
“A cut to NIH is not a cut to Washington bureaucracy, it’s a cut to lifesaving treatments and cures,” Senator Blunt has said of US investments in medical research. As chairman of the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee, Senator Blunt has played a pivotal role in protecting and expanding funding for agencies engaged in global health research and development (R&D), including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Senator’s steadfast leadership has helped deliver annual increases to the NIH budget for four consecutive years, and his forceful opposition to cuts to NIH and the CDC proposed by the Administration— which he called unacceptable and indefensible—led the way for his colleagues to do the same. Additionally, when the Zika epidemic struck the Americas, Senator Blunt helped break the political stalemate and brokered a bipartisan compromise to provide emergency funding.
Senator Blunt speaks passionately about the value of R&D from both a humanitarian and economic perspective. “Research funded by NIH has prevented immeasurable human suffering,” he has stressed, and “has yielded economic benefits as well.”

Suddenly there are no borders or barriers in a global health crisis, and we’ve been reminded too often of that. You just simply can’t separate global health and American health.
Senator Roy Blunt
Congressional Champion Honoree
Thanks to our 2022 Awards Selection Committee

Dr. Rebecca Martin Chair
Director of the Emory Global Health Institute, Emory University

Elisha Dunn-Georgiou
President and CEO, Global Health Council

Jamie Bay Nishi
Executive Director, Global Health Technologies Coalition

Dr. Charles Holmes
Director, Georgetown Center for Innovation in Global Health

Dr. Theresa Mkandawire
Professor, Malawi University of Business and Applied Science; Co-Principal Investigator, NEST360