Government Funding Alone Sent Doctors Clinical Laboratory Soaring

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

Michael Figueroa (He/Him)
10 min readJan 14, 2022

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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

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Michael Figueroa (He/Him)

Latinx tech & biz exec making solutions more accessible for mission-driven orgs. Fmr President, Advanced Cyber Security Center. linkedin.com/in/michaelfigueroa