I was thinking the same thing but further down in the article it says the surgery happened in 2019. This article is basically about the surgeons being punished.

I just watched this show Pluribus. In it a hive mind takes over earth except a few immune people. In one episode the main character discovers a warehouse full of frozen body parts starts freaking out and confronts the hive mind. They made a pretty convincing point, there 7 billion people in the world and every day millions of them die from accidents or natural causes, it would be wasteful not to use that abundant source of protein that is otherwise going to just rot.