Podcast with Martin McKee on public health and health policy

How do you translate academic research into policy that actually saves lives , across 50 countries, through political upheaval, and during a global pandemic? Public health scholar Martin McKee reveals why the gap between evidence and policy is not an information problem but a collaboration problem. Subscribe for more episodes on how real-world collaboration works. C. Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has spent over 30 years building collaborative infrastructure between researchers and policymakers across Europe. His creation of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies , a partnership linking universities, the WHO, the World Bank, the European Commission, and multiple national governments , provides a masterclass in how to make knowledge useful to power. The conversation opens with a fundamental insight about academic-policy collaboration: researchers consistently provide information that policymakers do not need, delivered too late to matter. McKee's solution was to build a permanent interface , not a one-off advisory panel but an ongoing partnership where researchers and policymakers develop shared understanding over time. The Observatory has provided background material for most rotating EU presidencies and fed into G20 deliberations, demonstrating that sustained collaboration between knowledge and power is possible when the architecture is right. McKee traces the evolution of public health collaboration through concrete examples. His work building connections across Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 revealed how political transformation creates both opportunities and obstacles for health cooperation. Countries emerging from Soviet control needed health system reform but lacked the institutional frameworks for evidence-based policymaking. Building those frameworks required not just technical expertise but cultural sensitivity and long-term relationship investment. The discussion addresses the COVID-19 pandemic as both a triumph and failure of collaboration. McKee describes how the rapid development of vaccines demonstrated extraordinary scientific cooperation, while the political response in many countries revealed how easily collaboration breaks down when leaders prioritize short-term political survival over public health evidence. The UK's response serves as a case study in how institutional capture by ideological advisors can override established collaborative mechanisms. On disinformation, McKee connects media manipulation directly to public health outcomes. When powerful interests use racism and xenophobia to undermine the welfare state model , telling the working class that their suffering is caused by immigrants rather than austerity , the resulting social fragmentation destroys the trust that public health collaboration requires. Despite these challenges, McKee finds grounds for optimism in the evolutionary argument for cooperation: in any situation involving repeated interactions, collaboration produces better outcomes than competition. His proposed change to humanity is the art of listening , combined with the humility to recognize that no matter how powerful you are, something is always above you. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.