When doctors want a dying patient's organs, they sometimes start removing them while the person is still alive, and there have been cases where someone said no and the patient survived.

The finding

What the evidence shows

There is a real case behind this: in 2021 a Kentucky patient, TJ Hoover, was taken to surgery for organ recovery, the procedure was stopped when he showed signs of life, and he survived. A federal HRSA review of the Kentucky organ group found 28 cases where patients may not have been dead when the recovery process began, but these were near misses where no organs were taken, and none involved a brain death declaration. That is a serious safety failure, not evidence that hospitals remove organs from living people. An official finding or court record showing organs actually removed from a patient who was still alive would make this verdict wrong.