In the latest ASCO in Action Podcast, American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) CEO Dr. Clifford A. Hudis is joined by Dr. Jonathan Marron, incoming Chair of ASCO's Ethics Committee and a lead author of the new Ethics and Resource Scarcity: ASCO Recommendations for the Oncology Community During the COVID-19 Pandemic. 

In this episode they discuss ASCO's recommendations, why ASCO developed this guidance, and what patients, families, and the entire medical community need to know about allocating limited resources during the COVID-19 Pandemic.  

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Transcript

Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

Dr. Clifford Hudis: Welcome to this ASCO in Action podcast, brought to you by the ASCO Podcast Network, a collection of nine programs covering a range of educational and scientific content that offers enriching insights into the world of cancer care. You can find all of our shows, including this one, at podcast.asco.org. The ASCO in Action podcast is ASCO's podcast series, where we explore the policy and practice issues that impact oncologists, the entire cancer care delivery team, and the individuals we care for, people with cancer.

My name is Dr. Clifford Hudis, and I'm the CEO of ASCO. And I'm proud to serve as the host of the ASCO in Action podcast series. Today, I'm very pleased to be joined by Dr. Jonathan Marron, incoming chair of ASCO's Ethics Committee and a lead author of ASCO's recent recommendations for the oncology community on ethically managing scarce resources during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Marron is also a bioethicist at Boston Children's Hospital, a pediatric oncologist at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and he is on the Center for Bioethics teaching faculty at Harvard Medical School. Today, we're going to talk about those recommendations. And I'll note that they were published just recently as a special article just in early April in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. We'll focus specifically on the reasons that ASCO took this step and what it is that oncologists, patients, families, and the entire cancer care community need to know about this issue. Dr. Marron, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dr. Jonathan Marron: Thank you so much, Dr. Hudis. It's really a pleasure to be speaking with you, and an honor as well. Before we get started, I do want to just point out that I have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Dr. Clifford Hudis: Well, that's great. Now, just to provide some context as we start this discussion, it's the middle of May as we're recording this. In the United States, the COVID-19 public health crisis bubbled up to awareness a little bit in January, became seemingly near threat in February, and seemed in the public's eye, I think, to breach our shores at the beginning to middle of March. So, we're about four months, more or less, into this public health crisis.

The US has had now about a million and a half-confirmed cases of the virus. And I think this week, we crossed the 90,000 number in terms of deaths from the virus. From the very early days, there was-- and we all remember this-- an extraordinarily emotional and widespread concern that medical resources, and especially ventilators, but also medications, as well as space, critical and intensive care beds-- those three things, that they would be stretched, that some communities would be especially hard hit, and that, as a consequence, access to those resources might be limited.

And when that arose as a concern, what followed, especially for people who work in this field, and bioethicists in general, as well as everyday clinicians, was the very real possibility that they would be forced to make some painful and difficult choices. And I'll say some of our members wrote about these experiences as well in ASCO Connection and elsewhere. So, can you now maybe help our listeners understand why ASCO in particular thought that this situation needed to be addressed and why we decided to provide the very specific guidance that you took part in creating in the form of these recommendations?

Dr. Jonathan Marron: Absolutely. So you really highlighted a couple of the main questions and concerns that we had that we wanted to do our best to address, in the sense that at the outset of the pandemic, it was really difficult to tell what direction things were going to go and just how bad everything was going to get. Seeing the experience in China and seeing the experience in Italy, there was significant concern that, as you mentioned, our health care system would not be able to support the critical care needs that we would have. There is a long history of people thinking about how to utilize and best utilize resources like this in the setting of scarcity.

One of the concerns that comes up whenever you have to make these difficult or realistically impossible choices is how you're going to do so. And so really, that's where we came, as oncologists and as the ASCO community, to try to figure out how we could best represent the oncology community and to ensure that cancer unto itself was not going to keep a given patient from having a fair chance to access these potentially lifesaving resources, even in the setting of a public health crisis like this, even in the setting of scarce resources.

Dr. Clifford Hudis: So, I remember as this was being developed having conversations with, I think, you and other members of the panel. I'm going to push a little bit on at least one of the areas that I think is really a concern but can be misunderstood. And that is this high-level statement you just made that people with-- if I understood correctly-- that people with cancer might find themselves discriminated against in these moments of triage, fundamentally. There's one ventilator. There are three patients at need. And God forbid we're ever in this situation-- how do you decide who gets it.

On the one hand, of course, there's a fairness doctrine. But on the other, there is a medical reality. And cancer is not one thing. So, could you just talk a little bit about what we mean when we say protecting the cancer patients? And let me be clear. We're not saying that cancer as a diagnosis, stage, prognosis should be ignored exactly, right?

Dr. Jonathan Marron: Absolutely. And I think what you said there really is one of the most, if not the most, important aspects here, that there are a couple of different ways that you can go about trying to take, as the example that you had of the three patients, and decide which of those three will get the ventilator. If not the perhaps fairest way would be simply to make a choice at random and say each of those three individuals has an equal chance at it, and we'll flip a coin or do some other random way of deciding who will get it. That's certainly fair.

But some people would say, you know what? They may not be equal in all ways. And if we're trying to maximize our resources and maximize the potential outcome benefits of these scarce resources, we want to do something more than just do something-- choose randomly. And we've actually learned in the past from work with community groups that people don't love the idea of randomly choosing things like this, in a public health emergency or otherwise.

And so then-- the question, then, is OK, so how are you going to make that choice. If we're trying to maximize health care outcomes, and which you usually think about that being survival, we want to use medical information. But then the question is, what is the information that should be used.

So, one of the concerns is that there could be certain disease processes, cancer or otherwise, that would be seen as exclusion criteria. That's to say, OK, we have these three patients. We have one ventilator. Patient one has cancer, so therefore we're going to not even give them a chance at that ventilator. And that's really where this comes in. That's not the way to do this. Cancer absolutely should come into the consideration. But that patient's specific cancer-- their diagnosis, their prognosis, the medical information-- the best medical information that we have, the best evidence-based medical information that we have about their specific disease so that we can make an informed decision, or at least a maximally informed decision about who is the most likely to survive if they are given access to the ventilator or ICU bed or whatever