Government Funding Alone Sent Doctors Clinical Laboratory Soaring

Part 2 - The Center for Covid Control: Success Story or Scam?

Doctors Clinical Laboratory, the privately-owned medical testing company fronted by the Center for Covid Control, has received at least $124 million in federal COVID reimbursements. Using that funding as the basis for financial modeling, the company’s annual revenue is likely between $250 million and $1 billion. That despite a dun&bradstreet estimate of approximately $710,000 in years prior.

How could a laboratory based in a small Chicago, Illinois storefront go from a handful of employees to a medical testing behemoth in just under one year? For DCL, a story that began humbly with a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center apparently turned spectacularly under the direction of Aleya Siyaj and Akbar Syed, owners of the BullsEye Axe Lounge and the Center for Covid Control, driven by the opportunity granted by a global pandemic, and fueled by the unprecedented rapid, perhaps indiscriminate, distribution of billions of dollars in new federal funding.

I first became aware of Doctors Clinical Laboratory (DCL) as the medical testing organization behind the Center for Covid Control when I began hearing complaints in my community about a local COVID-19 testing site. (Read about the people behind the Center for Covid Control in Part 1 of this series.) What began as a simple online check into the tightly-bound organizations blossomed into a multi-month investigation of companies that are collectively, at best, an extreme example of opportunistic exploitation. At worst, the Center for Covid Control, and by extension DCL, represents a modern pyramid scheme that masks a complex defrauding of both a desperate public seeking reassurance amidst the volatility of an unprecedented global emergency and government agencies rapidly distributing funds without the controls needed to verify that money is used as it intends.

The legitimacy of the companies appears to lean most towards the latter scenario, embodying enough red flags to warrant further scrutiny from state and federal officials.

To conduct my investigation, I used a standard technique that cybersecurity professionals refer to as Open Source Intelligence, an…