[6] In May 1978, during his deanship term, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was approved by the University of California Board of Regents to adopt a joint medical education program between the UCLA School of Medicine and Drew; the Drew/UCLA M.D.

[8] Under Satcher's leadership, the CDC took millions of dollars Congress set aside for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) research and secretly spent the funds in other areas.

The issue only came to light after a CDC employee filed a whistleblower report and a special Inspector General was appointed to investigate the matter.

[10] In the words of Martha Katz, Deputy Director for Policy and Legislation at CDC: "Resources intended for CFS were actually used for measles, polio and other disease areas.

In it, he reported that tobacco use was on the rise among youth in each of the country's major racial and ethnic groups, threatening their long-term health prospects.

[13] Satcher was appointed by Bill Clinton, and remained Surgeon General until 2002, contemporaneously with the first half of the first term of George W. Bush's presidential administration.

Because he no longer held his dual office, Satcher was reverted and downgraded to the grade of vice admiral in the regular corps for the remainder of his term as Surgeon General.

and estimated, based on 2002 data, that "83,570 excess deaths could be prevented each year in the United States if [the] black-white mortality gap could be eliminated.

"[21] In a 2006 essay for PLOS Medicine discussing the Health Affairs article, Satcher stated that the study's estimates included 24,000 fewer Black deaths from cardiovascular disease and, if infant mortality had been equal across racial and ethnic groups in 2000, 4,700 fewer Black infants would have died in their first year of life.

[30] An academic society at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine is named in Satcher's honor, and, in 2009, he delivered the university's Commencement Address.

[31][32] The Case Western Reserve School of Medicine also created the David Satcher Clerkship for Underrepresented Minority Students in 1991.