Time for a new global roadmap for supporting evidence into action

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed the use of evidence for policy-making high up on the international agenda. To fight the pandemic, Governments around the world have publicly stressed the need to draw on evidence by engaging scientific advisors and advisory bodies [1]. Furthermore, the increased demand for evidence has led to a global push for innovative solutions such as the scaling-up of living evidence syntheses [2]. At the same time, COVID-19 revealed fatal structural and systemic weaknesses in the production and use of evidence-flaws which have cost lives [3]. In many cases, institutional mechanisms and capacities to systematically mobilize and contextualize the best available evidence for rapid decision-making were missing [4]. As a consequence, policy-makers, practitioners and citizens alike were confronted with a deluge of competing claims and misinformation, severely limiting suitable decisionmaking and taking action [5]. The related surge of vaccine hesitancy has disproportionally impacted ethnic minorities and deprived communities, with the lowest vaccine uptake, worryingly, to be seen among the most vulnerable people-the older, the more clinically vulnerable, and those living in the most deprived areas-worsening pre-existing disparities in vaccine use, health inequalities and socio-economic marginalization [6, 7]. To assess different institutional responses in terms of the evidence-policy-society nexus and to learn lessons on how to build equity-centred, agile and responsive evidence-informed decision- making mechanisms, WHO convened its first Global Evidence-to-Policy Summit [8] in late 2021. The Summit, organized by the newly created Evidence to Policy Unit at WHO headquarters in collaboration with the corresponding teams in WHO regional offices, brought together more than 2,500 policy-makers, knowledge brokers, health actors, civil society representatives and researchers from around the world.