Lack of media coverage, institutional silence, self-censorship, and fear of Beijing’s retribution are among the reasons that many people, including those in the medical sector, are unaware of China’s ongoing state-sanctioned practice of killing innocents for their organs.
“In my experience, less than 10 percent of the entire medical community actually knows what forced organ harvesting is. And even less than that, actually, just a fraction of that has any kind of understanding of a tribunal or the massive amount of data that’s out there,” said G. Weldon Gilcrease, associate professor of medicine at the University of Utah and DAFOH deputy director, during the roundtable.
“So when I went to one of our senior leadership officials and said, ‘look, we need to at least sit down and talk about it, and talk about our potential complicity … in training people from China to come here, learn transplant and go back to China and be involved in these crimes against humanity [that] are likely genocidal acts of killing innocent people for organs,’” Gilcrease said.
He continued: “I was essentially told there was no doubt that it [forced organ harvesting] was happening. But there was a concern that if we said anything as a medical center, that China would send all of their students to Texas [instead of Utah]. That was the response I was given.”
“So I think there is real fear of economic retribution. I think there is fear of professional retribution,” Gilcrease concluded.
Since then, millions of detained Falun Gong practitioners have essentially become a large involuntary organ bank for the Chinese regime’s transplant industry. The supply of organs has turned China into a top destination for transplant tourism because Chinese hospitals often offer short waiting times for matching organs for patients, much faster than developed countries with established organ donation systems.
“Sometimes it [the censorship] was institutional,” Beyda added.
Beyda warned that while the Chinese regime is the perpetrator here, there is also the issue of being complicit in its crimes.
“The more personal you get with your personal censorship, the more complicit you become,” he explained.
“So on both sides, we have an organ recipient, who is just as much at fault, and being complicit in a murder of someone as the surgeons who are doing this,” Beyda added.
Some medical professionals simply couldn’t believe that their Chinese counterparts would be involved in forced organ harvesting, according to Jacob Lavee, founder of the Heart Transplantation Unit at the Leviev Heart Center in Israel and professor of surgery emeritus at Tel Aviv University.
“After all the evidence gathered by the China Tribunal, and after all the hundreds of papers published about it, our colleagues still find it hard to believe that our colleagues back in China are taking part in these atrocities,” Lavee said.
Alejandro Centurion, a neurologist and a DAFOH member, urged the American Medical Association (AMA) to take a stronger stand on the issue.
The AMA, according to Centurion, has not made a “formal statement” on China’s forced organ harvesting other than a “small statement” last year and it was “very superficial” without mentioning the China Tribunal.
“So we need to see leadership from the AMA. I would really urge them to do so,” Centurion said, adding that it was encouraging to see the British and the Canadian Medical Associations taking the stance in condemning the regime’s forced organ harvesting.
Torsten Trey, DAFOH’s executive director, called on more people to speak up against the atrocity.
“Organ harvesting from living prisoners of conscience can by no means or excuse be accepted in today’s global community and every doctor and every individual has to make a decision,” Trey said.
“Do I want to live in a world where a government can arbitrarily kill innocent people for the organs or do I speak up now?
“I think it is time to break the silence.”