The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is killing religious believers to sell their organs for profit, according to a new book promoted by Dr. Phil McGraw on his show “The Dr. Phil Podcast.”
“There are people on the other side of the world who are alive, breathing, thinking, maybe even praying, who have already been matched to a buyer for their organs, their vital organs—eyes, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys—their blood type has been logged, their organs have been appraised, and when the order comes in, they will be killed to fill it,” McGraw said.
The celebrity host interviewed Jan Jekielek, senior editor at The Epoch Times and author of the new book, “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary,” about what Jekielek described as the “monstrous machine” that the CCP has built over the past two decades.
“I know that sounds like something out of a horror movie. I know it sounds like the kind of thing that you would ordinarily dismiss as a conspiracy theory,” McGraw said. “Sadly, it has been well documented after 20 years of investigation. This is not fiction. This is policy. This is industry. In fact, this is an $8.9 billion a year industry run by the Chinese Communist Party, and it is happening right now.”
The primary victims of the CCP’s forced organ harvesting are Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice involving meditative exercises and based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The practice, introduced in 1992, grew rapidly in the 1990s, and by 1999, officials estimated there were 70 million to 100 million people practicing it. That’s when the CCP turned on the practice, launching a violent persecution against Falun Gong practitioners that continues to this day.
As Jekielek recounts in “Killed to Order,” organ transplant numbers began to rapidly rise in the year 2000 in China, a country that at the time had no organ donation program. By around 2015, the number of transplant hospitals had grown to more than 100, and evidence pointed to a second population being harvested: Uyghur Muslims, a population of about 12 million concentrated in the northern region of Xinjiang.
“We’re talking about people whose only crime is what they believe,” McGraw said, pointing to phone calls recorded by undercover investigators asking Chinese hospitals to procure organs and receiving responses that the hospitals would source them from Falun Gong practitioners.
For Chinese hospitals to be promising wait times of between one and four weeks, as heard in some of those recordings, McGraw said that the database of blood typed and tested victims has to be tremendous.
“Because you’ve got to match. It’s really careful to avoid rejection,” he said. “To match to somebody that needs a transplant. It’s not just a one-to-one. I mean, you got to have a big pool to choose from.”
“Killed to Order” is based on evidence from independent investigations that have taken place over the better part of two decades. They include Chinese hospitals advertising organs on demand with price lists and two-week wait times, testimonies from surgeons who were forced to conduct these transplants, and Falun Gong practitioners who have reported blood and medical tests being conducted on them upon being arbitrarily detained by Chinese authorities.
“This is happening with adults and with children,” McGraw said after reviewing an organ price list found on a Chinese hospital website, which gave separate prices for adult and child organs. “And to make it even worse, whistleblowers are telling us that in many cases, there’s no anesthesia used, because if you use anesthesia, it can degrade the organ.”
McGraw and Jekielek discussed the fact that institutions in the United States continue to train Chinese transplant surgeons.
“Should we be training doctors if we know that there is the possibility that they’re going to go back to China and be impacted by the Chinese Communist Party to do this kind of thing?” McGraw said. “They’re trained here. There’s the Hippocratic Oath, ‘First do no harm,’ but yet go back over there, and under the pressure of the Chinese Communist Party, even if they don’t think it’s right, under pressure, under fear, they’re forced into doing that.”
Jekielek added that some researchers believe that in China, removing organs from living people, violating the dead donor rule standard everywhere else, has become so normalized that Chinese doctors are writing such methods right into their research papers. A 2022 study published in the American Journal of Transplantation found 71 such papers out of nearly 3,000.
McGraw raised concerns that U.S. institutions were “looking away” due to the United States’ dependence on China for many things, including key ingredients for some of the 450 drugs on the U.S. shortage list.
Jekielek said that the CCP’s forced organ harvesting system reveals the nature of the regime.
“This industry is a logical conclusion of that system and how it functions, and how it thinks, how it acts, to make people complicit and co-opt them, and make them do terrible things that they would never do in a normal society,” he said.
