>> building a better area. moving forward. finding solutions. >> i am kristen sze and you are watching getting answers. we ask expert your questions every day at 3:00. today will talk extinction. 23 species are about to be gone forever. there is not much we can do about that. but why should we care and what can we do to prevent future extinctions? also we will meet san francisco's new city attorney, formerly the president of the board of supervisors and more recently a member of the state assembly we'll talk about his priorities. but today is the deadline for health care workers in california to be fully vaccinated or face being fired. we also need to address cdc

messaging ron covid that has caused misunderstanding and mistrust and new messaging that could replace it. and is this the end of the pandemic? is it in sight? joining us, dr. monica gandhi. always great to have you on. >> thank you. i like your hair. kristen: thank you very much. today is the deadline for health care workers in the state to be fully vaccinated. there is no exemption or extension, correct? >> there's no extension. there are rare possibilities of exemption. usually when someone is medically allergic to one of the components of the vaccines. but it is very rare. kristen: unlike other categories, not really a religious exemption. over 95% where you are are vaccinated.

can you even afford to lose a few people in nursing? even here in the bay area, where hospitalizations were among the lowest in the area. >> we cannot afford staffing shortages. in new york, they did end up firing people who did not get vaccinated, and here it is pretty strict as well. it is not a clear firing but there are consequences if you do not get vaccinated in terms of not being able to come to work. i hope even that 5% gets vaccinated. kristen: i want to adjust this because you feel strongly that some of the messaging coming from the cdc was mistaken, or at least unclear and misleading and they need to be updated and cleared up. so i want to take us through this. mistaken message number one, you say is the vaccinators -- the vaccinated spread the virus as easily as the unvaccinated. that is certainly what i got out

of the cdc news conference in which they showed lots of slides. monica: that was a terrible week. there just came this phrase where vaccinated could spread as well as unvaccinated. that is not true. what they were basing that moment on is in a provincetown outbreak got a lot of attention there was a lot of symptomatic disease, not a typical rate at all. lots of inside and intimacy things going on. what happened was the temporary value of your pcr tests was the same in unvaccinated and vaccinated. that means the viral loads at one point in time where the same. but local studies have shown the viral load goes down much faster if you are vaccinated. that totally makes sense.

your immune system kills it. also you culture the virus. it is harder for it to be viable because your immune system issym killing the virus. so you are not as infectious as if you are vaccinated as unvaccinated. if you have a symptomatic breakthrough, certainly if you have symptoms, stay home. you could be infectious for a while, but likely not as long as unvaccinated. and if you feel well and you are vaccinated, like me today, i am not spreading the virus. in fact there is very strong contact tracing studies in canada, in harvard, there's' multiple contact tracing studies. if you feel well and you are vaccinated, you are not spreading the virus, not like you can be if you are unvaccinated. kristen: that makes so much sense. mistaken message number two was around boosters, the discussion

saying the vaccines are not working. what is a better message? monica: what happened isi n -- is in mid-august, president biden announced we are all going to need boosters. it was such a shock. remember so many express saying, wait, what? essentially there was data from israel that was really confusing and not typical of what is happening in the u.s., the u.k., canada. 74 studies now show us the vaccines are holding up beautifully against severe disease, hospitalization and death. the fda when they reviewed the data went over these studies and it was a tour de force. this meta analysis showed us how well the vaccines were holding up. so, there is data from israel which is too much to get into right now, but there is a lot happening in israel which is different. but the vacci the vacci

extremely well. so the fda really tried to put out that message which i hope boosted confidence in the vaccines. if you are over 65 and immunocompromised, getting a booster makes sense because that has always made sense to get a booster. but giving it out to the general population, or when all that discussion happened that scared everyone, i think it made people think the vaccines did not work. i saw many messages that say now vaccines do not reduce transmission and do not work, so why would i take one? kristen: i see. let's talk about the offramp and a second but i want to get to this question. how long is an unvaccinated person contagious after they test positive? monica: ok, so we say 10 days. why? often you can be contagious for less, but at least in large population-based studies you can still culture virus sometimes out to nine days. so that was just being careful

and saying you are infectious for 10 days, so the period of isolation for unvaccinated people remains 10 days. you are likely to be infectious less if you have a some thematic breakthrough. kristen: santa cruz county has dropped at the indoor masking mandate and public comments are strong and divided, shall we say. some say the numbers warrant that move. others say the reason the number is so low is precisely because of masking. who is right? monica: you know, i am someone who wrote a lot about masks, i believe in masks. however, in our state when delta came back, some counties putback masks and some did not. san diego did not. and the trend was always the same. infections went down. why? because immunity is more powerful than masks. and i don't know how to convince people of that, but i will tell you that any pandemic, immunity was better than blocking of the

virus from masks, because it is -- you are blocking it internally. so, i think that in terms of masking, people who want to mask, and they probably will not have the flu or a cold, should mask. but a public health mandate has to be based on a public health emergency where it has shown to be better than vaccination. but in this case, we had -- and because of that, we need a metric, we need public health officials to be clear and say there is going to be in offramp. it will either be based on cdc metrics. they put it on moderate and low transmission in which you don't have to mask. or you can base it on the hospitalization rate in your region. but if you do not tell someone clearly when the mask mandate comes up, that is completely not the right way for public health to work. we have to be clear.

