Health
Recovered ‘brain dead’ man dancing at sister’s wedding reminds us organ donors are sometimes alive
TJ Hoover and his sister on her wedding day
From LifeSiteNews
Since brain dead people are not dead, it is not surprising that the only multicenter, prospective study of brain death found that the majority of brains from ‘brain dead’ people were not severely damaged at autopsy.
In 2021, a supposedly brain dead man, Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II, opened his eyes and looked around while being wheeled to the operating room to donate his organs. Hospital staff at Baptist Health hospital in Richmond, Kentucky assured his family that these were just “reflexes.”
But organ preservationist Natasha Miller also thought Hoover looked alive. “He was moving around – kind of thrashing. Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed,” said Miller in an NPR interview. “And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was visibly crying.” Thankfully, the procedure was called off, and Hoover was able to recover and even dance at his sister’s wedding this past summer.
Last month, this case was brought before a U.S. House subcommittee investigating organ procurement organizations. 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.
Because brain death is a social construct and not death itself, I can tell you exactly how many “brain dead” patients are still alive: all of them. When brain death was first proposed by an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School in 1968, the committee admitted that these people are not dead, but rather “desperately injured.” They thought that these neurologically injured people were a burden to themselves and others, and that society would be better served if we redefined them as being “dead.” They described their reasoning this way:
Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death. There are two reasons why there is need for a definition: (1) Improvements in resuscitative and supportive measures have led to increased efforts to save those who are desperately injured. Sometimes these efforts have only partial success so that the result is an individual whose heart continues to beat but whose brain is irreversibly damaged. The burden is great on patients who suffer permanent loss of intellect, on their families, on the hospitals, and on those in need of hospital beds already occupied by these comatose patients. (2) Obsolete criteria for the definition of death can lead to controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation.
Since brain dead people are not dead, it is not surprising that the only multicenter, prospective study of brain death found that the majority of brains from “brain dead” people were not severely damaged at autopsy – and 10 actually looked normal. Dr. Gaetano Molinari, one of the study’s principal investigators, wrote:
[D]oes a fatal prognosis permit the physician to pronounce death? It is highly doubtful whether such glib euphemisms as “he’s practically dead,” … “he can’t survive,” … “he has no chance of recovery anyway,” will ever be acceptable legally or morally as a pronouncement that death has occurred.
But history shows that despite Dr. Molinari’s doubts, “brain death,” a prognosis of possible death, went on to be widely accepted as death per se. Brain death was enshrined into US law in 1981 under the Uniform Determination of Death Act. Acceptance of this law has allowed neurologically disabled people to be redefined as “dead” and used as organ donors. Unfortunately, most of these people do not, like TJ Hoover, wake up in time. They suffer death through the harvesting of their organs, a procedure often performed without the benefit of anesthesia.
Happily, some do manage to avoid becoming organ donors and go on to receive proper medical treatment. In 1985, Jennifer Hamann was thrown into a coma after being given a prescription that was incompatible with her epilepsy medication. She could not move or sign that she was awake and aware when she overheard doctors saying that her husband was being “completely unreasonable” because he would not donate her organs. She went on to made a complete recovery and became a registered nurse.
Zack Dunlap was declared brain dead in 2007 following an ATV accident. Even though his cousin demonstrated that Zack reacted to pain, hospital staff told his family that it was just “reflexes.” But as Zack’s reactions became more vigorous, the staff took more notice and called off the organ harvesting team that was just landing via helicopter to take Zack’s organs. Today, Zack leads a fully recovered life.
Colleen Burns was diagnosed “brain dead” after a drug overdose in 2009, but wasn’t given adequate testing and awoke on the operating table just minutes before her organ harvesting surgery. Because the Burns family declined to sue, the hospital only received a slap on the wrist: the State Health Department fined St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, New York, just $6,000.
In 2015, George Pickering III was declared brain dead, but his father thought doctors were moving too fast. Armed and dangerous, he held off a SWAT team for three hours, during which time his son began to squeeze his hand on command. “There was a law broken, but it was broken for all the right reasons. I’m here now because of it,” said George III.
Trenton McKinley, a 13-year-old boy, suffered a head injury in 2018 but regained consciousness after his parents signed paperwork to donate his organs. His mother told CBS News that signing the consent to donate allowed doctors to continue Trenton’s intensive care treatment, ultimately giving him time to wake up.
Doctors often say that cases like these prove nothing, and that they are obviously the result of misdiagnosis and medical mistakes. But since all these people were about to become organ donors regardless of whether their diagnoses were correct, I doubt they find the “mistake” excuse comforting.
