and the fewer variants that we will have, so the best protection of all is if everyone gets vaccinated and if this virus basically can't find a host that is unvaccinated and basically goes away. it slinks away because it can't find a perch. but i think most -- most of us feel like they're probably -- we probably will still have a low level of virus. the whole world is not going to get vaccinated any time soon, even if we are successful in the united states at reaching a very high level of vaccination, so there will be variants we have to deal with, at least in the united states so far, the variants that we're seeing are not resistant to the vaccine. so the vaccine is still working

incredibly well at decreasing the rates of covid even when we're seeing the -- some of the variants are more transmissible, a little bit more infectious, may be a little more serious but at least so far they don't seem to be vaccine-resistant and that is the best news because it means the vaccines are going to work. >> doctor, while we're on the topic of social media, these questions coming in from facebook, mrna was trending yesterday. some people tweeting -- tweets went viral claiming it's an experimental gene therapy. can you clear up what exactly this is, what it does for covid-19? i personally had never heard of it until i saw it online, and how long have scientists been working on this? >> sure. they've been working on it for decades. it really is a product of the genetic revolution over the past 30 or 40 years that we've figured out the way dna works and rna works and mrna stands for messenger rna, and it basically means a way that the

body uses to program cells to produce something, and so the idea is once we figured out that with covid, with the virus that causes covid, there's a portion of it, the spike protein, that is what burrows into our cells and creates the cycle that causes the disease, covid. once we figured that out, we came up with this discovery that rather than injecting into people this particular protein, the spike protein, we can inject in this mrna, which is basically a message to your cells to begin producing this spike protein, and it turns out it had been worked on for decades, for all sorts of different infectious diseases and other diseases, it's not new, but this was sort of its golden moment where it had come to a point where we understood it well, there were companies that were using it. the advantage of it is it can be very quickly programmed. once we understand the genetic

make-up of a virus and the genetic make-up of the portion of the virus we're trying to get the body to develop immunity to, once we understand that, we can inject in this vaccine that basically tells your cells to make this particular protein. so, we're not injecting in the virus. the cells aren't making the virus. they're making a tiny portion of the virus but it's the money portion. it's the portion that gets into your cells. your body's immune system sees that, reacts to it, creates immunity to it so when your body sees the virus, when your body sees the virus, you are not -- you are immune to it. so, it's really a fantastic technology. >> and what do you think that this will have an effect ongoing forward for the long-term? >> well, i think the -- it really seems like the technology is now ready for primetime, has worked incredibly well for covid, appears to be incredibly safe and very effective, and is a really efficient way of the body -- of creating vaccines that may turn out to be useful

not only for other infections but maybe for other diseases as well, including immune disease like lupus, including cancers, so i think it's an incredibly exciting development. >> yeah, despite your excitement, we are getting some comments coming in on facebook right now. one coming in from a viewer named laurie who says, so, mrna messes up our cells. what's your reaction to that? >> that's just not right. the mrna goes in, gets into your cells. the mrna then goes away. once it signals to your cells to produce this particular protein. it's the way -- you know, vaccines, we have to get into people's body a portion of the virus but not the whole virus. we don't want to give people the virus, obviously. we have to get into people's body some portion of the virus that teaches our body to recognize it so it's ready to pounce on the virus if it ever -- if we're ever exposed to the virus. and so, the mrna is an incredibly safe way of doing that because the mrna teaches

the cells how to make this thing called the spike protein. the body then creates antibodies to the spike protein. the mrna dissolves in the bloodstream within several days and it doesn't linger at all. it's been tested for many, many years. it's incredibly safe. people are going to have all sort of worries about what this is and what it does. the evidence is that it's incredibly safe, incredibly effective, and we know covid is really terrible. it's killed almost 600,000 americans, so it's not like we're talking about these things in a vacuum. we're talking about these vaccines, the alternative for many people is that you're going to be exposed to covid and your body is defenseless and we've seen what that looks like. the minute i had a chance to get my pfizer vaccine, i ran, did not walk to get it. >> i'm really glad you mentioned that because a lot of people on social media are talking about our health, you know, are health officials getting the vaccine themselves because they're so concerned about safety. we have to take a break real quick but i want to encourage

everyone to keep asking those questions on facebook. we are facebook.com/abc7 news.

