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The patient is made “do not resuscitate” (DNR), ventilators and infusions are withdrawn, and doctors wait until the patient’s heart stops.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 Calvin Freiburger

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marco Rubio warned in a joint statement that radical new WHO amendments would violate Americans’ privacy and freedom of speech and expand the WHO’s power.

The Trump administration has announced it is rejecting a series of proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations of the World Health Assembly that would significantly expand the authority of the World Health Organization with, they say, harmful results.

Released July 18, the joint statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy states that the 2024 amendments were written “without adequate public input,” “expand the role of the WHO in public health emergencies, create additional authorities for the WHO for shaping pandemic declarations, and promote WHO’s ability to facilitate ‘equitable access’ of health commodities”; as well as “fail to adequately address the WHO’s susceptibility to the political influence and censorship – most notably from China – during outbreaks.”

“Terminology throughout the 2024 amendments is vague and broad, risking WHO-coordinated international responses that focus on political issues like solidarity, rather than rapid and effective actions,” the statement adds. “The amendments also suggest that countries develop capabilities that jeopardize management and dissemination controls over public health information, potentially stifling valuable scientific debate. Furthermore, these revisions compel countries to adopt digital health documents. Our Agencies have been and will continue to be clear: we will put Americans first in all our actions and we will not tolerate international policies that infringe on Americans’ speech, privacy, or personal liberties.”

Long known for a similar left-wing bias to that of the United Nations, the WHO has faced additional criticism since COVID-19’s outbreak in 2020 for, among other offenses, opposing bans on travel from China that could have limited the reach of COVID, for legitimizing the false claims coming out of the Chinese government that initially downplayed the gravity of the situation and covered up the communist regime’s mishandling of it, and for favoring the lockdown and mandate policies that exacerbated harm while curtailing basic freedoms and failing to improve health outcomes.

Even so, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus maintained as late as October 2024 that medical establishments must be “more aggressive” against COVID vaccine critics, despite how much the medical establishment got wrong.

President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the WHO on his first day back in office, but the State Department says the “amendments were set to become binding on the United States regardless of our withdrawal from the WHO,” necessitating formal rejection.