Ask an Expert: Dr. Bob Wachter 👨‍⚕️

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👨‍⚕️On today's special Ask an Expert, we're joined by Dr. Bob Wachter, Chair, UCSF Dept. of Medicine, author, and guest host of In the Bubble! He's answering questions around the pandemic and the Covid vaccines. Plus, some listener-submitted questions. 🏖 What will the Summer be like? 🏫 When can kids go to school without masks? 💉 Does it matter which vaccine you get? When does he think kids will be able to get the Fauci Ouchie? Plus, much more! Dive in, you don't want to miss out!

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👨‍⚕️ Learn everything there is to know about Dr. Bob Wachter

✍️ Find a copy of the transcript for today's episode here

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:00  

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Bethany Van Delft  0:07  

From Fauci Ouchies to vaccine passports today The Ten News gets extra to find out what's up with the coronavirus pandemic, and vaccines.

I'm Bethany Van Delft. And this is The Ten News gets extra. Vaccine supply is increasing and schools are reopening. And just this week Pfizer, one of the vaccine makers announced that their vaccine is showing 100% effectiveness rate against COVID. In their tests with 12 to 15-year-olds, 100% is a big deal. Imagine getting 100% on all the zoom quizzes you took this year. Does this mean that the pandemic is coming to an end? In this special Ask an Expert, we went to one of the smartest doctors we know that there Bob Wachter, Chair of the University of California, San Francisco's Department of Medicine to find out.

Thank you so much. This is so exciting. Thank you for agreeing to hang out with us at the time news.

Dr. Bob Wachter  1:26  

Oh, what a great pleasure. It's It's wonderful. Thanks.

Bethany Van Delft  1:29  

Okay, so you're a doctor. You've written books, you've been awarded prestigious honors, and you're a hospitalist. You're also at University of California, San Francisco. Can you talk about what you do there?

Dr. Bob Wachter  1:43  

Yeah, my day job is I run something called the Department of Medicine. So I oversee about 1000 doctors at a big university hospital. So what's fun about it is I get to be a doctor. But I also get to be a leader. I get to be a mentor and a teacher. I get to write, speak, it's just wonderful. If you like variety.

Bethany Van Delft  2:04  

That sounds like a whole lot of things to do at once. And then somehow in the midst of all of this, you've become somewhat of a Twitter master. I love your tweets. What drove you to tweet? 

Dr. Bob Wachter  2:16  

I'm pretty busy, although I've got amazing people that work with me. And I think Twitter is awesome. And I think that in part because to have a way for me to follow people whose opinions I really respect and admire, and figure out what they care about, and what they're reading and what they're watching and listening to, I think it's brilliant in COVID, it just became incredibly crucial. And what I discovered a year ago, I was taking in all this information about this brand new disease and had to understand it from so many different perspectives. I was trying to learn about the virus, the immune system, about behavioral change, and about masks and about aerosols, all this kind of stuff. And as I was learning about it, I figured Okay, maybe I'll maybe other people trying to learn about it, too. I'll put it out there. And I found the little like button on the bottom of your Twitter thing. All of a sudden, it was spinning around like a movie. Like wow, I guess people seem interested in this. So I kept on doing it. And it's been, it's been really gratifying.

Bethany Van Delft  3:14  

It's a great way to keep the public updated on the pandemic and COVID with so much misinformation and disinformation going around, it really is a valuable tool and you've been using it in the best way I can possibly think of. You're also guest hosting a podcast called in the bubble, a podcast about the pandemic from the frontlines.

Dr. Bob Wachter  3:36  

Yeah, the podcast was started by a guy named Andy Slavitt, who is a leader in the field of healthcare. He started it about a year ago. So his idea was to start a podcast and to focus on COVID. But when you focus on COVID, you have to focus on politics and policy and, and issues of racial justice and equity. And the schools and you know, it just it's everything. And so his guests ranged from Fauci to Tina Fey. And then when President Biden came into office, he asked Andy to come in and be one of his right-hand people in helping to lead the COVID response and Andy thought that was too important to say no to. And one day, I got a call from him maybe two months ago, and he said, you know, you ever listened to my podcast? I said I listened to it all the time. I think it's fantastic. He said, how would you like to run it?

Bethany Van Delft  4:34  

Now that we know what kind of doctor Bob Wachter is, let's find out more from him in Let's ask an expert. So super important questions. Does it matter which vaccine you get?