kristen: most of the bay area counties have numbers comparable to santa cruz or perhaps even better. but they have not removed the indoor masking mandate and we do not know when. but some other countries have spelled it out more clearly than the u.s. monica: they say when we get to this point, this happens. kristen: what you are saying now and what you wrote in the wall street journal in an op-ed today, my take away is you believe -- and tell me if i am wrong -- that the pandemic phase is just about over, at least in the bay area, that we are moving into the endemic phase. is that right? is that optimistic or where you think we are at in the bay area? monica: yeah, no, i will say i did not write the headline. there are multiple places across the country where we are not even close to being over. high hospitalizations are on acceptable. not -- are unacceptable.

so we're not country. but there are places in the world like mark, norway -- like denmark, norway, ireland, who have declared an endemic phase. that means hospitalizations are so low that you just live to learn with the virus, because it has features that make it not able to be eradicated. we are at the same rate as all these countries which have removed all these restrictions. that is a decision california will make for itself but we will have to accept little bit of virus circulating unfortunately, because it does not have features that allow eradication. it spreads when you sometimes feel well, and it also is very transmissible. that is what the delta variant is. kristen: in the endemic phase, there are fewer resections, not the public health emergency orders. monica: correct.

in any other pandemic or any other feature before this, public health restrictions are put into place during an epidemic phase. kristen: we're almost out of time but i want to ask, because there is still debate about that, whether we are close to defining this thing. many -- defanging this thing. many scientists say a more deadly virus could emerge. you say looking at virus behavior throughout history, that does not worry you too much. monica: i have to say that i can never say never. no one can. but usually the mutation that makes the most fit is the most transmissible mutation, which is what delta brought. let's just say that has never been another virus that keeps evolving and evolving and going forever. when you have vaccines, you can control it. so this would be supriging, if the -- kristen: we are going so long

but have to squeeze in this yes or no question. if my son who was a minor is amino compromised, should i get the booster as a parent? monica: yes. kristen: thank you dr. monica gandhi. appreciate it. coming up next, we will talk

kristen: welcome back. 23 species are about to be officially declared as extinct. joining us to talk about this and how we can prevent this in the future, tr curry, senior scientist at the center for biological diversity in tucson, arizona. thank you for joining us. the u.s. fish and wildlife service is proposing the extinction declarations. 22 animals and one plant

species. can you tell us about some of them? >> sure. you have the list right on the screen. eight freshwater mussels from the southeastern united states, 11 birds, which is truly heartbreaking, eight from hawaii, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the bachman's warbler, and also a flower from hawaii and a bat. this list is heartbreaking because it means there is no more hope for the species. we have made irreparable mistakes and all we can do, like you said, is due better and not let this happen again. kristen: what were the causes? were they different for all these 23 species or is there a theme or pattern? >> the overarching theme is all of the loss was caused by humans. for some of these it was intentional. like we intentionally logged the last forest of the ivory-billed woodpecker. there were trees in the southeast as large as the redwoods and they knew it would

cause the woodpecker's demise. others were not as intentional. the species in hawaii, their primary threat is evasive species. it was species at -- accidentally introduced to the islands. but we can prevent these things from happening today. a lot of species are still threatened and we can take better measures to -- kristen: in the case of the woodpecker you talked about, was it a calculated decision where we said, we can afford to lose that one? >> well, there's lesser videos about this online i encourage people to watch. a chicago company owned the rights to the timber, and the woodpecker was native to the southeastern u.s. so this distant landowner just did not care about the bird. there are so many people who still love this bird and there was a lot of heartbreak

yesterday when fish and wildlife service announced they were going to delist these species. it was kind of house keeping on their part. there are hundreds of species waiting to get on the list. services are drastically understaffed and underfunded. they wanted to clean up the list so they can prioritize the species. kristen: how many species and plant life species have gone extinct already? tierra: yesterday they announced 23. they delisted 11 previously but in the u.s. overall since we have settled here, we have lost about 650 species to extension. 150 of those we know argon and 500 more are missing and are likely extinct. around the world the united nations says one million species are at risk of extinction in coming days if we do not act to save them. kristen: is the pace accelerating? tierra: absolutely. freshwater species are going extinct at 1000 times the background rate. overall we are losing species at

100 to 1000 the background rate. and it is tragic because we know that we are doing it. we know that things like habitat loss, evasive species, pollution, exploitation of wildlife, climate change, that we are not doing enough to change these things and save the wildlife. literally, the fate of all wildlife is in our hands. kristen: some people say all wildlife are worth saving. others look at pictures of pandas and say, oh, they are cute and were saving. explain to people at home why everyone of these species matters and why we should care. tierra: whether or not it is a beautiful species of the monarch butterfly that we're naturally drawn to or a muscle that we will never see, they all play a role in the ecosystem by filtering water, contributing to the soil cycle, pollination. all of these species are connected to each other and our health ultimately depends on healthy wildlife populations.

