From LifeSiteNews

By Heidi Klessig, M.D.

RFK Jr.’s HHS has launched a ‘major initiative’ to reform the organ transplant system after an investigation found multiple patients who were not dead were taken for organ procurement.

On July 21, 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced a major push to begin reforming the U.S. organ procurement and transplantation system. This announcement was prompted by a Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) investigation that uncovered multiple examples of patients who were not dead when they were taken for organ procurement.

The HRSA investigation revealed that out of 351 cases studied, 103 (29.3 percent) were found to have problems. They discovered 73 patients (21 percent) who were authorized for organ procurement despite having neurological signs incompatible with organ donation. And disturbingly, at least 28 patients (8 percent) may not have been deceased when doctors began surgery to remove their organs.

The independent HRSA investigation began after the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) claimed to find no major concerns in their review of the 2021 TJ Hoover case. TJ Hoover, a supposedly “brain dead” man, began thrashing and crying as he was being wheeled to the operating room to donate his organs. His family was told that this was just “reflexes.” Whistleblowers claimed that even after two doctors refused to remove Hoover’s organs, Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates ordered their staff to find another doctor to perform the surgery. Thankfully, surgery was called off, and Hoover went on to recover and even dance at his sister’s wedding.

On July 20, 2025, the New York Times published an article reporting multiple cases of donors who were not dead when they were scheduled for organ procurement. This article focused on the problems of “donation after circulatory death” (DCD). In DCD, patients are not “brain dead” but either are not expected to survive or have decided that their quality of life is unacceptable. Their deaths are planned to occur at a specific place and time so that they can become organ donors.

The patient is made “do not resuscitate” (DNR), ventilators and infusions are withdrawn, and doctors wait until the patient’s heart stops. Then, depending on the transplant center, a two-five minute “no touch” period is observed, following which (if the heart doesn’t restart on its own) organ procurement immediately begins. However, it is well documented that people are routinely resuscitated after just two-five minutes of pulselessness – and if you could possibly be resuscitated, you were never dead.

But because DCD donors have been made DNR, they will not be resuscitated. In 2007, Dr. Ari Joffe published a report of a dozen patients whose hearts started beating again spontaneously after as many as 10 minutes of cardiac arrest, with some of them making a full recovery. This shows that people cannot be known to be dead until at least ten minutes after their cardiac arrest. But doctors are currently moving more quickly because waiting ten minutes makes it too late to successfully harvest most of the organs. The current two-five minute “no touch” period is much too short and essentially guarantees that more people will be waking up under the knife. Other countries recognize these dangers, and DCD is banned in Finland, Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Lithuania, and Turkey.

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 because she wanted something good to come out of this tragedy, she consented to making her daughter a DCD organ donor.

Misty was taken to the operating room, where a doctor took her off the ventilator and gave her drugs for comfort. Her heart stopped 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 was gasping for breath. Organ retrieval was called off, and 12 minutes later, Misty was declared dead a second time. It is unclear whether she received any anesthesia. At the time, her parents were only told that Misty had been unable to donate her organs. It was not until they were contacted by the New York Times over a year later that they learned the rest of the story.

Yesterday morning, I sent a formal complaint to the OPTN, HRSA, and the investigating U.S. House committee that was signed by over 300 doctors, nurses, lawyers, philosophers, PhDs, and citizens.

I am very encouraged that so many are finally taking these deeply problematic practices seriously. But going forward, this is going to be a difficult moral, medical, and legal knot to untangle. As our country seeks solutions, these are the key goals I have identified:

1. The public needs full transparency about how death is declared prior to organ and tissue procurement, for without transparency there is no true consent.
2. We need an opt-out exemption to a brain death diagnosis nationwide. There are eight states with medical freedom laws that allow healthcare providers to opt out of participating in a brain death case, but the only state where patients have this right is New Jersey. And New Jersey’s law only provides for a religious exemption: people should be able to opt out for any reason.
3. Hospitals must mandate that doctors obtain informed consent before embarking on a brain death diagnosis, including the dangerous apnea test that can make a brain injury worse and has risks of hypotension, pneumothorax, and cardiac arrest.

It is also encouraging that many doctors are now taking a closer look at organ procurement and are interested in making changes. Living donation, in which both the donor and the recipient remain alive after the procedure, is completely ethical and can provide every organ except the heart. And a fully implantable artificial heart is currently in clinical trials. I am hoping that greater transparency will actually lead to more life-saving transplants, not less. After all, “brain death” accounts for <1% of reported deaths nationwide, whereas the number of living donors is potentially vast.

