Kentucky Senate passes a resolution to create a Make America Healthy Again Kentucky Task Force
By Melissa Patrick
Kentucky Health News
Despite voicing concerns about a resolution to create a Kentucky task force that is charged with exploring ways to integrate the principles of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again movement, a Democratic physician joined 36 of her fellow lawmakers in voting for it.
“I am extremely in favor of promoting health. . . . But I do want to speak a little bit to this resolution because I do have some concerns about it, ” said Sen. Karen Berg, D-Louisville.
Pointing to the active case of measles confirmed in Kentucky on Wednesday, Feb. 26, and the death of an unvaccinated child in Texas that same week from a “preventable communicable disease,” Berg stressed that misinformation about vaccinations is the culprit.
“We have not had a child die of measles in this country in over a decade,” she said. “We are going backwards.”
She added that the vaccination rates in Kentucky are “not necessarily high enough to give us herd immunity,” which means, “Everybody is at risk.” At this time, the Kentucky Department for Public Health reports that only 90% of the state’s kindergartners have received the measles vaccine, lower than the national average.
Coverage of 95% or greater of the two-dose measles-containing vaccine is needed to create herd immunity in order to protect communities and achieve and maintain measles elimination, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I understand wholeheartedly the concepts of health and well-being and being responsible for what you put in your body and how you treat your body, but I also cannot under any circumstances, minimize what medicine has done to impact the survival of children in this country,” she said.
While presenting Senate Concurrent Resolution 61 on the Senate floor, Sen. Shelley Funke Frommeyer, R-Alexandria, lauded U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s vision to Make America Healthy Again, of which he will lead a newly created commission.
“This groundbreaking commission will be charged with investigating what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic illness, reporting its findings, and delivering an action plan to the American people. And it’s going to be a plan that people are really waiting to hear,” President Donald Trump said Feb. 13 at Kennedy’s swearing-in ceremony.
Kennedy is well-known for spreading misinformation about vaccines and his mistrust of the science around the safety of them.
Funke Frommeyer stressed that the Make America Healthy Again Kentucky Task Force would “promote and prevent and identify preventative and alternative therapies,” as it seeks to determine the root cause of the state’s chronic health conditions.
Further, she said the task force would work to integrate the practice of “integrative holistic health” in the state’s professional medical curricula and consider how this could be promoted through continuing education opportunities.
“We want to pursue evidence-based approaches,” Funke Frommeyer said. “We’d like to encourage partnerships with research institutions to gather data on the long-term benefits of holistic health practices, providing a robust basis for policy decisions.”