Keizo Takemi served as Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare from September 2023 to September 2024 and served five terms in the House of Councillors, representing the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

Since 2007, he has been a senior fellow at the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE), serving as chair of JCIE’s Executive Committee on Global Health and Human Security—a public-private global health policy platform. He also chairs the International Selection Committee of the Healthy Aging Prize for Asian Innovation (HAPI), for which JCIE serves as the secretariat.

Takemi was a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health from November 2007 to June 2009, and has been involved in various global initiatives including the UN Commission on Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health, the Global Health Workforce Alliance (GHWA), the WHO Expert Working Group on R&D Financing, the international organizing committee of the Prince Mahidol Award Conference (PMAC), and the international advisory committee for the US National Academy of Medicine’s Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity.  He has also served as the chair of the parliamentary caucus on Stop TB Partnership and the Asian Forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development (AFPPD), and is  a senior fellow of the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA). 

In 2016, he was appointed to the UN High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth, and in 2018, to the UHC Financing Advisory Committee for the G20 2019. He served as Senior Vice Minister for Health, Labour and Welfare, and State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, where he led the initiative to establish the UN Trust Fund for Human Security.

In recognition of his contributions to the field over the past decade, he was appointed WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) from 2019–2022, and was named to the advisory board of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in July 2025. From October 2025, Professor Takemi also served as Visiting Professor at Nagasaki University. In 2026, he was appointed as a HelpAge Global Ambassador. He is the co-author of Global Action for Health System Strengthening: Policy Recommendations to the G8 (2009), and has contributed numerous articles in English and Japanese to journals such as The Lancet, Asia-Pacific Review, and Gaiko [Diplomacy].