Dr. William Foege doesn’t know how his private letter to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, got leaked — but he stands by its contents.
“I think we’ve got about the worst response to this pandemic that you could possibly have,” said Foege, who served as CDC director from 1977 to 1983, spanning the Carter and Reagan administrations, in an interview with NPR.
He blames the White House, which he says has not allowed the CDC, the nation’s public health agency, to apply its considerable knowledge to the pandemic response: “It felt to me like President Trump had his knee on the neck of the public health community holding them down so that they could not actually do their work,” he says.
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