Chinese doctors at state-run hospitals executed prisoners to keep the highly profitable organ transplant industry going, a new research has found. A study published in the American Journal of Transplantation analysed nearly 125,000 medical papers from official Chinese databases between 1980 and 2020. The researchers found 71 publications where heart removal, without ascertaining that the person was brain-dead, appeared to be the cause of the prisoners’ deaths. Fifty-six hospitals and more than 300 medical workers across China were found to be involved. “While we don’t know exactly how these prisoners end up on the operating table, we can speculate there are multiple troubling scenarios as to how this happens. These include a bullet to the prisoner’s head before being immediately rushed to hospital, or a drug injection that paralyses the prisoner,” said Matthew Robertson, a co-author of the report.