we like to think that we are disconnected from the natural world but really we are totally dependent on the ecosystem services that a healthy environment provides. kristen: so there are bills moving through congress to increase protection for these species. what are they? tierra: the extinction prevention act would provide $5 million in funding per year for five years from each of the most imperiled groups in the u.s. butterflies, freshwater mussels, southwest desert fish, and hawaii plants. there's also the extinction crisis emergency act which would allow president biden to direct all federal agencies to prioritize protecting wildlife populations. because extinction is the end of the line. but it is a long road to get there, and lots of wildlife populations are crashing. unfortunately for the ones that were listed yesterday, protection came too late. so it's really important that we protect things before they

declined so far that recovery is almost impossible and a lot more expensive. kristen: tierra curry with the center for biological diversity in arizona. thank you so much for your insight and time. tierra: thank you. kristen: when we come back we will meet san francisco's new city hey, i just got a text from my sister. you remember rick, her neighbor? sure, he's the 76-year-old guy who still runs marathons, right? sadly, not anymore. -what, you mean-- -mhm. -just like that. -wow. so sudden. um, we're not about to have the "we need life insurance" conversation again, are we? no, we're having the "we're getting coverage so we don't have to worry about it" conversation. so you're calling about the $9.95 a month plan -from colonial penn? -i am. we put it off long enough. we are getting that $9.95 plan, today. (jonathan) is it time for you to call about the $9.95 plan? i'm jonathan from colonial penn life insurance company. sometimes we just need a reminder

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♪ hello, colonial penn? kristen: san francisco has a new city attorney. after the longtime holder of that office was appointed to the city's public utilities commission, the new city attorney will be a familiar face. he was san francisco's board of supervisors president, a state a simile member, and now he is returning to city hall at a time of great challenges, great divisions, in great turmoil. joining us is david chiu. good to see you. david: good to see you too. kristen: without those great challenges, maybe you will have second thoughts. david: changing my mind. kristen: no, you will be san francisco's first asian-american city attorney effective november 1.

do you feel an extra sense of the respective -- responsibility or gratitude to be in this position right now? david: i feel both. i am incredibly grateful and humbled for this opportunity to serve during this time with so many challenges out there. i want to salute dennis, the outgoing city attorney who led that office to be the gold standard for public law offices. led it in a victorious way and so many national conversations around our rights not just as san franciscans, but as americans. i am looking forward to doing a challenging and important work of that office. kristen: a lot of people in san francisco know your story because you have been around for a couple decades. but for those who don't, you did enter public service because of a hate crime against asian-american students when you were a student at harvard. david: i was a college freshman and i got a call about a hate incident involving eight asian

students at a nearby college who were attacked by football players hurling racial epithets. and when those football players were not disciplined, it changed me. i got super involved in student activism, study the civil rights movement, and decided to go to law school because i wanted to fight for justice. became a civil-rights attorney, a prosecutor, and eventually a lawmaker. i am just so excited for the next opportunity to serve. kristen: whether it is a tax against -- attacks against asian americans or street crime, social justice issues, climate change, so much is going on. and the homeless crisis. what will your priorities be? of course you provide legal guidance to the mayor and commissions. how will you be in the fight for those priorities in this role? david: you have just touched on some of them. as someone who has worked on civil rights issues my whole

life, in the wake of black lives matter and me too and anti-asian hate, i think it is so important that we continue to stand up for our collective civil-rights so that everyone feels part of our community and feels welcome. but i also want to make sure that we take opportunities to use the law to address the pressing issues of the day. whether it be homelessness or safety on our streets with existential crisis of climate or ensuring that city government is held to the highest ethical standards. we need to do better. kristen: it is such a big priority for the folks of san francisco, the homeless crisis. if you have any specific ideas on how to tackle that. david: for the past six years, i have chaired the assembly housing committee. and we have just in this past year invested over $12 billion in tackling homelessness, another $5 billion to assist renters who are struggling during this time, and we've also authored laws to hold cities

accountable to do more in this space. but so much more needs to happen. i know issues that may come up for me and the city attorney's office would be around conservatorships and weather folks who are struggling with the onus is on our streets, what are the conditions under which they get help. i know there are discussions around safe injection sites and whether we can provide that level of health care to folks. and how do we build l -- build housing faster? how do we make sure money is being well spent? how do we remove barriers to building supportive housing for formally homeless individuals? the city attorney's office works with all policymakers and city agencies in touching on these issues and i'm looking forward to understanding more of what we can do. kristen: we only have about 30 seconds but i have to ask, the city attorney's office has spent the past 1.5 years overseeing a city hall corruption scandal because of the reputation of city hall and everyone who works there has taken a hit. how do you plan to restore that?

david: there is an ongoing investigation and i will absolutely continue that investigation. we need to restore people's faith in government and trust in government. mean i think until we know we have rooted out all corruption, our work is not done. kristen: well david, i guess i have 10 seconds. i'm going to squeeze this in. do you have an endorsement for who should succeed you as endorse -- david: i am not planning to make an endorsement at this time. kristen: you are lucky we are out of time. good luck to y