Hopefully we can provide justice for the families who have been hurt by the current unethical system without jeopardizing ethical forms of organ transplantation.

Heidi Klessig MD is a retired anesthesiologist and pain management specialist who writes and speaks on the ethics of organ harvesting and transplantation. She is the author of “The Brain Death Fallacy”, and her work may be found at respectforhumanlife.com.

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Toronto’s so-called ‘harm reduction’ program delivers free drug kits, including crack and meth pipes and syringes, via a hotline and reportedly over 100 distribution sites.

The city of Toronto is delivering drug kits across the city via a drug hotline, as part of its “harm reduction” plan.

The city of Toronto is operating a Mobile and Street Outreach program to allow residents to call a hotline and have drug kits, complete with pipes for smoking crack or meth, naloxone, syringes, condoms, delivered to them for free.

“The province of Ontario made it clear that there was no place for ‘safe consumption,’ for the consumption of drugs anywhere near schools and daycare centers,” Canadian commenter Ben Mulroney in a July 22 episode of his show.

“And instead, what we’ve noticed is the rise of the use of drugs and the giving out of all the materials that you need to do drugs in homeless shelters across this city,” Mulroney continued.

Mulroney interviewed a Toronto resident named Amy working with the New Toronto Initiative, who explained how the city’s drugs policies are exacerbating, not solving, the drug crisis.

Amy shared that she collected a free drug kit from the Queen West “harm reduction” center in Toronto. The kit included an OD package, to help someone who is suffering from a drug overdose.

However, it also included pipes for smoking crack or meth, naloxone, syringes, condoms, and instructions on “safer crystal meth smoking,” such as how to use a meth pipe.

According to the City of Toronto, the drug kits were only to be distributed from five supervised consumption treatment centers in Ingleton, Lake Ontario, Victoria Park, and Don Valley Parkway.

However, Amy revealed that there are “over 100 distribution sites in the city of Toronto.”

Additionally, the city’s “Street & Mobile Van Outreach” program delivers “harm reduction supplies” across the city.

“This stuff is supposed to be circumscribed to these five locations,” Mulroney explained, adding that, despite this, “the city has decided that they’re circumventing that by offering mobile delivery.”

The supplies provided by the mobile service include injecting and smoking supplies, which can be delivered within 20 to 40 minutes of calling the hotline.

Furthermore, earlier this year, Toronto began building new homeless shelters, including one in Amy’s neighborhood, which raised concerns regarding community safety.

However, the city assured Amy that the homeless shelter will not be a “safe injection” site. Later, Amy learned that the shelters will be handing out the euphemistic “harm reduction kits,” which include drug supplies.

“And if you are telling us that in homeless shelters it is now open season for people to consume drugs at their leisure, then you are putting people who never had any interaction with drugs right next to people who do,” Mulroney warned.

As LifeSiteNews previously reported, a government funded vending machine is dispensing drug supplies and contraception just meters away from a Toronto school.

The distribution of the kits comes after the Liberal “safe-supply” program was deemed such a disaster in British Columbia that the province asked former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to recriminalize drugs in public spaces. Nearly two weeks later, the Trudeau government announced it would “immediately” end the province’s drug program.

“Safe supply” is a euphemism for government-provided drugs given to addicts under the assumption that a more controlled batch of narcotics reduces the risk of overdose. Critics of the policy stress that giving addicts drugs only enables their behavior, puts the public at risk, disincentivizes recovery from addiction, and has not reduced – and sometimes has even increased – overdose deaths when implemented.

Beginning in early 2023, Trudeau’s federal policy effectively decriminalized hard drugs on a trial-run basis in British Columbia.

Under the policy, the federal government allowed people within the province to possess up to 2.5 grams of hard drugs without criminal penalty. Selling drugs remained a crime.

Since its implementation, the province’s drug policy has been widely criticized, especially after it was found that the province broke three different drug-related overdose records in the first month the new law was in effect.

The effects of decriminalizing hard drugs in various parts of Canada have been exposed in Aaron Gunn’s recent documentary Canada is Dying and in the U.K. Telegraph journalist Steven Edginton’s mini-documentary Canada’s Woke Nightmare: A Warning to the West.