all right, we are back with the chair of the department of the medicine at ucsf medicine. doctor, we are getting so many questions in from facebook, a lot of comment as well. christina writes in to say, how is the j&j vaccine, johnson & johnson, chemically different from the other two? we haven't heard as much about johnson & johnson in recent weeks. >> well, it uses a different technology. it uses a different platform to get the spike protein into people's body. at the end of the day, they all

kind of act the same way, which is they are presenting your body with this protein that the virus contains. they're not presenting it with the whole virus. they're presenting it with the -- with this protein, but rather than using this mrna to teach your cells how to make the protein, it piggybacks the protein on an attenuated a did virus that can't cause harm. it's an older technology. it's similar to the technology used with the astrazeneca vaccine, and now we're kind of -- it's very, very effective. it is very safe, but we have seen these cases of these rare blood clots that have caused everyone to take some -- a little bit of time to try to understand what's going on and pause things. but it's a different technology. the technology is different enough that there's no reports yet of any of those blood clots in the pfizer or the moderna vaccine, so i would feel completely safe getting those, and i think it's going to turn out that the j&j vaccine is

going to be safe in certain populations, although it won't surprise me if they limit its use in certain populations. we're just going to have to see. >> i see. and for some, that could be perhaps a red flag. i know sometimes people, the general public, are so caught up on those percentages, right? the effectiveness percentages, and that's all they see. so, i'm glad you clarified that it is indeed a high level of efficacy. darren writes in to say this. saying, if you're healthy and have no underlying conditions, don't get it. eat healthy and exercise and you'll be good. that certainly doesn't sound very doctorly. but what would you tell him? >> so, is he saying don't get the j&j or don't get any vaccine? >> it's not clear, but i think he believes -- i believe he's saying, any vaccine at this point. >> yeah. no, i understand that. i understand that point of view. if you're young and you're healthy, the chances that you're going to get super sick and die from covid are low, but not zero. there have been, i think, about 10,000 deaths in the united

states in people under age 35, certainly seen many people with terrible cases in the hospital, on ventilators and plenty of people with long covid. so, that's the game that you're playing. i mean, those are the -- you're sort of weighing the odds. the vaccines are completely safe now with the one caveat of this very rare side effect with the j&j potentially. but the vaccines are completely safe. they give you peace of mind that that's not going to happen to you. it also, i think, gives you peace of mind that you're not going to get the infection and give it to someone that you care about. but you know, i get it. i think right now, people are making that choice. i hope people will choose to get vaccinated because i think it's ultimately the better choice. and i can tell you after i was vaccinated, after my family members were vaccinated, just felt like a weight was taken off my shoulders, that so much freer knowing that i'm not going to get super sick and die of this virus, and i think even if you're a young, healthy person

who exercises, you don't know that if you're not vaccinated and even you could make the argument that the risk to unvaccinated people in certain communities may actually be going up because now we have these variants around that are even more infectious, so if you're unvaccinated, you're no safer than you were a year ago, and you have an opportunity now to become much, much safer. so, i don't agree with the choice. i think it's a bad decision. >> you know, we only have about 45 seconds before we hit the brake and i want to ask you your opinion of how you think california has handled this vaccine rollout and getting the message across from health officials like yourself that, yes, this vaccine is safe. >> i think we're doing okay. if you look at national a averages, the uptake in california is a little bit better. i think the speed of vaccination is going pretty well. the first timonth or two were disastrous, they were chaotic, we didn't have our acts together, the federal government and the state and local level.

by the time early february came around, we got our acts together and i think we're doing pretty well. >> many thanks to not only you, dr. wachter, but for everyone who flooded our facebook page with questions this afternoon. as always, a pleasure to have you. stay with us, because if you have anxiety about returning to the office like many people, certainly you are not alone, and we want to talk about a new poll and what we can all learn about changing our work habits. not just for employees but for employers as well. we are taking a break on air, but

all right, thank you so much for staying with us. ready or not, some workers are starting to return to their offices. traffic is getting worse, anxiety is likely building for those who have been working from home. so, joining us to talk more about this is jim wonderman, the ceo for bay area council. thank you for joining us. >> pleasure. >> first off, we need to share with everyone what the bay area

council does. can you elaborate? >> yeah. the bay area council is a regionwide association of major employers who ■workon the sustainability, quality of life and the economy of the region. we work on issues like housing and transportation and education to make sure that we have a strong economy going forward and the place functions and there's 101 cities and 9 counties in the bay area surrounding a bay. they don't all always work together so well, so we're the group that created b.a.r.t. way back in the 1950s to try to create a web and a true regional perspective that is really important for a lot of issues where these sort of artificial boundaries don't actually work very well in practice. >> i feel like what your organization does is so crucial during this time of the pandemic, and you recently did a poll of 350 employers last month.

