From evidence to decisions: building knowledge translation for pandemic preparedness and response

The COVID-19 pandemic showed that moving evidence quickly into decisions matters as much as strong surveillance, especially in low- and middle-income countries. During the fifteenth session of the WHO Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence Innovation Forum, held on 24 February 2026, speakers from the World Health Organization, the Caribbean Centre for Health Systems Research and Development in Trinidad and Tobago, the United States International University-Africa in Kenya and the Ethiopian Public Health Institute discussed how evidence-to-decision processes are being built and how they perform during health emergencies. The Ethiopian Public Health Institute reported that a dedicated knowledge translation team within the emergency management system reduced the time between a decision maker’s question and an evidence response from days or months to hours, drawing on a mandate and relationships established long before the pandemic. In Trinidad and Tobago, a proposed rapid response service could not be established without government funding and engagement, and the momentum gained during COVID-19 faded as the urgency passed. Speakers described arrangements that help sustain evidence use, including the WHO Evidence-informed Policy Network and its six domains of institutionalisation, county-level taskforces, reverse research days and national research agendas. Political turnover, limited resources, unharmonised tools and declining trust in science were identified as the main obstacles. Artificial intelligence was seen as a way to accelerate evidence synthesis, but not to replace the relationships and dialogue at the core of knowledge translation. Moving forward, evidence systems need to be built in ordinary times so that they can support decisions when the next crisis comes.