Hospitals have been caught using fake death certificates to harvest organs from living patients, with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. exposing the horrifying truth that the elite’s organ procurement rackets begin the process while victims still show signs of life, a barbaric system designed to profit from death.
“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,” Kennedy declared in a recent press release, slamming the unhinged practices that have allowed this nightmare to unfold unchecked.
Infowars.com reports: This statement came on the heels of a New York Times article highlighting multiple cases of organ donors who were not dead. The article focused on an organ procurement practice known as “donation after circulatory death,” or DCD. DCD donors are not “brain dead,” but have a poor prognosis and are either not expected to survive or have decided that their quality of life is unacceptable. DCD deaths are a planned event, coordinated to occur at a specific time and place to allow organ procurement.
Here’s how it works: before proceeding to organ donation, DCD donors are given a “do not resuscitate” (DNR) order. This is necessary because these patients could be resuscitated, but a decision has been made not to do so. Their treatment switches from patient-focused care to organ-focused care, often including placement of large-bore intravenous lines and infusions of medications for the benefit of the organs, not the patient.
On their final day, DCD donors are taken to surgery and removed from life support. Once they become pulseless, doctors observe a two to five minute “no touch” period to observe for any spontaneous return of circulation. Organ removal begins as quickly as possible thereafter, because warm organs rapidly become unsuitable for transplantation in the absence of circulation.
But are these people actually dead following just two to five minutes of pulselessness? It is well documented that people are routinely resuscitated within this timeframe, but in the case of DCD donors a decision has been made not to do so.
A review in the medical literature shows that people have spontaneously recovered a heartbeat after as many as ten minutes of cardiac arrest, with some of these people making a full recovery. Thus, DCD donors are not known to be dead after just two to five minutes of pulselessness. The reason that doctors don’t wait longer is because after ten minutes of pulselessness most organs would no longer be viable for transplantation. So, because doctors are moving more quickly, patients are waking up during the removal of their organs.
One of the cases described in the New York Times article was that of DCD donor Misty Hawkins. After a choking accident, Hawkins suffered a brain injury and was comatose on a ventilator. She was not brain dead, but doctors told her parents that she would never wake up. Her mother did not want Misty to suffer, and hoping that something good could come out of their tragedy, she consented to making her daughter a DCD organ donor.
Misty was taken to the operating room, where a doctor disconnected her ventilator and gave her drugs for comfort. Her heart stopped beating 103 minutes later. After a five-minute waiting period, surgery began. But when surgeons sawed through her breastbone, they discovered that Misty’s heart was beating and that she had resumed breathing. The organ retrieval was called off, and 12 minutes later Misty was declared dead a second time.
It is unclear whether she received any anesthesia. To make matters worse, her parents were never told what happened: an organ procurement coordinator phoned Misty’s mother and said that unfortunately Misty had been unable to become an organ donor. It was not until the family was contacted by the New York Times for comment over a year later that they learned the rest of the story.
During a recent US House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing, Florida Representative Kat Cammack cited the case of an Illinois DCD donor who self-resuscitated on the operating room table. This unfortunate young woman was undergoing the removal of her kidneys when surgeons noticed that pulses had resumed in her aorta and renal arteries and that she was gasping for breath. She was given large doses of lorazepam and fentanyl, following which she died. The county coroner ruled her manner of death to be a homicide.
In 2019, Larry Black Jr. was made a DCD donor and taken to the operating room just one week after his traumatic brain injury. His family said they consented to donate his organs because they felt pressured by the organ procurement team. En route, Black tried to blink and sign that he was awake and aware, but his efforts were dismissed as “reflexes.” Thankfully his neurosurgeon was able to stop the harvest, and Black recovered: he is now a musician and the father of three children.
From a legal perspective, the DCD protocol does not meet the letter of the law under the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA). The UDDA requires the “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions” for a legal diagnosis of death. Because DCD donors could be resuscitated (though a decision has been made not to do so), their hearts have therefore not irreversibly ceased. Doctors get around this by saying the DCD donor’s circulatory and respiratory functions have permanently ceased. In common parlance, the words irreversible and permanent are often used interchangeably, but in this application, they are defined differently.
In the realm of death determination, “irreversible” means “not capable of being reversed.” But the term “permanent” is defined as meaning that function is not expected to resume spontaneously, and will not be restored through intervention. So, because doctors are not going to attempt to correct the patient’s problem, it is now “permanent.” Dr. Ari Joffe explains that “permanent” is a prognosis, not a diagnosis of death: “Is a drowning man dead because no one will swim out to save him? Or is he merely going to die?”
Sociologist Renee C. Fox sharply criticized the DCD protocol, calling it, “an ignoble form of medically rationalized cannibalism” that “borders on ghoulishness.” She deplored dying a death away from family in an operating room, a “desolate, profanely ‘high tech’ death that the patient dies, beneath operating room lights, amid masked, gowned, and gloved strangers.” Worldwide, many countries agree: the practice of DCD is banned in Finland, Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Lithuania, and Turkey.
There are variants of DCD that are even more problematic. Normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) organ retrieval begins by allowing the patient’s heart to stop according to the DCD protocol. But because surgeons plan to restart the heart, they take the initial step of clamping off the blood vessels supplying the patient’s brain. Then, a full resuscitation of the remaining organs is performed such that the heart starts beating again in the patient’s own chest. The University of Nebraska NRP protocol states, “The initial step for ligation of the blood vessels to the head is necessary to ensure that blood flow to the brain does not occur.”
Of course, this shows that the legal definition of death under the UDDA’s circulatory-respiratory standard (which requires the irreversible cessation of circulatory function) was never met, since the patient’s heart is beating once more. But now, doctors are “covered” because they have made the patient brain dead on purpose by clamping off the cerebral circulation. Now the patient’s death becomes defined by the UDDA’s brain death clause: the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain including the brain stem. By declaring death under the circulatory standard, then switching in mid-procedure to the neurologic standard, the NRP technique plays fast and loose with the legal definitions of death under the UDDA.
The American College of Physicians, the world’s largest medical specialty organization, called for a pause in the practice of NRP in 2021, as “the burden of proof regarding the ethical and legal propriety of this practice has not been met.” Their call for a pause has been ignored.
Thankfully, the HHS investigation is bringing the problems of DCD organ procurement before the public eye, but this information is not new. Drs. Joseph Verheijde, Mohamed Rady, and Joan McGregor wrote in 2009, “Heart-beating or non-heart-beating organ procurement from patients with impaired consciousness is de facto a concealed practice of physician-assisted death, and therefore, violates both criminal law and the central tenet of medicine not to do harm to patients.”
In their 2012 book, Death, Dying, and Organ Transplantation: Reconstructing Medical Ethics at the End of Life, Drs. Franklin Miller and Robert Truog wrote, “‘brain dead’ donors remain alive and donors declared dead according to circulatory-respiratory criteria are not known to be dead at the time their organs are procured.”
It’s time for complete transparency about organ procurement practices, and for mandating fully informed consent when people register to become organ donors. For DCD donors, because it is well-documented that people have self-resuscitated (without any medical intervention at all) despite as many as ten minutes of cardiac arrest, the current practice of DCD donation after just two to five minutes of pulselessness must cease.