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Laurie Garrett      

Peabody- & Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Bestselling Author, Science Writer & Journalist; Premier Authority on Disease Prevention & Pandemics

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.

Speech Topics

Bioterrorism: The Modern Peril

It's a surreal, terrifying thought: terrorists using bio-chemical weapons. Garrett has investigated both the science and the politics behind international bio-terrorism, and, here, provides a responsible, informative assessment of who is capable, what form it might take, and how likely it is to happen.

Climate Change and Global Health: Ending the Debate

To the timely debate over the impact of climate change on human health, Garrett offers this frank, hopeful talk. The health community, she says, is focusing on how climate change affects the movements of diseases, such as malaria. While these threats are serious, we must also look at how other consequences of climate change are already wreaking havoc on human health: catastrophic weather—resulting in flooding, famine and drought—is infecting and killing thousands; we must turn our attention toward preparedness. Garrett shows you where our efforts—activism, money, policy—need to go, and how urgently they need to get there.

Betrayal of Trust: Critical Issues in Global Healthcare

Based on her international travels to report on and research healthcare, Garrett delivers a sweeping, multimedia talk that uncovers the reality of healthcare in the United States, Europe, Russia and Africa -- providing a new understanding of both the challenges and the opportunities of delivering quality healthcare to the global village.

I Heard The Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks

This powerful talk combines health issues, investigative journalism, and a personal minute-by-minute account of 9/11 to offer an astonishing view of a dark chapter in American life. A proud New Yorker who heard the first jet slam into the north tower, Garret raises fascinating questions around the World Trade Center attacks, the anthrax scare, and the mental trauma afflicting Americans during, and well after, 9/11. She captures the national mood as it veered from a united political place to a deeply divided anger. By the end of the winter of 2002, she reminds us, the arc had completed, from spectacular unity and confidence in governance to accusations of American arrogance. Through the frustrated anthrax investigations and drumbeats of war, the global community, especially Americans, moved in just a few months’ time from collectivism to fragmentation. Drawing on personal diary entries, and a deep understanding of health and government policy, Garrett's sweeping talk details repercussions of these historic events, transformations of critical government institutions, public health disasters, and, what, in particular, the specter of terrorism meant -- and means -- for the American people.

News

Infectious Diseases | Council on Foreign Relations
Dec 5, 2023 ... Laurie Garrett offers a masterful account of the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Zaire, and argues these lessons learned must be applied to solve the Ebola crisis of ...

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