Dr. Bob Wachter  4:47  

They're different but it doesn't matter in terms of if you have a chance to get any of the ones that are approved in the United States, you want to get it. They are all miraculously effective. They are all remarkably safe. And if you had told me in March of 2020, a year ago, that we will have three vaccines out there that are this good, this safe and will already be in more than 100 million shoulders, I would have said that's a pipe dream that can't happen. It's amazing how good they are. And, you know, there are slight differences between the vaccines, but the best one is the one that you can get.

Bethany Van Delft  5:31  

So when can kids under 16 begin to get their Fauci Ouchies?

Dr. Bob Wachter  5:39  

Maybe you heard about that weeks ago, I was having dinner with my birthday dinner actually, with my younger son the other day, and he said, it looks like I'm going to get my Fauci out GMA, and I said, I have not heard that before. And I have to tell you, since then, I can't think about the vaccine being called anything other than Fauci ouchie. I just think it's great. They're just being tested now in kids. And judging by the speed with which they're being tested. My guess is they're going to be available for kids in the fall.

Bethany Van Delft  6:08  

That is fantastic. And that is kids under 12, as well?

Dr. Bob Wachter  6:14  

Yeah, no they're testing it down to I think age one or two right now. And so I think we'll get answers fairly quickly for kind of the full range of kids.

Bethany Van Delft  6:24  

If you had a magic ball, what would you say the summer is going to look like?

Dr. Bob Wachter  6:30  

I think the summer is going to be pretty good. I mean, I think that the vaccine now is rolling out really quickly, where we're getting about two and a half million people a day, vaccinated. I mean, I think about, you know, a big college football stadium that seats 100,000 people. So that is 25 of them, filled with people that were getting vaccinated every single day. It's pretty, pretty staggering. At that pace, by the end of May, everybody in the country who wants to get vaccinated will have had the opportunity to get vaccinated. I hope everybody will get vaccinated. But if you get up to 70% of the population vaccinated, 80% of the population vaccinated, you get to the point where the virus just doesn't have a place to go. It's looking around for someone who is susceptible, and it can't find someone. And it's not like it goes away forever, because unfortunately, we're not gonna be able to vaccinate the rest of the world by the end of May, or probably by the end of 2021. But you have enough people vaccinated that the cases are going to go down to a very low level.

Bethany Van Delft  7:40  

That's such good news. Okay, so this is a big one. I hear people talking about this one. If someone's grandparents are vaccinated, but they are not, can they get together? If you are vaccinated? Could you spread the virus to someone who is not vaccinated?

Dr. Bob Wachter  7:58  

Just in the last month studies have come out that have made it clear that the ability of a vaccinated person to spread the virus to another person is way, way, way down? It's probably not zero. But it's, it seems to be cut by 80 or 90%. And so, given how well kids do with COVID, so few of them get super sick, I think most of us on the recommendation from the CDC now is that for a vaccinated grandparent, to hug an unvaccinated kid is an okay thing to do. And we've waited so long for that. I think the time has come that we can do that once the grandparents are fully vaccinated. It's not like they have a zero chance of getting COVID. But there is actually a zero chance of them dying from COVID. In the studies that have looked at 10s of 1000s of people, the number of people that have died of COVID, after they were fully vaccinated is zero. So the vaccine is breathtakingly effective, 

Bethany Van Delft  9:05  

So we, we keep hearing about variants. Is that like some kind of supervillain gang? Or? Or is that like a COVID thing that we should be worried about? 

Dr. Bob Wachter  9:16  

A little. So here's what a variant is. The virus every time it creates a copy of itself. And that's all it does for a living, it just it doesn't really do anything other than create copies of itself and then make mischief, takes over our cells. To do that it uses the machinery of ourselves to create copies of itself. And viruses aren't perfect every time they make a copy of themselves, they can sometimes have a little bit of a proofreading error. Starting about three or four months ago, we started to see some variants that seemed to be acting a little bit differently. And the biggest player right now is the one that started in the United Kingdom in England. All of the sudden, they found that the number of cases We're going up while the country was pretty well locked down. And they were scratching their head saying what's going on here, we would have expected that what we're doing as a society would have led to lower cases, the cases were going up. When they investigated, they found that the virus had taken on a new power to be somewhat more infectious than the original virus. And so that's the main variant that's in the United States. Now, the good news about that variant is it appears to be every bit as sensitive to the vaccine, as the original virus. There are a couple of variants that we're seeing in other countries, where the vaccines appear to work a little bit less well, but they're not taking over it's the UK, the British variant that's taking over. And so the companies that have made these vaccines are even as we speak, while they're working on testing them in kids, they're also working on reformulating them so that they are as active against the variants, as they were against the original virus.

