The real news on organ donation is that America’s non-profit system for procuring this life-saving gift for transplant is effective, efficient, and growing, but that growth is slowing. Sensational headlines based on shoddy reporting promoted grossly inaccurate allegations that OPOs began removing organs before the potential donor had died. This reporting that lacks medical and scientific knowledge disregards the facts, laws, and detailed case reviews are causing a decline in willing donors. Let us set the medical and scientific record straight and insist that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services take note.

The misinformation exacerbates the already negative impact of the fatally flawed “Final Rule” created by CMS, which will wreak havoc when it takes effect in March 2026. At its adoption, Donate Life America estimated one of its consequences was the loss of thousands of future donations. Further, the Rule will close, “decertify,” up to two-thirds of the nation’s Organ Procurement Organizations (OPOs). Peer-reviewed data show that its faulty measures will decertify the wrong OPOs. (https://sidandt.org/the-science/peer-reviewed-scientifically, closing well-run OPOs can exacerbate the confusion over donations, making the confusion worse.)

Organ Procurement Organizations — already defamed by ORGANize’s decade-long smear campaign and facing a chaotic future as CMS struggles to implement its unsound and draconian Final Rule — are now dealing with this poorly researched media firestorm.

Going forward, the news media, as well as Health and Human Services (HHS) officials, who are on record in their commitment to improving the system, must be more cautious before assigning blame for organ donation mishaps, making it clear that:

Federal law excludes OPOs from being involved in the declaration of death or in any medical treatment of a patient. The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, adopted by all fifty states and the District of Columbia, makes sure that OPOs have absolutely nothing to do with the headline allegations.

• OPO transplant teams do not dictate withdrawal of care nor declaration of death.

• There is a mandatory waiting period after the declaration.

• Physician misdiagnoses can happen. OPO personnel can catch them, but not cause them.

• Organ donation stops as soon as a hospital’s physicians change the patient’s prognosis.

• In the unheard circumstance of organs potentially recovered from a person not declared dead by a physician, participants would have a duty to report it to local authorities, who would treat it as a crime. This has never happened.

The fifty-five federally regulated nonprofits that run organ donation in their service areas face a chaotic future that puts patients at risk. As OPOs deliver the critical life-saving link between donors, surgeons, and patients, they must deal with the impact of a media firestorm wrongfully pushing the public’s greatest fear: organs removed before a patient is dead. 

National news outlets have made poorly researched allegations, alarming selfless and generous people who have responded by pulling themselves off their state donor registries in droves.

The news sounds terrifying, but is it true? No.

A recent op-ed in Undark, signed by a trio of organ transplantation leaders, argues that by “suggesting that some U.S. patients had nearly been killed for their organs,” the media’s coverage has “confused some of the fundamental issues involved” in the cases they reported on. False and sensationalized reporting is the primary reason thousands of people removed themselves from organ registries in 2025. Those removals impact the hopeful patients on transplant waiting lists.

Jedediah Lewis, head of the nonprofit Organ Preservation Alliance, joined by Hedi Aguiar, R.N., M.S.N., and Adam Schiavi, Ph.D., M.D., wrote in Undark: “Organ donation is complex. Much of the recent reporting has misled and unnecessarily alarmed the public.” They added that the disturbing news coverage “mostly alleges mistakes made during the underlying process of (physicians) withdrawing life-sustaining treatment and not the organ donation process itself. In other words, the alleged errors would have happened whether the patient was an organ donor or not.”

A significant news source told a story to shock readers with its depiction of an OPO surgeon cutting into a living person. The stubborn fact remains: OPO recovery teams never touch the deceased donor without the hospital doctor’s independent declaration of death. That doctor’s declaration might have been premature, but it was caught by the OPO and hospital team who stopped the donation case. It is illogical, and plainly factually wrong, to blame the OPO team, which made the observations of the patient’s movements that the doctors missed, and acted responsibly in ending the organ donation process.

We applaud HHS’ announcement that it would require OPOs to appoint officers to monitor patient safety events in real-time, including both medical and procedural incidents that occur during organ donation, recovery, and placement processes. When an incident occurs, the OPO’s patient safety officer will lead a “root cause analysis” to determine what led to the event. The goal is to identify systemic issues and prevent them from happening again.

Safeguards have always been in place. All concerned have a moral responsibility to encourage donation for the sake of others, placing responsibility for reform on systemic safety issues. The OPOs and HHS are making an important statement that safety, not numbers, is the priority for OPOs and physicians.