51% of respondents consider working at the office unsafe, and 64% believe public transit is unsafe. now, what do you -- what does this say? can you translate the meaning behind this poll? >> well, you know, it's been a long year, and you know, i think we took this poll of about 1,200 residents of the 9 county bay area, about a month ago, and things are ever changing. more people are getting vaccinated. so, you know, we had a big spike in cases, as you remember, at the end of the year and so forth. so, people are scared and they're worried about being together in tight places, so transportation or being together in a party indoors, that kind of thing really, you know, appears to still worry people quite a lot. and i guess it's not really surprising. so, you know, as time goes on, you mentioned at the outset that traffic was increasing, so people are getting back to it and they're beginning to experience the negative side of that because they're traveling

in their car alone and they're not getting on transit, so that's probably an indication that people will begin to use, you know, public means again, because it's -- it's so frustrating to sit in heavy traffic, and people aren't used to it anymore. >> yeah, i think we've forgotten. my own commute doubled the other day and i thought to myself, my goodness, and we're not fully even back to the office yet. so i can only imagine how this is going to affect things going forward. you know, there are some other results when it comes to this poll. share those with us. >> yeah, you know, in general, people are not planning to go back to work as much as they did before, so about a third of the respondents say, i'm not going to go back. i'm not going to work as much in the office as i did before, and if you go back a couple of years, we had about 6.5% of the population who worked from home, didn't go to the office at all. about 16% say that's going to apply to them now. so, that's actually a lot of

cars and people off the transit system and the roads in the future if that turns out to be the case. so, you know, in general, there's just a reluctance to go back to some degree, and then i think some people have gotten used to the notion of remote work, and some organizations are supporting it. you saw the salesforce announcement, pretty flexible about that. i think we're seeing that with a lot of kmaencompanies. we're going to have a different kind of work environment as we go forward. i don't think we're really sure what that looks like yet but it's going to be different and we have to learn from it and adjust to it. >> real quickly, we have about 40 seconds left. can you talk to me about productivity? how has that changed with people working from home? because it really varies, depending on what sector you're in. >> well, that's a great question. in the poll, 58% of the people who responded said they're more productive, and about 20% said they're less productive. so, from the workers' standpoint, they think they're more productive now.

we didn't ask the employers what they think about their employees, so that would be a different question. but i think that overall, most employers believe that some connection, collaboration, between their employees and going to be important in order to get the most out of people and for people to actually enjoy and thrive in their work environments going forward. so, i think we're going to see a hybrid of some form, and you know, a lot to be learned in the next few months ahead. >> all right, stay right there. we are going to take a quick break o after my car accident, i wondered what my case was wor insurance wasn't fair. it was the best call i could've made. atat t bararnefirmrm, our r inry a attneysys wk hahard i could've made.

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bay area to work because now they can do that too. okay, thank you so much for joining us, everybody, for this interactive show called getting answers. today, we talked with ucsf's dr. bob wachter, and he answered a lot of your questions about

covid-19 vaccines. also when it comes to returning to the office, we talked to the bay area council. we'll see you today at 4:00. tonight, breaking news as we come on the air. the mayor of chicago calling for calm tonight. the police body cam just released, and it's difficult. it appears to show a 13-year-old boy turning and raising his hands before a fatal police shooting. you can hear the officer demanding to see his hands. the boy turning. the officer fires a shot. the officer said the 13-year-old had a gun. what was found at the scene. our chief justice correspondent pierre thomas standing by tonight. hot spots flairing up. new cases in the u.s. climbing more than 30% in a month. in michigan alone, in some places they are setting up outdoor triage center again, running out of room in hospitals. also tonight, the ceo of