Issue #16 | January 2026

Welcome to the Science in Donation & Transplant Newsletter!

Three new and informative articles in this issue:

1. Transplant Leaders, Dr. Cooper, Dr. Goldstein, and Dr. Watkins Show the Path Forward

2. SID&T Responds to House Ways and Means Oversight Hearing Misinformation

3. SID&T Applauds Bret Whetsone’s Accurate Take on the For-Profit Threat

Transplant Leaders, Dr. Cooper, Dr. Goldstein, and Dr. Watkins Show the Path Forward

The Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Oz with their dramatic decertification of the Miami organ procurement organization demonstrate that the previous disjointed approach to federal oversight of the system of past years will no longer be acceptable …

SID&T Responds to House Ways and Means Oversight Hearing Misinformation

Below are two different testimonies that SID&T submitted to the Committee on Ways and Means between November and December 2025 on the issue of recent changes to the the U.S. donation and transplant system …

The System That Saves Lives vs. the System That Doesn’t Show Up

From Brent Whetstone – There’s something almost surreal about watching Congress announce, yet again, that the organ procurement system needs urgent reform … only for the ranking member not to show up, senators to arrive without even reading their materials, and the majority of the hearing to be consumed not by data, not by policy, not by patients waiting for a transplant—but by stories about the COVID vaccine …

Discover SID&T on Your Favorite Social Media Platforms

Did you know that we post regularly across a series of popular social media platforms? Give us a follow and join us as we share updates from the news, Washington D.C., and debunk bad science and misinformation on OPOs, and organ donation and transplantation.

Science in Donation and Transplant is a non-profit established in November 2020 devoted to improving OPOs performance and placing patient results above politics.

Our goal is to ensure that the metrics and measures used to credential, license, designate and certify donation and transplant organizations are grounded in science and protected from political whim and private financial influence.