Bethany Van Delft  10:55  

Okay, so to recap, variants are like spider man into the spider-verse, they're just different versions of the virus in like an alternate universe, and most of them aren't a big deal. Some of them make the virus a little bit more contagious. And with everyone getting vaccinated, and everybody staying careful, it should still be okay.

Dr. Bob Wachter  11:19  

I think it should be when it comes to the UK variant. The one that many of us are watching carefully are the ones in South Africa and Brazil. And at least so far, they don't seem to be spreading super fast in the United States.

Bethany Van Delft  11:30  

So I keep hearing about vaccine passports. What are those? Like? Can you fly with it? Does it mean you don't get the virus, like what is the vaccine passport?

Dr. Bob Wachter  11:39  

Yeah, it's probably not a great name, because people immediately think of a passport. And a passport, of course, is a document that you have to be able to show to travel outside the country. This is not that exactly. This is might be better thought of as vaccine authentication, a document may be on your phone, maybe a piece of paper that that shows that you were vaccinated. And the reason it's interesting is come the end of May, all adults will have had the opportunity to have been vaccinated in the United States, some of them will choose not to. And there are going to be questions that that arise about business, you know, a bowling alley, sports stadium, a train, an airplane, should they require that everybody who enters that space have to show that they were vaccinated. You could see an argument why the argument might be that everybody inside will feel more comfortable and safer. So there's your entry into certain places is going to be limited to people who have been vaccinated. The problem, of course, is it's going to create some political battles, there will be people who feel like that's an infringement, that's getting in the way of their ability to make a decision about whether they get vaccinated. But it's a tricky call, because your decision about whether to get vaccinated is not only about you, it's also about me, because that's the nature of infectious diseases. It's not just you making a choice about what to do with your own body. But your choice influences the risk of other people. So there's no right answer on this one. But I think you can expect that during the summer, there's going to be a lot of debate and you'll hear that term vaccine or immunity passport a lot of times.

Bethany Van Delft  13:26  

It also seems like it opens the door to different types of discrimination and like people who have barriers to access that may not be able to get the vaccine, maybe they want the vaccine, but they can't get the vaccine for lots of different reasons like immigration status or things like that.

Dr. Bob Wachter  13:43  

Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely important. People talk about communities of color having vaccine hesitancy, what we're seeing is that, that not so much. We're seeing differences in access, that for certain communities, it's harder to get the vaccine, you know, the ability to travel there, the ability to use a complicated web system, you know, maybe a 90-year-old doesn't can't get on the web and make a make a complicated web-based appointment. So I think it is really, really important if we say that you're going to need this passport to get into certainly essential services. We have to solve the problem that anybody who wants to have gotten a vaccine has had the opportunity to get it.

Bethany Van Delft  14:22  

Exactly.

Okay, so now we have some questions from our listeners.

Rose  14:35  

Hi, I'm Rose, and I'm seven years old. My school isn't open yet. Are lots of other schools still closed?

Dr. Bob Wachter  14:44  

Well, in a lot of places, the schools are still closed either fully or they're doing hybrid classes. But I think there's a really big push to get the schools open. It turns out that one of the happy surprises about COVID, there weren't that many but one of the happy surprises is that kids are, don't get sick very often don't spread it as much as adults do. And I think once we came to understand that, it really was going to be important to try to get the schools open with masks with extra ventilation being careful. And we've been pretty slow on that. So I think you see that the new administration pushing very hard to get the schools open. And I think by this by the fall, virtually all the schools are going to be fully open. In the spring, it's sort of hit and miss. It varies across the country.

Maddy  15:30  

Hi, my name is Maddy, I'm eight years old. And my question was, how can something so small cause something so big?

Dr. Bob Wachter  15:38  

Yeah, I often asked myself that question, as well, you know, it is it is well below the limits of detection, even the regular microscope, you would not see it, these things are so tiny, but they replicate really fast. And so if you get a few 1000 copies of a virus that reaches the back of your nose, and then manages to burrow into the cells in your nose or the back of your throat, it immediately takes over those cells and begins having little baby viruses. And then eventually it breaks out of the cell and can spread to the rest of the body. So although they're tiny, you can you know, without it doesn't take much time for you to have millions or even billions of them in a human body. And one of the things that happened with COVID, is we learned that this virus, you can have it and you can spread it and you can feel fine. So that made it particularly difficult. And you know, it's a worthy foe. And it's proved that this year, and it's smallness, actually is one of its superpowers.

