A top virologist for the World Health Organization (WHO) backtracked Tuesday on a recent statement that the asymptomatic spread of the novel coronavirus is “very rare.” The statement was made several days ago by Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on the virus.

Kerkhove’s statement was more than significant, it changed everything people have been told about the virus. In fact, it had everyone questioning everything that’s happened over the past three months. The story first published on CNBC and took off like wildfire around the globe.

Think about it, businesses have been shuddered, nearly 40 million Americans had applied for unemployment, schools across the nation were shut down, no summer camps in many states, six feet distance between everyone in public spaces and in many states masks are required in public spaces to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, health officials told us.

In fact, many people who have questioned the regulations have been publicly shamed and accused of not caring for the elderly or for those with compromised immune systems. So Kerkhove’s statement that the spread of the virus from asymptomatic persons (that means those showing no symptoms) to others as being “rare,” would actually mean that the regulations and mask-wearing were extreme and unnecessary.

The WHO is now announcing that asymptomatic transfer of #COVID19 is rare.

This is a complete turnaround from their initial information.

So, the masks are unnecessary without symptoms?

The social distancing was unnecessary without symptoms?

Was this all a game?@GregKellyUSA pic.twitter.com/fjcVDv7eEN

— Dr. David Samadi (@drdavidsamadi) June 9, 2020

“We made everybody do something we called social distancing,” said Dr. David Samadi, Director of Men’s Health and Urologic Oncology at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, New York.

He told Newsmax that “we made everybody across the board to wear masks. At the beginning, if you had symptoms you wore a mask to protect others but then we gave in, because the CDC and everybody kept changing back and forth.”

Dr. Samadi also told this reporter that the studies Kerkhove referred to were from very significant places, like Singapore, where government agencies have done extensive contact tracing on the virus and said that the WHO is doing “damage control” to cover for its original misguidance.

However, by Tuesday, after the backlash from people around the globe, Kerkhove backtracked.

She said during a live Q & A that streamed on social media, “I was responding to a question at the press conference. I wasn’t stating a policy of WHO or anything like that. I was just trying to articulate what we know. And in that, I used the phrase ‘very rare,’ and I think that that’s a misunderstanding to state that asymptomatic transmission globally is very rare. I was referring to a small subset of studies.”

What? She knew what she was saying but then she was just trying to “articulate what we know” and that she was referring to a “small set of subset studies.” She said there was a “misunderstanding.” None of what she said really changed the fact that she actually believed, based on the testing, that asymptomatic transmission is “very rare.”

“We do know that some people who are asymptomatic or some people who don’t have symptoms can transmit the virus on,” she said.  Then she added that she was relying on “two or three studies”, as well as unpublished reports from some countries to the WHO for her statement. Then she tried to explain that based on some models (mind you not studies), the virus could have a higher rate of infection transmission from asymptomatic persons to others.

“Some estimates of around 40 percent of transmission may be due to asymptomatic, but those are from models, and so I didn’t include that in my answer yesterday but wanted to make sure that I covered that here,” she said.

Folks, we should never be afraid to question the facts. The backtracking on Kerkhove’s original statement that transmission from asymptomatic persons is ‘very rare’ is deeply concerning.

If anything, impartial scientific studies and a commission to study the government’s response to this novel coronavirus must be done so that we understand the real impact of this virus and the decisions made by our leadership.

For those people that lost their lives and for those whose lives were turned upside down that’s the least we can do.