Last week, WHO's general director, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, tweeted that he was glad to speak with the organization's Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health to "discuss vaccine acceptance and uptake in the context of COVID-19."

In his next tweet Ghebreyesus announced that Cass Sunstein, founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School, will chair the advisory group, which was created in July.

Sunstein was former President Barack Obama's head of Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where he was responsible for overseeing policies relating to information quality.

In 2008, Sunstein wrote a paper proposing that governments employ teams of covert agents to "cognitively infiltrate" online dissident groups and websites which advocate "false conspiracy theories" about the government. In the paper, Sunstein and his co-authors wrote:

"Our principal claim here involves the potential value of cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, designed to introduce informational diversity into such groups and to expose indefensible conspiracy theories as such."

The government-led operations described in Sunstein's paper would work to increase faith in government policy and policymakers and undermine the credibility of "conspiracists" who question their motives. They would also maintain a vigorous "counter misinformation establishment" to counter "conspiracy" groups opposed to government policies that aim to protect the common good.

Some of this would be accomplished by sending undercover agents, or government-paid third parties, into "online social networks or even real space groups."