We need an expert council for public health

Axel Radlach Pries is a medical doctor, professor of physiology and dean of the Charité University Medicine in Berlin. Since this year he has also been President of the World Health Summit, a Berlin-based international health conference.
Foto: Wiebke Peitz, Charite Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

The UK is clearly ahead of Germany in terms of corona testing capabilities and viral genome sequencing, how can this be?

Indeed, this is currently the case. However, this view is based on a momentary glimpse of a very dynamic environment. It shouldn’t be forgotten that at the start of the pandemic, Germany was clearly ahead in terms of testing capacity. But what is certainly true is that Britain was able to change course quickly. This is due to the fact that interaction between politics and science worked very well. In addition, the UK is home to some truly outstanding biomedical research. Per capita, this line of research receives significantly greater funding in Great Britain and Scandinavian countries than it does in Germany. However, the current pandemic has clearly demonstrated that greater commitment to biomedical research is necessary and furthermore that this approach proves "worthwhile" in economic terms.

How can we improve future interaction between medicine and politics in Germany?

This requires several approaches. On the one hand, further investment into “Public and Global Health” resources is essential. This includes the technical and personnel upgrading of health authorities so as to improve networking both with each other and with the scientific community at large. On the other hand, we need a broadly positioned expert council for population health, along the lines of the long-existing German Council of Economic Experts, which represents a similar expert body in the economic field. Advice with respect to healthcare policy must finally be organized systematically in the current pandemic and thereafter.