In China, Prisoners of Conscience Are Being Murdered for Their Organs to Fuel Transplant Tourism
A somber photo of the Great Wall of China.
Organ transplantation can dramatically improve or save lives. A heart transplant can literally give a person a new lease of life, while a kidney transplant frees the recipient from lengthy spells on dialysis.
A people's tribunal in London has recently found that in China, organs are sourced from prisoners of conscience who are killed on demand to fuel the lucrative organ transplantation market.
To protect the integrity of organ transplantation, there are strict ethical guidelines. When organs are sourced from deceased persons, the donation must be voluntary, donors must die naturally before any organs are taken, and death must not be hastened to provide organs. These ethical guidelines protect donors and provide assurance to transplant recipients that their organs have been sourced ethically.
However, not all countries follow these ethical guidelines. A people's tribunal in London has recently found that in China, organs are sourced from prisoners of conscience who are killed on demand to fuel the lucrative organ transplantation market. This conclusion, reported at the United Nations Human Rights Council on September 24, was not reached lightly.
The independent China Tribunal, made up of four human rights lawyers, one surgeon with transplant experience, an academic who specialises in China studies and a businessman with human rights interests, spent over a year looking at written materials and heard evidence from over 50 witnesses in five days of hearings. Their grim conclusion, that prisoners of conscience are murdered for their organs, confirms the findings of earlier investigations.
Questions first arose over China's transplant system when the numbers of transplants rose dramatically after 2000. Transplant capacity rapidly increased; new infrastructure was built and staff were trained. Hospital websites offered livers, hearts and kidneys available in a matter of days or weeks, for a price. Foreigners were encouraged to come to China to avoid lengthy transplant waiting lists in their home countries.
At the time, it was a mystery as to how China had a ready supply of organs, despite having no volunteer donation system. Eventually, in 2006, the Chinese government stated that organs were removed from prisoners who had been found guilty and sentenced to the death penalty. But this explanation did not ring true. Death row prisoners often have poor health, including high rates of infectious diseases, making them poor candidates for donation. By contrast, the organs offered for sale were promised to be healthy.
In 2006, the first clues about the source of the organs emerged. A woman called Annie reported that her surgeon husband had been present during organ removal from Falun Gong practitioners who were still breathing as the scalpels cut into them. A subsequent investigation by two Canadian human rights lawyers examined multiple sources of evidence, concluding that murdered Falun Gong practitioners were indeed the source of the organs.
The evidence included testimony from practitioners who had been imprisoned, tortured, and later released. During imprisonment, many practitioners reported blood and other medical tests examining the health of their organs—tests that were not performed on any other prisoners. Phone calls made to Chinese hospitals by investigators posing as patients were offered rapid access to fresh organs from Falun Gong practitioners. The organs were guaranteed to be healthy, as the practice forbids smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol.
Since 2006, evidence has continued to accumulate. China has a huge transplant industry and no plausible source of voluntary organ donations. Unlike the rest of the world, Chinese waiting times remain very short. Foreigners continue to come to China to avoid lengthy waiting lists. Prisoners of conscience, including Tibetans and Uyghurs as well as Falun Gong practitioners, are still being imprisoned and medically tested.
The Chinese government continues to deny these crimes, claiming that there is a volunteer donor system in place.
The China Tribunal heard from Uyghur witnesses who had recently been inside the notorious labour camps (also called "re-education" centers) in Xin Xiang. The witnesses reported terrible conditions, including overcrowding and torture, and were forced to have medical examinations. They saw other prisoners disappear without explanation following similar medical tests. As recently as 2018, doctors in Chinese hospitals were promising potential patients healthy Falun Gong organs in taped phone calls.
The Chinese government continues to deny these crimes, claiming that there is a volunteer donor system in place. In the Chinese system, prisoners are counted as volunteers.
China's forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has international implications. A recent study found that most published Chinese transplant research is based on organs sourced from prisoners. International ethical guidance prohibits taking organs from prisoners and prohibits publication of research based on transplanted material from prisoners. The authors of that study called for retractions of the papers, some of which are in well-known scientific journals. So far Transplantation and PLOS One are among the journals that have already retracted over twenty articles in response. On questioning from the editors, the authors of the papers failed to respond or could not verify that the organs in the transplant research came from volunteers.
The international community has a moral obligation to act together to stop forced organ harvesting in China.
