NYU Langone Health, one of the nation’s top academic medical centers, told emergency-room doctors that they have “sole discretion” to place patients on ventilators and institutional backing to “withhold futile intubations.”

A March 28 email from Robert Femia, who heads the New York health center’s department of emergency medicine, underscored the life-or-death decisions placed on the shoulders of bedside physicians as they treat increasing numbers of coronavirus patients with a limited supply of ventilators.

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