AZPHA mourns the passing of Dr. Bill Foege and gives thanks for a life of extraordinary service to public health. Very few people have made the world healthier and safer at global scale. Bill Foege did.
Dr. Foege’s career spanned decades of modern public health. Beginning as an officer in the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, he played a central leadership role in the global campaign in India that eradicated smallpox in the 1970s… one of the greatest public-health achievements in history.
His firsthand account of that effort, House on Fire is essential for anyone who wants to understand how evidence, strategy, and persistence can overcome even the deadliest threats.
In 1977, Dr. Foege was appointed Director of the CDC by President Carter. As CDC Director, he inspired staff and championed evidence-based, collaborative public-health policy. He showed that science accompanied by ethical and transparent leadership can earn public trust. He also co-founded co-found The Task Force for Global Health, which helped increase global childhood immunization coverage from roughly 20% to 80%, saving untold lives.
He was also a big player in the public health philanthropy. Dr. Foege also left a profound mark on the philanthropic landscape.
At a dinner in Seattle in the mid-1990s, Foege was seated next to Gates and explained the enormous leverage of public health to improve lives at scale. That conversation is widely credited as the moment that set the foundation on its global-health path.
Gates later recruited Foege to join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as Senior Medical Advisor and senior fellow in global health where he helped shape the foundation’s global public health strategies. His insistence on vaccine equity and high-leverage global interventions was instrumental in shifting the foundation’s focus toward preventable deaths in low-income countries.
Dr. Foege served as President of the American Public Health Association in 1986. Those who collaborated with him consistently describe a leader who spoke, acted, and led with moral clarity something especially rare at the federal level these days.
Ironically, Foege passed away on the day the US abandoned their membership in the WHO – institution built on the same principles of international cooperation, shared responsibility, and evidence-based action that defined his life’s work.
Many of us were fortunate to meet Foege in real-life. He visited Arizona several times including spending time with county health officers at the Arizona Local Health Officers Association retreat in the 2010s. I also was able to meet him at a talk he gave at the UA Medical School in the early 2010s.
The world is better because Bill Foege showed what public health can achieve when evidence is paired with courage, ethics and morals.
His life is a reminder that showing up, building coalitions, and insisting on evidence can change the course of history.
We’ll miss his leadership and mentoring even as his legacy endures.
Dr Bill Foege: A life well-lived.