A former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently wrote to the agency's current director, Robert Redfield, asking him to expose the "colossal failure" of the Trump administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, even though he said it meant Redfield likely would be fired.
Former CDC Director William Foege sent a private letter to Redfield in September, first made public by USA Today. He wrote the Trump administration's response will go down as "a colossal failure of the public health system in our country," in part by failing to put CDC in charge and blaming the agency and states when things went wrong.
In an interview with ABC News, Foege said he didn't intend for the letter to become public and he wrote to Redfield to apologize that it's been released, but said he hopes it shows the administration how frustrated the public health community is and encourages the White House to put the experts back in charge of the pandemic response.
"I hope that, perhaps, it gives CDC some cover. If the White House sees that this is really the way the public health community feels that we do feel that they violated everything we believe him by trying to run this on their own," he said.
MORE: 5 former CDC directors on where US went wrong in its COVID-19 response In the letter, Foege called on Redfield to go on record about how the Trump administration has hurt CDC's reputation.
"Don't shy away from the fact that this has been an unacceptable toll on our country," Foege wrote.
"It's is a slaughter and not just a political dispute. You don't want to be seen, in the future, as forsaking your role as servant to the public in order to become servant to a corrupt president," he wrote.
