By Sonni Efron
Brett Murphy and Letitia Stein of USA Today have won the National Press Foundation’s Feddie Reporting Award for a trio of stories showing how the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s dysfunctional response to COVID affected local communities across the United States.
The Feddie Award recognizes outstanding reporting about the impact of federal laws and regulations on local communities.
Murphy and Stein meticulously documented how the federal-level failure of the CDC, a $7 billion agency charged with protecting Americans’ health, translated into chaos and confusion for state and local authorities trying to prevent outbreaks from escalating into thousands of preventable deaths.
“Instead of answers, many received slow, confusing and conflicting information – or no response at all,” they wrote.
“The USA Today series is a model for the kind of stories that deserve the Feddie Award,” judge Jeff Birnbaum said. “The series illustrates in concrete ways how an important federal agency – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – too often failed to provide life-saving guidance to localities about the greatest medical threat of the century, the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“In Nevada, the state’s top infectious disease scientist called the CDC begging for a list of travelers coming from China. A flustered agency representative hung up on her.”
They went on to file more than 150 public records requests, sort through tens of thousands of emails, memos and other communications and interview hundreds of public health officials across the United States. In September, they produced an exposé of how CDC had minimized, ignored or obfuscated as local officials struggled to get help, and infections mounted. Murphy and Stein reported in March that the CDC had botched the rollout of a COVID-19 test and misled scientists about it. In April, they reported on how federal officials failed to heed early warnings from top public health officials, in an email thread titled “Red Dawn Breaking.”
“The CDC piece is written simply and assertively and is devastating,” judge Kathleen McElroy said.
“This is an impressive model of accountability journalism about the most important story of the year,” said judge Sudeep Reddy. “The reporters delivered in-depth storytelling in the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis, when much of the nation was just starting to grapple with the tragedy, followed by a comprehensive accounting of the CDC response after they gathered evidence for months through interviews and documents. It’s precisely the kind of work the Feddie Reporting Award aims to recognize.”
The Feddie comes with a cash prize of $5,000. Previous winners of the award can be found here.
