“It’s an unfortunate misstep in the middle of what’s already a hard road for most public health officials,” said Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease physician and the medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit at the Boston University School of Medicine.
The controversy comes at a tumultuous time for the WHO. President Donald Trump said last month blasted the agency’s coronavirus response and said the U.S. would withdraw its support. A Trump administration official confirmed U.S. funding to the WHO has been suspended.
Several prominent Republicans jumped on Van Kerkhove’s initial statements as evidence the United States could safely, and completely, reopen. “Good News! People who catch coronovirus but have no symptoms rarely spread the disease. Translation: sending kids back to school does not require millions of test kits,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted on Monday. His tweet has been shared more than 11,000 times and liked at least 25,000 times as of Tuesday afternoon.
During a briefing Tuesday, van Kerkhove said the extent to which asymptomatic people spread the virus is a „big open question,“ although there is evidence showing it does happen. Some disease-modeling studies suggest asymptomatic spread accounts for 40 percent of all infections, she said.
That does not include the risk posed by presymptomatic people, who can infect others before they develop any symptoms of the virus. By contrast, asymptomatic people carry the virus without ever developing signs of the disease.
Van Kerkhove also said her initial statements were based on unpublished contact-tracing data collected by some WHO member countries.
Public health advocates and experts panned her decision to cite research that isn’t publicly available.
„There’s so much attention to everything that’s being said by every public health agency that it’s important to be extremely careful and science-based in what you say,” said Tom Frieden, who served as CDC director during the Obama administration.
And Andy Slavitt, who led the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services under former President Barack Obama, also criticized the WHO official. „If your data is thin or not public or contradicted by lots of studies, making definitive statements is a mistake,” he tweeted.
Source: politico.com
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