Champion of the Public Health Laboratory Award

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro represents the Third Congressional District in Connecticut, a job she has held for the past 32 years! When Representative DeLauro became Chair of the Labor, HHS, Education Subcommittee in 2019, she prioritized public health data modernization and worked to establish a new funding line at CDC with $50 million in FY 2020 to begin addressing the complex challenges of collecting, analyzing, and sharing information. Once COVID-19 hit, she fought for supplemental funding to advance these efforts.

Representative DeLauro consistently cites that nearly 80 percent of CDC funding goes out to state, local and public health partners. This funding reaches all areas of the country. You can even find the impact of this funding on lab results reporting in Connecticut.

She is also a champion for the establishment of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics and the Public Health Infrastructure and Capacity funding line. Along with public health workforce, she supports these funding streams that support the public health infrastructure of our nation.

Her leadership on food safety funding, an area that she has been fighting for years, has resulted in a 20% increase for CDC’s food safety activities. She fully understands that public health laboratories are critical partners in food safety goals and activities.

Representative DeLauro was unable to join us in person today, but we were able to record her response to winning this year’s award. And we will be presenting the award to her in person, later this summer.

Dr. Daskalakis has always recognized the importance of the lab and of laboratory testing to public health, and readily describes his experience from his undergraduate days spent dropping off blood specimens for HIV testing to the New York City Public Health Laboratory, to working in the lab as an infectious disease fellow, to working directly with the NYC Public Health Laboratory during multiple historic outbreaks.

It is impossible to look across the landscape of public health in the United States and not see evidence of Dr. Salerno's extraordinary contributions. Dr. Salerno has championed public health laboratories and public health laboratory science throughout much of his distinguished career. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Salerno has emphasized the critical importance of laboratory safety, quality, security and risk management in public health laboratories. As director of the Division of Laboratory Systems at CDC, Dr. Salerno works to improve public health and health equity by advancing laboratory safety, quality and workforce competency.

As COVID-19 gripped the world in 2020, Dr. Salerno assumed additional roles where he further championed public health laboratories and public health laboratory science. As co-lead of the Laboratory and Testing Task Force for the CDC response to the pandemic, Dr. Salerno contributed significantly to COVID-19 laboratory response efforts. Dr. Salerno not only influenced how state and local public health jurisdictions leverage existing laboratory capabilities, he also influenced the innovative use of community-based approaches to SARS-CoV-2 testing and the use of antigen testing resources. Dr. Salerno provided leadership and oversight for all CDC COVID-19 guidance documents for laboratories, supervised national calls with laboratory stakeholders and participated in stakeholder discussions that continue to shape our national response strategies. In addition, Dr. Salerno maintained his role as CDC liaison to the APHL Board of Directors and managed CDC funding activities with APHL all while maintaining a critical technical presence on various APHL committees and workgroups.

It is safe to say that Dr. Salerno's work has influenced every public health jurisdiction in our country. Through his dedication to data-driven science, laboratory safety and quality, workforce development, and innovative use of technology and testing strategies, Dr. Salerno has distinguished himself as a true champion of public health and public health laboratories.

Since his appointment as director of NIAID in 1984, Fauci has overseen an extensive portfolio of basic and applied research to help prevent, diagnose and treat established infectious diseases—such as HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis and malaria—as well as emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola, Zika and SARS-CoV-2. He has advised seven US Presidents on HIV/AIDS and many other domestic and global health issues, and was one of the principal architects of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a program that has saved millions of lives throughout the developing world, and earned him the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush in 2007. He is also the long-time chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation where's he's made many contributions to basic and clinical research on the pathogenesis and treatment of immune-mediated and infectious diseases. He helped pioneer the field of human immunoregulation by making important basic scientific observations that underpin the current understanding of the regulation of the human immune response. Fauci was instrumental following the anthrax terrorism attacks of 2001 and mobilized the NIAID to initiate a research program to develop countermeasures such as diagnostics, treatment, and vaccines for infectious agents that are deliberately released as well as those naturally occurring, such as pandemic influenza.