Former CDC chief: Trump has ‘knee on the neck’ of public health experts

Update 2:44 a.m. EDT Oct. 9: The former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke out Thursday against what he perceives as the muzzling of the public health community in the national response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

"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," Dr. William Foege told NPR in a Thursday interview.

“You can’t sit by and let this happen. … You have to have a national plan. You can't have 50 states trying to figure this out on their own,” Foege told the outlet one day after a private letter he wrote to current CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield was published by USA Today.

Foege, who led the CDC from 1977 to 1983, called the United States’ response to date to the COVID-19 pandemic “about the worst” a country “could possibly have.”

Specifically, Foege blamed the Trump administration for failing to leverage the expertise of the country’s leading disease-fighting agency in the midst of a pandemic.

“The failure of the White House to put the CDC in charge has resulted in the violation of every lesson learned in the last 75 years that made the CDC the gold standard for public health in the world,” Foege wrote in his letter to Redfield.

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