SID&T to NPR: Jennifer Erickson Promotes Junk Science on Organ Donation

Scott Simon and Sarah Lucy Oliver,

On its April 13, 2024 program, NPR’s Weekend Edition ran a story, “Patients die everyday waiting for organ transplants. The problem goes beyond donations.” The story was almost entirely based on an interview with Jennifer Erickson, who was identified as a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a venerable nonprofit dedicated to global peace. Perhaps the association with FAS made it seem to NPR that Erickson was asserting about the US organ transplantation system for which no legitimate opposing point of view existed.

However, within the organ donation and transplant community, Erickson is seen as a gadfly – a controversial figure whose ideas for reforming organ transplantation have found little support and whose tactics primarily consist of slandering the US organ transplant system – the world’s best system, which sets records every year -- as corrupt and unaccountable…