The China Tribunal concluded that forced organ harvesting remains China's main source of transplant organs. In their view, the commission of Crimes Against Humanity against the Uyghurs and Falun Gong has been proved beyond reasonable doubt. By their actions, the Chinese government has turned a life-saving altruistic practice into our worst nightmare. The international community has a moral obligation to act together to stop forced organ harvesting in China, and end these crimes against humanity.
In this new video, we capture examples from history when people rejected scientific breakthroughs at first, only for the march of progress to continue.
What makes people turn against science? After two years of a global pandemic, the world has never felt more divided on questions of science. But this is not a new phenomenon. People have resisted scientific and technological advances throughout history.
This video by Leaps.org, with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, captures noteworthy examples from history when people rejected science. What do these cases have in common? Scientific breakthroughs can be revolutionary, but revolutions can be disorienting and anxiety-producing. They transform our livelihoods, culture and even our understanding of what it means to be human. But there's reason for optimism. Many of history’s controversies were overcome. Science has a way of enduring, because it changes things for the better.
Scientists search for a universal coronavirus vaccine
Stephen Zeichner, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Virginia Medical Center, has made progress with an early stage universal coronavirus vaccine.
The Covid-19 pandemic had barely begun when VBI Vaccines, a biopharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, initiated their search for a universal coronavirus vaccine.
It was March 2020, and while most pharmaceutical companies were scrambling to initiate vaccine programs which specifically targeted the SARS-CoV-2 virus, VBI’s executives were already keen to look at the broader picture.
Having observed the SARS and MERS coronavirus outbreaks over the last two decades, Jeff Baxter, CEO of VBI Vaccines, was aware that SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to be the last coronavirus to move from an animal host into humans. “It's absolutely apparent that the future is to create a vaccine which gives more broad protection against not only pre-existing coronaviruses, but those that will potentially make the leap into humans in future,” says Baxter.
It was a prescient decision. Over the last two years, more biotechs and pharma companies have joined the search to find a vaccine which might be able to protect against all coronaviruses, along with dozens of academic research groups. Last September, the US National Institutes of Health dedicated $36 million specifically to pan-coronavirus vaccine research, while the global Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) has earmarked $200 million towards the effort.
Until October 2021, the very concept of whether it might be
theoretically possible to vaccinate against multiple coronaviruses remained an open question. But then a groundbreaking study renewed optimism.
The emergence of new variants of Covid-19 over the past year, particularly the highly mutated Omicron variant, has added greater impetus to find broader spectrum vaccines. But until October 2021, the very concept of whether it might be theoretically possible to vaccinate against multiple coronaviruses remained an open question. After all, scientists have spent decades trying to develop a similar vaccine for influenza with little success.
But then a groundbreaking study from renowned virologist Linfa Wang, who runs the emerging infectious diseases program at Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School, provided renewed optimism.
Wang found that eight SARS survivors who had been injected with the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine had neutralising antibodies in their blood against SARS, the Alpha, Beta and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2, and five other coronaviruses which reside in bats and pangolins. He concluded that the combination of past coronavirus infection, and immunization with a messenger RNA vaccine, had resulted in a wider spectrum of protection than might have been expected.
“This is a significant study because it showed that pre-existing immunity to one coronavirus could help with the elicitation of cross-reactive antibodies when immunizing with a second coronavirus,” says Kevin Saunders, Director of Research at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute in North Carolina, which is developing a universal coronavirus vaccine. “It provides a strategy to perhaps broaden the immune response against coronaviruses.”
In the next few months, some of the first data is set to emerge looking at whether this kind of antibody response could be elicited by a single universal coronavirus vaccine. In April 2021, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, launched a Phase I clinical trial of their vaccine, with a spokesman saying that it was successful, and the full results will be announced soon.
The Walter Reed researchers have already released preclinical data, testing the vaccine in non-human primates where it was found to have immunising capabilities against a range of Covid-19 variants as well as the original SARS virus. If the Phase I trial displays similar efficacy, a larger Phase II trial will begin later this year.
Two different approaches
Broadly speaking, scientists are taking two contrasting approaches to the task of finding a universal coronavirus vaccine. The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, VBI Vaccines – who plan to launch their own clinical trial in the summer – and the Duke Human Vaccine Institute – who are launching a Phase I trial in early 2023 – are using a soccer-ball shaped ferritin nanoparticle studded with different coronavirus protein fragments.
VBI Vaccines is looking to elicit broader immune responses by combining SARS, SARS-CoV-2 and MERS spike proteins on the same nanoparticle. Dave Anderson, chief scientific officer at VBI Vaccines, explains that the idea is that by showing the immune system these three spike proteins at the same time, it can help train it to identify and respond to subtle differences between coronavirus strains.