However, Jahi McMath was indisputably diagnosed as being “brain dead” correctly. She was declared brain dead by three different doctors, she failed three apnea tests, and she had four flat-line EEGs, as well as a cerebral perfusion scan showing “no flow.” But because her parents refused to make her an organ donor and insisted on continuing her medical care, McMath recovered to the point of being able to follow commands. Two neurologists later testified that she was no longer brain dead, but a in minimally conscious state. Her case shows that people correctly declared “brain dead” can still recover.
READ: Woman with no brainwave activity wakes up after hearing her daughter’s voice
Brain death is not death because the brain death concept does not reflect the reality of the phenomenon of death. Therefore, any guideline for its diagnosis will have no basis in scientific facts. People declared brain dead are neurologically disabled, but they are still alive. “Brain dead” organ donation is a concealed form of euthanasia.
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
Now seated at the helm of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is poised to reshape not only the agency’s research priorities but the very culture that pushed him to the fringe.
Imagine spending your career studying infectious diseases, only to find that the real virus spreading uncontrollably is censorship. That was the reality for Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford epidemiologist who committed the unpardonable sin of questioning the COVID-19 lockdown orthodoxy. His punishment? Digital exile, courtesy of Silicon Valley’s Ministry of Truth.
In December 2022, the Twitter Files exposed what many had long suspected: Twitter had quietly placed Bhattacharya’s account on a Trends Blacklist. This ensured that his posts, often critical of lockdowns and mask mandates, would never see the light of day on the platform’s trending topics. In other words, Twitter’s algorithm worked like a digital bouncer, making sure his dissenting opinions never made it past the velvet rope.
And Twitter wasn’t alone. Facebook, ever eager to please its government handlers, scrubbed the Great Barrington Declaration from its pages. That document, co-authored by Bhattacharya and other esteemed scientists, dared to suggest that maybe, just maybe, locking down entire populations wasn’t the best strategy. Instead, it proposed focused protection for the most vulnerable while allowing the rest of society to function. For this, it was sent to the digital equivalent of a gulag.
These experiences took center stage during Bhattacharya’s Senate confirmation hearing for the directorship of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Republican lawmakers, who suddenly found themselves cast as the last defenders of free speech in scientific discourse, saw his nomination as a win.
During his testimony, Bhattacharya didn’t mince words. He detailed how the Biden administration played an active role in orchestrating the suppression of alternative views. It wasn’t enough for officials to push their own pandemic policies — they needed to ensure that no one, regardless of expertise, could challenge them in the public square.
The Science™ vs. The Science
Bhattacharya’s testimony laid bare an uncomfortable truth: the pandemic was a crisis of speech. “The root problem was that people who had alternative ideas were suppressed,” he told Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.). “I personally was subject to censorship by the actions of the Biden administration during the pandemic.”
In a functioning society, that statement would spark bipartisan outrage. Instead, it barely registered. The people who spent years chanting “trust the science” were never interested in science at all.
Real science thrives on debate, skepticism, and the understanding that no single expert — no matter how credentialed—holds absolute truth. But during COVID, science became The Science™ — a government-approved doctrine enforced by Silicon Valley moderators and federal bureaucrats. Deviate from it, and you weren’t just wrong. You were dangerous.
A government-sanctioned muzzle
Bhattacharya wasn’t silenced in some haphazard, accidental way. The Biden administration actively leaned on social media companies to “moderate” voices like his. In practice, that meant tech executives — most of whom couldn’t tell a virus from a viral tweet — decided which epidemiologists the public was allowed to hear.
He responded with a lawsuit against the administration, accusing it of colluding with Big Tech to crush dissent. But in a ruling as predictable as it was revealing, the Supreme Court dismissed the case, arguing that Bhattacharya and his fellow plaintiffs lacked standing. Meaning: Yes, the government may have pressured private companies into silencing critics, but unless you can prove exactly how that harmed you, don’t expect the courts to care.
The real role of science
Despite everything, Bhattacharya didn’t argue for scientists to dictate policy. Unlike the public health bureaucrats who spent the pandemic issuing commandments from their Zoom thrones, he made it clear: “Science should be an engine for freedom,” he said. “Not something where it stands on top of society and says, ‘You must do this, this or this, or else.’”
That distinction matters. Science informs, but policy is about trade-offs. The problem wasn’t that officials got things wrong — it’s that they refused to admit the possibility. Instead of allowing open debate, they silenced critics. Instead of acknowledging uncertainty, they imposed rules with absolute certainty.
Bhattacharya wasn’t censored because he was wrong. He was censored because he questioned people who couldn’t afford to be.
His confirmation hearing made one thing clear: science wasn’t about data. It was about power. And in Washington, power doesn’t like to be questioned.
Science, money and power
At the heart of the hearing was a fundamental question: Who controls science that people are allowed to talk about? The NIH, with its $48 billion budget, is less a research institution and more a financial leviathan, shaping the direction of American science through the projects it funds (or doesn’t) fund.
