Laurie Garrett

Laurie Garrett is a world premier authority on disease prevention and pandemics, and a bestselling author. Garrett is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Health Security Advisory Board. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the National Association for Science Writers. At radio station KPFA in Berkeley, she worked in management, in news, and in radio documentary production. A documentary series she co-produced (with Adi Gevins) won the 1977 Peabody Award in broadcasting. Other KPFA production efforts by Garrett, won the Edwin Howard Armstrong award.

In 1996, Garrett was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for a series of works published in Newsday that chronicled the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire. In 1997, she won a George Polk Award for foreign reporting, for "Crumbled Empire, Shattered Health" in Newsday, described as "a series of 25 articles on the public health crisis in the former Soviet Union".[5] She won another Polk award in 2000 for her book Betrayal of Trust, "a meticulously researched account of health catastrophes occurring in different places simultaneously and amounting to a disaster of global proportions".[6]

In 2004, Garrett joined the Council on Foreign Relations as the senior fellow of the Global Health Program. She has worked on a broad variety of public health issues including SARS, avian flu, tuberculosis, malaria, shipping container clinics, the intersection of HIV and AIDS, and national security.

On June 27, 2021, an interview with Garrett comprised an entire episode of TWiV, This Week in Virology,[7] in which she discussed many facets of the SARS-CoV-2, (also known as Covid-19) pandemic, comparisons with earlier epidemics, as well as prospects for the future of public health.

Her first bestselling book, "THE COMING PLAGUE: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance," is still in demand.

In her career, Garrett has tracked outbreaks and epidemics worldwide, noting the insufficient responses from global public health institutions in Zaire, India, Russia and most of the former USSR, Eastern Europe, and the United States. This resulted in her second book, "BETRAYAL OF TRUST: The Collapse of Global Public Health."

Garrett's third book, "I HEARD THE SIRENS SCREAM: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks," was published in time for the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 by Amazon as an e-book. It is also available on Kindle and in paperback.

Garrett helped create the Noguchi Africa Prize and numerous times has served as its judge.