Dr. Foege, an epidemiologist who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, said he wasn’t sure what he would do in Dr. Redfield’s shoes, but the first thing “would be to face the truth.” Despite spin from the White House, “this will go down as a colossal failure of the public health system of this country. The biggest challenge in a century and we let the country down.” In the future, public health textbooks “will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an infectious disease pandemic.” The cause, he said, has been “the incompetence and illogic” of the White House.

Not placing the CDC in charge of the pandemic response violated “every lesson learned in the last 75 years that made CDC the gold standard for public health in the world,” he wrote. The need for a “coherent federal plan, the backbone of every former response,