The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

On September 23, 2020, a former director of the CDC, Bill Foege, sat down to write a letter to the current director, Robert Redfield. Foege was eighty-four years old and a legend in disease control—to many “the man who eradicated smallpox.” He wore his principles lightly but he had some, and had lived by them. He’d been the last CDC director to rise from within the ranks, propelled by the admiration of fellow experts, rather than through connections to a politician. Later, Jimmy Carter would introduce him as the man he’d handpicked to run the agency, but Jimmy Carter hadn’t picked him at all: Foege’s peers in disease control had. “Dear Bob,” he now wrote, as a disease swept through the American population. “I start each day thinking about the terrible burden you bear. I don’t know what I would actually do, if in your position, but I do know what I wish I would do. The first thing would be to face the truth. You and I both know that: 1) Despite the White House spin attempts, 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. The public health texts of the future will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an infectious disease pandemic.” Points 2 and 3 followed Point 1. The gist of all three was that the CDC, under Robert Redfield, had been disgraced. It had let itself be used by the Trump administration to lead the United States in a direction opposite to the direction the ...