SAN FRANCISCO—About one mile from the World Transplant Congress (WTC), taking place Aug. 2-6 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, another group gathered to talk about the dark side of organ transplantation.
Practitioners of Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa), an ancient meditation practice, rallied on Aug. 2 in Harry Bridges Plaza in front of the Ferry Building, to make people aware that in China, the communist regime operates a lucrative nationwide organ harvesting industry, where doctors murder prisoners of conscience to sell their organs for profit. Falun Gong, a group severely persecuted in China since 1999, have been the main victims of this crime.
“We estimate that more than a million Falun Gong practitioners have been killed over the past 26 years to harvest their organs,” Torsten Trey, medical director and founder of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) said at the rally.
Trey said the scope of the killing calls to mind Nazi Germany. Behind him a banner read: “Immediately Stop Nazi-Style Atrocities Committed by the Communist Party.”
“In China the forced organ harvesting is the equivalent of the gas chambers, killing Falun Gong practitioners so that they cannot testify, cannot speak, cannot share what they believe in.
“But only a few doctors, few transplant doctors, have actually taken notice or known about forced organ harvesting as it takes place in China. This has to change!”
As he spoke, another group of Falun Gong practitioners stood outside the Moscone Center, holding banners and passing out fliers to the some of the 5,000 doctors, scientists, and health care workers attending the WTC.
In early 2006, The Epoch Times exclusively reported that a whistleblower, alias “Annie,” the ex-wife of a Chinese neurosurgeon surgeon, said there were unwilling living organ donors, Falun Gong practitioners, incarcerated in a facility resembling a concentration camp in Sujiatun, Liaoning Province, China.
In July 2006, two Canadian lawyers, David Kilgour, also a former secretary of state, and David Matas, revealed in an independent report that there was systematic organ harvesting mainly of living Falun Gong practitioners.
The victims were mainly practitioners who protested in Beijing against the persecution that started in 1999.
Retired professor Litong Shi, 82, was incarcerated for a few days in Shijing Mountain, Beijing, around New Year’s Day 2001. Shi said there were eight other female Falun Gong practitioners with her, and they were forced to have blood tests and medical examinations after being brutally tortured.
A police officer told Shi to give her identity, or she would be sent far away, and it would not be possible to see her family again.
Shi sought asylum in the United States in 2012.
The pool of potential victims quickly expanded from Beijing to incarcerated practitioners around the country. Several Falun Dafa practitioners from the Bay Area stated at the rally that they had experienced suspicious blood tests while detained.
Jianhua Lv said she has experienced multiple forced blood tests over five years of incarceration starting in October 2000.
“There’s one time that was scary when we were escorted for blood testing, a lot of guards with guns watching, everyone drew two large tubes of blood,” Lv said at the rally.
Lv escaped from Communist China after being released from prison, and she managed to get to the United States in 2006 with the help of the UN Refugee Agency in Thailand.
Before her time in the United States, Lv was not aware of organ harvesting in China.
In another case, Duo Xu said he was arrested in April 2016 in his own home and was forced to take a blood test the next day. Xu told the authorities he did not want to become a victim of organ harvesting, which the local police didn’t deny was happening. Xu arrived in the United States in 2017 and was granted asylum.
Ali Centurion, neurologist and vice medical director of DAFOH, told The Epoch Times that the unethical organ harvesting still continues in China.
“There were websites that you could pull up even just a couple of years ago advertising organs in English, Arabic, and Russian, getting an organ in one or two weeks.” Centurion said.
“It’s just not possible to provide an organ in such a short period of time, even today,” Centurion added, and mentioned that his own mother and brother had transplants in the United States and Spain, and the nominal waiting time was three to five years.
The only reasonable explanation is that there’s a very large pool of organ “donors” in China ready to be killed.
DAFOH Booth Denied
DAFOH, the nonprofit that provides the medical community and society with “objective findings of unethical and illegal organ harvesting,” was founded in March 2006.The organization’s booth request, however, was rejected for the first time by WTC’s joint hosts: The Transplantation Society (TTS), the American Society of Transplantation (AST), and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS).
“When we shared the reasoning with WTC attendees, many of them were speechless or shocked. Medicine thrives on open discussion,” the post continued.
“We are worried that these are steps of medical censorship where the leadership of the hosting organizations don’t want the other attending doctors to learn about forced organ harvesting,” said Trey.
DAFOH members have to stand in the free speech kiosk outside the conference room to try to reach out to attending doctors.
“It is an uphill battle and surprisingly the most obstacles that we face are coming from the medical community and specifically from the transplant community,” Trey said.
“It’s sad to hear or to see these crimes have taken place and they have not ended yet, but we are now very hopeful,” Centurion said.
Countries including Israel, Taiwan, Spain, England, and Canada have passed legislation against forced organ harvesting, according to Centurion.
In the United States, two bills, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act and the Falun Gong Protection Act, have passed the House and await Senate passage.
“We’re very hopeful the United States will also be taking a strong stance against these abuses,” said Centurion. “A lot is taking place, a lot of efforts and more awareness.”
“The Chinese government is still hiding it and they deny it but we need to keep on exposing it. ... And once enough people know about it, we'll help bring these atrocities to an end,” Ceturion said.