Bhattacharya’s nomination comes at a moment when the battle lines around scientific freedom, government intervention, and public trust in research are more entrenched than ever. The pandemic shattered the illusion that science was above politics. Instead, it exposed just how much political and corporate interests shape what counts as “settled” science.
The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife. The man once branded too dangerous for social media, blacklisted for questioning lockdowns, and effectively erased from mainstream discourse is now being handed a key role in the very government that tried to silence him. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, once forced to the margins, is now at the center of power.
A new administration has decided that maybe — just maybe — silencing dissenting scientists wasn’t the best pandemic strategy. And in a twist no Hollywood scriptwriter would dare to pitch for being too on-the-nose, Bhattacharya wasn’t being welcomed back into the conversation — he’s being put in charge of it.
Bhattacharya was confirmed following a party-line vote Tuesday evening. The decision came after a similarly partisan endorsement from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), clearing the final hurdle for President Donald Trump’s nominee.
Equally central to his testimony was Bhattacharya’s call for a sweeping shift in NIH priorities. He proposed a decentralization of research funding, stressing the need for greater inclusion of dissenting voices in the scientific process, an apparent rebuke of the consensus-driven culture that dominated during the pandemic. He emphasized targeting resources toward projects with a clear and measurable impact on public health, dismissing other NIH initiatives as “frivolous.”
Now seated at the helm of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is poised to reshape not only the agency’s research priorities but the very culture that pushed him to the fringe. His confirmation, hard-won and unapologetically political, is already shaking the scaffolding of a scientific establishment that long equated conformity with consensus.
Reprinted with permission from Reclaim The Net.
Tyler Ginn prior to his death from a fentanyl overdose in 2021. [Photo credit: Gayle Fowlie]
By Alexandra Keeler
Police are charging more drug dealers with manslaughter in fentanyl overdose deaths. But the shift is not satisfying everyone
Four years ago, Tyler Ginn died of a fentanyl overdose at the age of 18. Tyler’s father found his son unresponsive in the bedroom of their Brooklin, Ont., home.
For Tyler’s mother, Gayle Fowlie, the pain of his loss remains raw.
“He was my kid that rode his bike to the store to buy me a chocolate bar on my birthday, you know?” she told Canadian Affairs in an interview.
Police charged Jacob Norn, the drug dealer who sold Tyler his final, fatal dose, with manslaughter. More than three years after Tyler’s death, Norn was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.
“I don’t think you can grasp how difficult going through a trial is,” Fowlie said. “On TV, it’s a less than an hour process. But the pain of it, and going over every detail and then going over every detail again … it provides details you wish you didn’t know.”
But Fowlie is glad Norn was convicted. If anything, she would have liked him to serve a longer sentence. Lawyers have told her Norn is likely to serve only two to four years of his sentence in prison.
“My son’s never coming back [and] his whole family has a life sentence of missing him the rest of our lives,” she said. “So do I think four years is fair? No.”
Norn’s case reflects a growing trend of drug dealers being charged with manslaughter when their drug sales lead to fatal overdoses.
But this shift has not satisfied everyone. Some would like to see drug dealers face harsher or different penalties.
“If we say that it was 50 per cent Tyler’s fault for buying it and 50 per cent Jacob’s fault for selling it … then I think he should have a half-a-life sentence,” said Fowlie.
Others say the legal system’s focus on prosecuting low-level drug dealers misses the broader issues at play.
“[Police] decided, in the Jacob Norn case, they were going to go one stage back,” said Peter Thorning, who was Norn’s defence lawyer.
“What about the person who gave Jacob that substance? What about the person who supplied the substance to [that person]? There was no investigation into where it came from and who was ultimately responsible for the death of that young man.”
Manslaughter charge
At least 50,000 Canadians have died from drug overdoses since 2016. Last year, an average of 21 individuals died each day, with fentanyl accounting for nearly 80 per cent of those deaths.
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. A dose as small as a few grains of salt can be lethal.
Given its potency, police and prosecutors have increasingly turned to manslaughter charges when a dealer’s product results in a fatal overdose.
A recent study in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society found that the number of manslaughter charges laid for drug-related deaths in Canada surged from three cases in 2016 to 135 in 2021.
Individuals can be convicted of manslaughter for committing unlawful, reckless or negligent acts that result in death but where there was no intention to kill. Sentences can range from probation (in rare cases) to life.
Murder charges, by contrast, require an intent to kill or cause fatal harm. Drug dealers typically face manslaughter charges in overdose cases, as their intent is to distribute drugs, not to kill those who purchase them.
Joanne Bortoluss, a spokesperson for the Durham Regional Police, which charged Norn, said that each of their investigations follows the same fundamental process.
