Dr. William (Bill) Foege was the director when I started at CDC. Back then (1978) it was the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Now it is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They reorganized into a series of centers with focus in specific areas and added prevention to the name but kept the acronym.
I spent 30 years at CDC and so went through many changes of Directors. As far as I was concerned, Dr. Foege was the best.
What prompted me to write about Dr. Foege was his letter to the current director Dr. Robert Redfield and the subsequent news coverage when the letter was made public and I’ll get to that in a minute.
Emory University where Dr. Bill Foege is Professor Emeritus, Global Health has a nice 1 page biography at https://www.sph.emory.edu/departments/gh/fellows/foege/bill-foege/. I just mention this since many will not be familiar with Dr.Foege and his many achievements.
USA Today broke the story (‘It is a slaughter’: Public health champion asks CDC director to expose White House, orchestrate his own firing which starts like this:
A former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public health titan who led the eradication of smallpox asked the embattled, current CDC leader to expose the failed U.S. response to the coronavirus, calling on him to orchestrate his own firing to protest White House interference.
William Foege, a renowned epidemiologist who served under Democratic and Republican presidents, detailed in a private letter he sent last month to CDC Director Robert Redfield his alarm over how the agency has fallen in stature while the pandemic raged across America.
Foege, who has not been a vocal critic of the agency’s handling of the novel coronavirus, called on Redfield to openly address the White House’s meddling in the agency’s efforts to manage the COVID-19 crisis, then accept the political sacrifice that would follow. He recommended that Redfield commit to writing the administration’s failures – and his own – so there would be a record that could not be dismissed.
“You could upfront, acknowledge the tragedy of responding poorly, apologize for what has happened and your role in acquiescing,” Foege wrote to Redfield. He said simply resigning without coming clean would be insufficient. “Don’t shy away from the fact this has been an unacceptable toll on our country. It is a slaughter and not just a political dispute.”
The NPR story is also good and here is a small bit of it
Foege says he penned the letter because he was frustrated that the nation’s messy, piecemeal efforts have led to many unnecessary deaths. The situation in the U.S. “is a slaughter and not just a political dispute,” he wrote.
“We have 75 years of experience at CDC on how to handle outbreaks,” he says, “And we’ve learned a lot of lessons. And it appears to me that every one of those lessons has been violated.”
Read the stories and read the letter. They tell the story of how the Trump adminstation response to COVID-19 failed and why about 215,000 Americans are dead so far. It didn’t have to be this bad.