HONG KONG (AP) – Hong Kong leader John Lee said police will investigate suspicious requests from people to opt out of the city’s organ donation system and condemned the alleged attempt to damage the program as shameful.
The city’s organ donation registration system has received nearly 5,800 withdrawal requests in the five months since December, when the government raised the possibility of setting up an organ transplant mutual assistance program with mainland China. More than half of the withdrawal requests turned out to be invalid, either as duplicate requests or from people who never decided to do so.
At a regular media briefing Tuesday, Lee referred to those who withdrew their applications without ever registering, calling the moves suspicious.
“I condemn in the strongest possible terms those who seek to harm this noble system that saves lives through organ donation,” he said. “That is a shameful act.”
Hong Kong, a former British colony returned to China in 1997, has a separate system for matching donated organs to patients and has no permanent mechanism to share cadaveric organs with mainland Chinese institutions. Cross-border organ transplants were permitted on a case-by-case basis.
Under an opt-in system, Hong Kong currently has more than 357,000 registrants in the financial hub of 7 million people. Organ donation is met with opposition in both Hong Kong and China due to a deeply rooted desire to keep the body intact.
The government issued a strongly worded statement on Monday saying it could not rule out a small number of people attempting to withdraw in order to damage the system’s reputation and increase administrative burdens. Without naming platforms or individuals, it said a small number of people had misrepresented the value of organ donation by promoting the idea that donors should verify recipients’ identities online. Some also called on others to withdraw from the system, it said.
At the Reddit-like forum LIHKG in Hong Kong, where pro-democracy supporters discussed strategies for the anti-government movement in 2019, some users expressed skepticism about the proposed system. Others have posted a link for withdrawals from the register.
The Hong Kong government launched the proposal after a little girl in the city had her first transplant with a heart donated from mainland China in December. It said the organ assistance program under consideration could be activated immediately if medical staff could not match a donated organ to a suitable patient locally.
The political row over the proposed mutual support program reflected some Hong Kongers’ distrust of China’s healthcare system, as well as their displeasure with Beijing, which has cracked down on the city’s pro-democracy movement with a sweeping national security law.
Hong Kong’s medical standards are among the highest in the world. Although China’s medical system has evolved over the past few decades, many Hong Kongers remain skeptical about China’s healthcare system. Allegations of forced organ harvesting in China, particularly against imprisoned minorities, have heightened concerns about cross-border organ collaboration.
In 2015, Beijing stopped organ transplantation from executed prisoners in response to human rights concerns, and later shared data with the international community showing that the country was fighting illegal organ transplants.