In May 2014, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) announced that it would halt its โfakeโ vaccination programmes, which had been exposed byย The Guardianย newspaper three years earlier. What transpired was that for many years the CIA had been using local health workers as its intelligence agents, instructing them to gain security information while administering vaccines to unsuspecting members of the local population (Lenzer,ย 2011). Adopted in various locations in the Global South,1ย including in Pakistan and Afghanistan, this โsham vaccination campaignโ (Rushton & Kett,ย 2014) provided DNA and other crucial information in the search for Osama Bin Laden (Robbins,ย 2012).