The Duke Human Vaccine Institute is utilising the same method, but rather than including the entire spike proteins from different coronaviruses, they are only including the receptor binding domain (RBD) fragment from each spike protein. “We designed our vaccine to focus the immune system on a site of vulnerability for the virus, which is the receptor binding domain,” says Saunders. “Since the RBD is small, arraying multiple RBDs on a nanoparticle is a straight-forward approach. The goal is to generate immunity to many different subgenuses of viruses so that there will be cross-reactivity with new or unknown coronaviruses.”
But the other strategy is to create a vaccine which contains regions of the viral protein structure which are conserved between all coronavirus strains. This is something which scientists have tried to do for a universal influenza vaccine, but it is thought to be more feasible for coronaviruses because they mutate at a slower rate and are more constrained in the ways that they can evolve.
DIOSynVax, a biotech based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, announced in a press release earlier this month that they are partnering with CEPI to use their computational predictive modelling techniques to identify common structures between all of the SARS coronaviruses which do not mutate, and thus present good vaccine targets.
Stephen Zeichner, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Virginia Medical Center, has created an early stage vaccine using the fusion peptide region – another part of the coronavirus spike protein that aids the virus’s entry into host cells – which so far appears to be highly conserved between all coronaviruses.
So far Zeichner has trialled this version of the vaccine in pigs, where it provided protection against a different coronavirus called porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, which he described as very promising as this virus is from a different family called alphacoronaviruses, while SARS-CoV-2 is a betacoronavirus.
“If a betacoronavirus fusion peptide vaccine designed from SARS-CoV-2 can protect pigs against clinical disease from an alphacoronavirus, then that suggests that an analogous vaccine would enable broad protection against many, many different coronaviruses,” he says.
The road ahead
But while some of the early stage results are promising, researchers are fully aware of the scale of the challenge ahead of them. Although CEPI have declared an aim of having a licensed universal coronavirus vaccine available by 2024-2025, Zeichner says that such timelines are ambitious in the extreme.
“I was incredibly impressed at the speed at which the mRNA coronavirus vaccines were developed for SARS-CoV-2,” he says. “That was faster than just about anybody anticipated. On the other hand, I think a universal coronavirus vaccine is more equivalent to the challenge of developing an HIV vaccine and we're 35 years into that effort without success. We know a lot more now than before, and maybe it will be easier than we think. But I think the route to a universal vaccine is harder than an individual vaccine, so I wouldn’t want to put money on a timeline prediction.”
The major challenge for scientists is essentially designing a vaccine for a future threat which is not even here yet. As such, there are no guidelines on what safety data would be required to license such a vaccine, and how researchers can demonstrate that it truly provides efficacy against all coronaviruses, even those which have not yet jumped to humans.
The teams working on this problem have already devised some ingenious ways of approaching the challenge. VBI Vaccines have taken the genetic sequences of different coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins, from publicly available databases, and inserted them into what virologists call a pseudotype virus – one which has been engineered so it does not have enough genetic material to replicate.
This has allowed them to test the neutralising antibodies that their vaccine produces against these coronaviruses in test tubes, under safe lab conditions. “We have literally just been ordering the sequences, and making synthetic viruses that we can use to test the antibody responses,” says Anderson.
However, some scientists feel that going straight to a universal coronavirus vaccine is likely to be too complex. Instead they say that we should aim for vaccines which are a little more specific. Pamela Bjorkman, a structural biologist at the California Institute of Technology, suggests that pan-coronavirus vaccines which protect against SARS-like betacoronaviruses such as SARS or SARS-CoV-2, or MERS-like betacoronaviruses, may be more realistic.
“I think a vaccine to protect against all coronaviruses is likely impossible since there are so many varieties,” she says. “Perhaps trying to narrow down the scope is advisable.”
But if the mission to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine does succeed, it will be one of the most remarkable feats in the annals of medical science. In January, US chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci urged for greater efforts to be devoted towards this goal, one which scientists feel would be the biological equivalent of the race to develop the first atomic bomb
“The development of an effective universal coronavirus vaccine would be equally groundbreaking, as it would have global applicability and utility,” says Saunders. “Coronaviruses have caused multiple deadly outbreaks, and it is likely that another outbreak will occur. Having a vaccine that prevents death from a future outbreak would be a tremendous achievement in global health.”
He agrees that it will require creativity on a remarkable scale: “The universal coronavirus vaccine will also require ingenuity and perseverance comparable to that needed for the Manhattan project.”