(The Epoch Times)—The good news came on Heather Knuckles’s wedding day: her mother, bedridden with a failing liver and kidneys, had an organ match.
It was the happiest day of their lives, Knuckles said, recalling her mother smiling while picturing a new life in front of her.
Instead, she said, what began was a nightmare.
Knuckles’s mother, Mary Ann Hollis, underwent liver and kidney transplants on Oct. 30, 2022. Five days after the surgery, doctors told the family that the donor liver had a previously unreported issue—a rare and deadly form of cancer.
Hollis soon had a second surgery to replace the liver, a four-hour procedure that left her fragile and in delirium.
By Christmas, she was on a feeding tube, and family members crowded her bedside to open gifts she was too weak to open by herself. She died three weeks later, with a solid mass developing in her body.
What killed her was the same cancer—undifferentiated adenocarcinoma—from the donor whose organs Knuckles said should have never been eligible for transplant in the first place.
Three years later, with new national scrutiny on the U.S. organ transplant system and its procurement process, she is now demanding accountability.
“No one should ever have to experience what my mother and our family has endured,” she told lawmakers at a Dec. 2 congressional hearing amid the ongoing inquiry into the nonprofits facilitating organ donations and transplants known as Organ Procurement Organization (OPO).
And her story was far from an outlier.
‘Inhumane’
At the hearing, whistleblowers testified to patients on the brink of getting their organs removed when they showed clear signs of life, donor organs being discarded, and concerns of potential malpractice silenced.
One witness is Nyckoletta Martin, a former surgical preservation coordinator with Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, which later merged with another OPO to form the Network for Hope in October 2024.
The hospital in 2021 received TJ Hoover, who was in cardiac arrest and remained unresponsive for days. He woke up in the operating room just as doctors were assessing whether his organs were healthy enough for donation. But instead of immediately halting the procedure, Martin said, medical staff allegedly sedated him to stop his movement, alarming some staffers who called the actions “inhumane” and akin to “human euthanasia.”
Network for Hope is one of 55 OPOs in the United States tasked with recovering organs for transplantation.
A federal probe in July uncovered more than 100 cases in which organ procurement began when patients were still showing signs of life. Following that, the Department of Health and Human Services decertified an organ procurement group, saying it was a warning to other transplant procurement networks.
Jennifer Erickson, senior fellow for organ donation policy at the Federation of American Scientists, describes America as having reached national-crisis levels of corruption at OPOs.
“Taxpayer-funded OPOs operate with virtually no accountability, and OPOs have pressured grieving families and, in the most horrifying cases, targeted patients who aren’t even dead,” she told lawmakers.
Whistleblowers told Erickson they have been trained to “target inexperienced physicians, especially in rural America” to worsen patients’ conditions by over-administering comfort medications, such as fentanyl, she said.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) later circled back to this point.
“Isn’t this essentially trying to kill people in order to get their organs?” he asked.
Erickson replied: “I want to be absolutely clear, the things we are talking about are crimes.
“That is not just a danger to the people who live there. It’s a danger to any American who travels through any of these states where whistleblowers have shared these practices happen.”
Charles Bearden, America’s longest-serving transplant coordinator, who passed away in the summer, once “literally covered a patient with his own body to stop dangerous OPOs from harming patients who could otherwise survive,” Erickson said.
“The line between organ donation and organ harvesting is consent. No family would consent to a loved one being wheeled into or to have their organs removed when they could survive. Yet that’s what’s happening across the country.”
Silenced
After what happened to Hoover, Martin said that several staff had wanted to report the case to the appropriate authorities, but they were told the OPO would deal with the matter internally, she said.
“Our access to TJ’s records was restricted. We were silenced.”
Martin quit her job over the facility’s handling of the case and was fired by her new employer, Buckeye Transplant, after she spoke publicly about the issue.
Martin said she saw a pattern while reading a letter from the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee to the New Jersey Organ and Tissue Sharing Network, an OPO that the committee is investigating over Medicare fraud concerns.
Over a dozen whistleblowers have brought forth concerning allegations of directives being given for organ procurement to proceed after a patient showed signs of life and deletion of documentation. The letter further cited Excel sheets from the organization allegedly showing mass discarding of pancreases, collected in the name of research but apparently meant to improve metrics instead, the committee said.
The parallels between her experience and the whistleblower allegations in the letter were “unmistakable,” said Martin, highlighting “systemic failures that demand urgent accountability and reform.”
The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which manages the national organ waiting list and matching system under federal contract, had threatened legal action against witnesses from a previous House hearing, Erickson said, citing local media reports from Richmond, where the organization is based.
The nonprofit, in a Dec. 2 statement, said it “adheres to whistleblower protection laws and does not tolerate, or engage in, retaliation against whistleblowers.”
“UNOS has never engaged in any unlawful behavior. Any statement to the contrary is outrageous and actionable in court,” it added.
Reached by The Epoch Times, the network pointed to a July testimony by UNOS CEO Maureen McBride in Congress, in which she suggested creating a “no wrong door” patient safety reporting system to address potential concerns. The Knuckles’s mother’s case is “deeply disturbing,” McBride said, but UNOS doesn’t regulate OPOs or transplant hospitals, nor participate in clinical decision-making.
Barry Massa, CEO of Network for Hope, said the claims from the hearing “do not reflect the positive impact of Network for Hope since its merger.”
For people working at OPOs, Martin’s advice is “don’t be afraid.”
“We are on the front lines. We are that patient’s advocate. That’s what we all sign up for, right?” she said. “We are protected in ways, but at the end of the day, you know, we’re all here to save lives. We can’t let this keep continuing to go on.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