“Investigators consider the strength of the evidence, the dealer’s level of involvement, and applicable laws when determining whether to pursue charges like manslaughter,” she said.
The Canadian Journal of Law and Society study also found that prosecutions often target low-level dealers, many of whom are drug users themselves and have personal connections to the deceased.
Norn’s case fits this pattern. He struggled with substance abuse, including addiction to fentanyl, Xanax and Percocet. Tyler and Norn were friends, the judge said in the court ruling, although Fowlie disputes this claim.
“[Those words] are repulsive to me,” she said.
The Crown argued Norn demonstrated “a high degree of moral blameworthiness” by warning Ginn of the fentanyl’s potency while still selling it to him. In a call to Ginn, he warned him “not to do a lot of the stuff” because he “didn’t want to be responsible for anything that happened.”
Fowlie’s outrage over Norn’s lenient sentencing is compounded by the fact that Norn was found trafficking fentanyl again after her son’s death.
“So we’ve killed somebody, and we’re still … trafficking? We’re not worried who else we kill?” Fowlie said.
Trafficking
Some legal sources noted that manslaughter charges do not necessarily lead to harsh sentences or deterrence.
“If you look at how diverse and … lenient some sentences are for manslaughter, I don’t think it really pushes things in the direction that [victims’ families] want,” said Kevin Westell, a Vancouver-based trial lawyer and former chair of the Canadian Bar Association.
Westell noted that the term “manslaughter” is misleading. “Manslaughter is a brutal-sounding title, but it encapsulates a very broad span of criminal offences,” he said.
In Westell’s view, consistently charging dealers with drug trafficking could be more effective for deterring the practice.
“What really matters is how long the sentence is, and you’re better off saying, ‘We know fentanyl is dangerous, so we’re setting the sentence quite high,’ rather than making it harder to prove with a manslaughter charge,” he said.
Trafficking is a distinct charge from manslaughter that involves the distribution, sale or delivery of illicit drugs. The sentencing range for fentanyl trafficking is eight to 15 years, Kwame Bonsu, a media relations representative for the Department of Justice, told Canadian Affairs.
“Courts must impose sentences that are proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender,” Bonsu said, referencing a 2021 Supreme Court of Canada decision. Bonsu noted that aggravating factors such as lack of remorse or trafficking large quantities can lead to harsher sentences.
‘Head of the snake’
Some legal experts noted the justice system often fails to target those higher up in the drug supply chain.
“We don’t know how many hands that drug goes through,” said Thorning, the defence lawyer.
“Are the police going to prosecute every single person who provides fentanyl to another person? Jacob [Norn] was himself an addict trafficker — what about the person who supplied the substance to him?”
Thorning also questioned whether government agencies bear some responsibility. “Is some government agency’s failure to investigate how that drug came into the country partly responsible for the young man’s death?”
Westell, who has served as both a Crown prosecutor and criminal defence lawyer, acknowledged the difficulty of targeting higher-level traffickers.
“Cutting off the head of the snake does not align very well with the limitations of the international borders,” he said.
“Yes, there are transnational justice measures, but a lot gets lost, and as soon as you cross an international border of any kind, it becomes incredibly difficult to follow the chain in a linear way.”
Bortoluss, of the Durham police, said even prosecuting what appear to be obvious fentanyl-related deaths — such as Tyler Ginn’s — can be challenging. Witnesses can be reluctant to cooperate, fearing legal consequences. It can also be difficult to identify the source of drugs, as “transactions often involve multiple intermediaries and anonymous online sales.”
Another challenge in deterring fentanyl trafficking is the strong financial incentives of the trade.
“Even if [Norn] serves two to four years for killing somebody, but he could make a hundred thousand off of selling drugs, is it worth it?” Fowlie said.
Thorning agreed that the profit incentive can be incredibly powerful, outweighing the risk of a potential sentence.
“The more risky you make the behaviour, the greater the profit for a person who’s willing to break our laws, and the profit is the thing that generates the conduct,” he said.
A blunt instrument
Legal experts also noted the criminal justice system alone cannot solve the fentanyl crisis.
“Most people who have [lost] a loved one [to drug overdose] want to see a direct consequence to the person that’s responsible,” said Westell. “But I think they would also like to see something on a more macro level that helps eliminate the problem more holistically, and that can’t be [achieved through] crime and punishment alone.”
Thorning agrees.
“These are mental health .. [and] medical issues,” he said. “Criminal law is a blunt instrument [that is] not going to deal with these things effectively.”
Even Fowlie sees the problem as bigger than sentencing. Her son struggled with the stigma associated with therapy and medication, which made it difficult for him to seek help.
“We need to normalize seeing a therapist, like we normalize getting your eyes checked every year,” she said.
“Pot isn’t the gateway drug, trauma is a gateway drug.”
This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.
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