In 2011, as the hunt for Osama bin Laden was intensifying and honing in on a region of Pakistan, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign as part of its intelligence operation. The campaign went door to door, under the pretense of public health, in the hope of finding evidence of bin Laden’s hideout. Such initiatives are not new. The history of vaccines in the Global South is fraught with abuse, mismanagement and deception. And the costs have been high. Vaccine hesitancy, particularly in the Global South, has led to distrust in what are safe, life-saving scientific advances for the treatment of some of the deadliest…

If there were any doubts about how dependent we have become on digital technologies in our daily lives, the pandemic has surely dispelled them. At the same time, the pandemic has raised to the forefront some of the implications of this digital dependence — and the divides within this dependence — that have very real health, public safety, social and economic consequences. There are far too many prominent societal divides to list, but here are five technology-related divides that were top of mind in 2020. First, the access divide: Our need to physically separate has made digital technologies and services almost indispensable to carrying out daily routines and keeping in…

The changes in the ways that women experience violence require new forms of support at a time when service provisions are becoming more difficult to provide. Technology plays a vital role in accessing services that support women who are being harmed by this online violence. With restrictive health guidelines in place, many organizations no longer offer in-person services and are finding it challenging to adapt to this new reality. Some organizations can reach their clients over the phone or the internet to provide supports, but this can be problematic for several reasons. For one, women who are struggling financially may not be able to afford the technology needed to connect…