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| Subject: Former GP Spurs 20+ Retractions Over Forced Transplants From Chinese Prisoners Wed Oct 09, 2019 11:02 pm | |
| In her second career as a bioethicist, a former general practitioner is reshaping the scientific literature of organ transplantation.
From 1983 to 2000, Wendy Rogers, BMBS, practiced primary care medicine in different settings in the United Kingdom and Australia. In the latter country, the single mother of two grew disillusioned with the fee-for-service system, so while she was pondering her future, she decided to change course, leaving practice to take a degree in English literature and philosophy that led to a doctorate in philosophy.
Medicine's loss was medical ethics' gain. Now a professor of clinical ethics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, Rogers' work to draw attention to scientific research that used organ transplants from executed prisoners in China have led to at least 20 retractions, and counting.
This past June, a people's tribunal convened by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), a nongovernmental organization for which Rogers chairs the international advisory committee, concluded that "forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale." The Chinese government officially banned the practice in 2015, but estimates of the number of transplants in the country suggest it is still done.
For China, procuring organs from prisoners disposes of two problems at one stroke, Rogers said. "The evil genius of this is that it gets rid of troublesome dissidents and at the same time sources an unlimited supply of organs for transplant," she explained.
Finding Her CauseRogers came to embrace this cause after seeing Ken Stone's 2015 documentary film on transplant organ abuse, Hard to Believe, while speaking at a conference on the ethics of organ donation after death determined by circulatory criteria alone.
In February of this year, she was lead author of a study in BMJ Open that urged English-language journals to repudiate more than 445 studies involving 85,477 organ transplants performed in China. "The body of literature contains a large number of papers that certainly or almost certainly include data from executed prisoners," Rogers and colleagues wrote in the article, many being prisoners of conscience.
The analysis found that 412 (92.5%) of the studies failed to report whether or not the organs were sourced from executed prisoners, and 439 (99%) neglected to confirm that organ donors gave consent. Only 73% specified approval from an institutional review board. Of articles declaring that no prisoners' organs were forcibly harvested for transplant, 19 of them involved 2688 transplants performed before 2010, when China had no established program of volunteer organ donation.
Her tireless efforts and rigorous investigation have weighed heavily on our collective consciences. James Shapiro, MD, PhD Rogers and coauthors rapped the knuckles of the international transplant research community as well as reviewers, editors, and publishers for their "significant lack of vigilance and failure to stick to accepted ethical standards," faulting them for disseminating and benefiting from research based on executed prisoners' biomaterials.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/919645 |
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