WASHINGTON, DC — China is likely using lungs taken from living political prisoners to treat coronavirus patients, a doctoral researcher told Breitbart News, confirming revelations by a Chinese labor camp survivor during an event on Capitol Hill Tuesday.

China targets imprisoned religious minorities for organ harvesting, particularly from its Falun Gong and predominantly Muslim Uyghur communities.

Chinese labor camp survivor Yu Ming is a practitioner of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that Beijing considers a dangerous anti-communist cult.

Matthew Robertson, a China studies researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) who authored a new report on organ procurement and extrajudicial executions in the communist country, translated Yu’s Chinese-language comments.

During the event Tuesday, Yu indicated that unscrupulous doctors in China used the harvested organs for recent double-lung transplants performed on people suffering from coronavirus, Robertson said.

After the event, Robertson confirmed Yu’s comments to Breitbart News.

“The authorities would say they [the lungs used for the transplants] were obviously donated, but one can raise reasonable objections as to whether that was in the least plausible,” he said.

VOC hosted the Capitol Hill gathering in collaboration with the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China and the Uyghur Human Rights Project.

The event was primarily focused on allegations of extrajudicial killings for the harvesting of organs by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), particularly coercive organ transplant practices involving Falun Gong and Uighur political prisoners.

During the event, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), a decades-long champion of human rights in China, compared the abhorrent organ harvesting practices in the communist country to “Nazi-like behavior” in Germany during World War II.

“Sometimes they killed the person outright. Sometimes it was the surgery that took their lives. Just horrible, Nazi-like behavior and yet it became mainstream, especially as it was directed towards those [political] dissidents … like the Falun Gong and the Uyghurs,” the New Jersey Republican declared.

Smith, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Global Human Rights Subcommittee, said that he has learned from witness testimonies that organs harvested by uninhibited doctors from prisoners in China who expire during the surgery have become routine.

China is harvesting organs from unwilling donors “to this day,” the China Tribunal, an independent legal entity created to investigate decades of reports of the communist country selling organs cut out of living political prisoners, recently determined.

“It’s real, and it’s not surprising,” Robertson told Breitbart News, referring to the ongoing organ harvesting practices in China.

The researcher wrote in his new report, published on Tuesday:

At this stage, only the Chinese authorities are in a position to put these [organ harvesting] allegations to rest. Instead of doing so, they have co-opted international medical elites, responded with propaganda to those making the allegations, and engaged in an elaborate scheme of data falsification, creating a Potemkin voluntary donation system while continuing to offer organs on demand to paying clients. World governments have not publicly challenged China as to the source of its organs, and international medical and human rights organizations have also failed to raise public concerns as to the scale of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] transplant system and the real source of organs.

Coronavirus originated in China, where it has infected more than 80,000 people, including 3,100 who died from the disease.

The communist regime is currently holding up to one million Muslim-majority Uyghurs in re-education camps. Prisoners face extrajudicial incarceration, torture, communist indoctrination, and forced labor, among other human rights abuses. China coerces the prisoners to renounce to their faith and native language.

Beijing is also reportedly holding Falun Gong practitioners at the camps. Breitbart News has noted that China has expanded its industrial-scale harvesting of organs from living Falun Gong practitioners to Uyghur Muslims.