Governing Evidence in Contentious Times: A GUARD Framework for Public Health Leadership

Public health leadership faces widening inequities, uneven life expectancy trends, and growing information disorder. Experience from COVID-19 showed that shortcomings often stem less from lack of evidence than from weaknesses in how evidence inform decisions. This commentary reframes the challenge as one of evidence governance: ensuring that knowledge is interpreted, debated, and translated into fair, accountable action. We introduce GUARD, a practice-oriented framework for governing evidence: Govern in public, User power-sharing, Architect and audit integrity, Resist manipulation of meaning, and Demonstrate legitimacy. Rather than proposing new principles, GUARD operationalizes existing ones into implementable governance routines, offering public health leaders a practical pathway to strengthen legitimacy, reduce inequities, and sustain trustworthiness under uncertainty.