The Role of Genomic Surveillance in Pandemic Preparedness and Response: Global Lessons Learned

Genomic surveillance has emerged as a cornerstone of global pandemic preparedness, offering real-time insight into pathogen evolution, transmission dynamics, and the emergence of variants of concern, and although it was instrumental during the COVID-19 pandemic in shaping public health interventions, from vaccine design to border control strategies, its global implementation remains highly uneven due to disparities in sequencing capacity, data sharing infrastructures, and governance models, and this article presents original comparative analysis from the United Kingdom, South Africa, India, and Brazil, combining statistical evidence from 2019 to 2025 with the authors’ conceptual model for integrating genomic intelligence into public health systems, and concludes with policy recommendations for embedding genomic platforms into a predictive, equity-driven health security architecture.