Bethany Van Delft  16:39  

And this is exactly why masks are so important, isn't it, to diminish the number of viruses that can that you might get in your nose or throat or something like that.

Dr. Bob Wachter  16:49  

You might ask, you know, if it's so small, can it get through a mask? And the answer is, if you're wearing particularly, we're going two masks, it really can't, it seems to get thwarted by the masks for this particular virus, it really has only one set of cells that it likes to burrow into. And those are the cells that happened to be in the back of your nose in the back of your throat, and to some extent your eyes. And so that is why wearing masks has been so important. And if everybody just wore masks, the number of cases would go down massively.

Ben  17:25  

My name is Ben, I'm five years old. My question is, when will COVID be over?

Dr. Bob Wachter  17:32  

I wish I had a good answer for that. I'm gonna give you two answers to that Ben, one over I think by the by the early fall, so six months from now, I think life will feel like it's going back to something that resembles normal. We may still be wearing masks if we get together in a big crowd of strangers. The second answer, though, is I don't think that COVID is going away, go away forever. I think it's going to resemble the flu in the United States where maybe every winter we have an outbreak. People have to be careful to wash their hands, maybe you're going to be wearing some masks in the wintertime, we'll have to see, you may have to get another shot of a vaccine every winter the way we do for the flu. But I think that's it's not so bad. You know the number of people that died this year of COVID, more than half a million in the United States. We will never see anything like that again. But I think we probably are going to have to deal with COVID over the coming years in a much, much milder form. 

Olivia  18:34  

Hi, I'm Olivia and I'm 11 years old. Will kids be able to be in school without masks if teachers get vaccinated? 

Dr. Bob Wachter  18:41  

That's a great question, Olivia. And I think there's still gonna be mass in the school until either all everybody's vaccinated, including the kids, or the level of virus in our communities is down so low that we're really, no one's at risk of COVID. And that could happen by the fall. We'll have to say.

Bethany Van Delft  18:59  

Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This is so much fun.

Dr. Bob Wachter  19:03  

What a joy. Thanks for having me.

Bethany Van Delft  19:10  

If you listen to TheTen News townhall with Dr. Anthony Fauci, and if you didn't, you should you learn that way before he was the US's top doctor. He was captain of his high school basketball team. Today's guest Dr. Wachte had a big role in college sports. Was he A) first baseman on the baseball team B) the team's mascot C) the assistant coach or D) The announcer? Did you guess it? The answer is

B!

Let's hear Dr. Bob tell us about it. Oh, I love this story.

Dr. Bob Wachter  20:06  

When I was in college, I was the school's mascot. I was at the University of Pennsylvania, and the mascot, it's in Philadelphia and the mascot was somebody called the Penn Quaker. And the Quaker, believe it or not, I went to every football and every basketball game, and I was dressed in a black tri-cornered hat, bifocals, knickers, blue knickers, white ruffled shirt, and a red top coat. And, and that's what I tried it around in front of 10 or 20 or 30,000 people at each game dressed like the Penn Quaker, my parents were very proud of me.

Bethany Van Delft  20:49  

You want to see a photo of Dr. Bob and his amazing mascot outfit? We have one. Check it out at thetennews.com Time's up. That's the end of The Ten for today, but you can catch new episodes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The Ten News is a co-production of Small But Mighty Media in collaboration with next chapter podcasts and distributed by iHeartRadio. The Ten News is written and produced by Tracey Crooks, Stephen Tompkins, Jenner Pascua, Pete Musto, Andrew Hall, and Sarah Olender. The production director is Jeremy Tittle and the show's executive produced by Donald Albright and show creator Tracy Leeds Kaplan. Special thanks to Rose, Maddy, Olivia, and Ben for helping us out with questions for Dr. Wachter. If you have questions about the show, a story idea or a fun fact you want to share? Email us at hello@thetennews.com. And don't forget to subscribe rate and review The Ten News on Apple podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast. I'm Bethany Van Delft, and thanks for listening to The Ten News. Oh Dr. Wachter. Can't you hear me calling? Ask your parents about this. That's not really how the song goes but it fits so well. Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Sources for this episode

The photo of Dr. Bob Wachter, mentioned in today’s episode.