophy for the state growth. The CCP took the worst aspects of these two philosophies

A Non-PRC Han Chinese Race here. Can you explain more how this related to Han Race or Culture? And what should I do so I can meet your superior-high morality standard culture and godly race? I live outside China and don't speak Mandarin.

Thanks

The headline of this alone is horrific

Is it some kind of joke?

I did read all the text in the Appendix 2. the MS word file. And I also found and read some of the original papers. Do they even have some persons who read Chinese?

Some of the papers are descripting "How to protect the organ during transplantation". They are not even case studies.

> From these reports, we infer that violations of the DDR took place: given that the donors could not have been brain dead before organ procurement, the declaration of brain death could not have been medically sound

So all the brain dead donor cases are treated as DDR violation?

It’s no joke. Yes, likely a large amount of the brain dead organ cases are murder of prisoners, dissidents, ethnic groups and other groups deemed undesirable by the CCP. China offers organs on demand like nowhere else on the planet, it’s not a matter of luck. The more light that is shined on this evil practice the better.

I'm talking about science, not CCP. Is that how you do research? By composing data from the source in another language you cannot even understand?

I do feel disgusting.

Is that how you downplay crimes against humanity? Finding irrelevant bullshit to distract from the actual issues?

It is disgusting! If the average man on the ground in China realized what was going on here — hey maybe allowed to talk about it without it being suppressed — maybe we could do something about it.

Irrelevant bullshit?

So you think talking about the submit is "irrelevant"? Or you agree the paper is "bullshit"?

You are just too arrogant to admit that average man on the ground in China do realize what was going on there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com