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Background As research increasingly investigates the impacts of technological innovations in health on social inequalities, political discourse often promotes development and adoption, limiting an understanding of unintended consequences. This study aimed to investigate national public health policy discourse focusing on innovative health technology and social inequalities, from a Norwegian context. Methods The analysis relies on a perspective inspired by critical discourse analysis using central State documents typically influential in the lawmaking procedure. Results The results and discussion focus on three major discourse strands: 1) 'technologies discourse' (types of technologies), 2) 'responsibility discourse' (who has responsibility for health and technology), 3) 'legitimization discourse' (how technologies are legitimized). Conclusions Results suggest that despite an overt political imperative for reducing social inequalities, the Norwegian national discourse gives little attention to the potential for these innovations to unintentionally (re) produce social inequalities. Instead, it is characterized by neoliberal undertones, individualizing and commercializing public health and promoting pro-innovation ideology. ; publishedVersion ; Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

The present volume offers a fresh perspective on political top-down crisis communication across several countries during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes how leaders address the growing awareness of the dangerous impact of social restrictions, along with the controversies surrounding the first vaccination campaigns.