Who's ahead?

With about a month to go see the numbers in the newest Fisher Cameron poll.

Teams are left out of the conversation around domestic violence.

October is domestic violence awareness might find out how the YMCA is helping keep our teens out of harm's way.

One, two, three.

And hear why this railroad spike is making a transcontinental journey of its own.

Production of Kentucky Edition is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions, the Leonard Press Endowment for Public Affairs and the KET Millennium Fund.

Good evening.

Welcome to Kentucky Edition on this Thursday, October the fifth.

I'm Renee Shaw.

Thank you for spending a little time with us tonight.

Governor Andy Beshear leads Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the Republican by six and the latest public opinion poll of the governor's race.

The poll is from the Club for Growth PAC, a conservative organization which has endorsed Cameron.

The poll shows Beshear leading Cameron 48 to 42, with 10% of the electorate undecided.

500 Kentuckians were polled between September 25th through the 28th and another Club for Growth poll done in early September.

Governor Beshear, led by eight points, 48 to 40.

In recent weeks, Attorney General Cameron has tried to clarify his stance on Kentucky's abortion ban.

This week, he said he would sign a bill providing exemptions to the ban for victims of rape and incest if the courts require him to do so.

The man who wants his current job, former U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman, told Spectrum News one he is in favor of those exemptions.

I also believe and feel very strongly that these women that are pregnant via rape and incest, these are crime victims.

These are crime victims first and foremost.

And just like reaching a plea agreement, an aggressive plea agreement in a child exploitation case so as to keep the victim from going to court and retraumatizing that victim.

We would retraumatize these women by forcing them to have a child that was that was conceived out of rape or out of incest.

So while I will enforce the law as passed by the General Assembly, that's the job.

I am pro-life, but I support the exceptions for rape and for incest to not retraumatize these women.

And I would ask, calling the General Assembly to take a hard look at that issue.

Coleman is a Republican.

He is opposed by Democrat Pamela Stephenson, a member of the Kentucky General Assembly.

She posted this about Attorney General Cameron and Russell Coleman on ex formerly known as Twitter.

Quote, Our current AG and my opponent continue to attack women's rights to make their own health care choices.

I will always support a woman's right to choose and make the health care choices that are best for her and her family, unquote.

Planned Parenthood alliance advocates is also reacting to Russell Coleman's remarks.

State director Tamara Wieder put out this statement to quote, Russell Coleman, just like Daniel Cameron is talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Here are the facts.

Coleman answered yes to every question.

The Kentucky Right to Life Victory PAC put out in order to receive their endorsement.

And he backed the 2022 constitutional amendment that Kentucky voters defeated.

Neither included exceptions for rape and incest survivors.

End of quote.

The U.S. House is still in recess after Tuesday's vote, ousting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

But Congressman James Colmer of the first District in Kentucky, who heads the House Oversight Committee, says this will not stop the House's impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden.

Here's Congressman Colmer on the Fox News Channel.

Well, we're going to keep moving forward.

We're going to continue to read emails.

We're going to continue to look at bank statements.

We're going to continue to talk to people that have insider knowledge of what the Bidens were really doing with respect to criminal activity.

With respect to Joe's knowledge.

We're going to continue to be putting together a timeline so we're not going to stop.

We're going to continue from the committee member standpoint, from the committee staff standpoint.

And we're expecting a whole nother batch of bank documents to come in this week from our subpoena last week.

So, oh, everything's moving forward.

We're continuing to follow the money.

And this is an negative, but it's not stopping our work.

Comber and the rest of Kentucky's Republican House delegation voted to keep McCarthy as House speaker.

Legalized sports betting began a month ago, as you know, and betting online began list last week.

Today, during his weekly news conference, Governor Andy Beshear talked about the money spent so far looking at the first month of retail wagering.

Our partners are reporting a total of over $10 million of in-person sports wagering.

And with the launch of mobile wagering just from Thursday through Sunday, Kentuckians wagered over $68 million through retail and mobile channels combined.

Now that it's legal, Kentuckians are taking advantage of both in-person and mobile applications to spend their entertainment dollars betting on things like NFL, college sports, Formula One racing and more.

These numbers shouldn't be a surprise to anyone because Kentuckians have wanted this option for so long.

When folks told us getting it passed was impossible.

But even some legislators said that they'd never pass it while I was governor.

We said, Watch this.

And together we got it done, because at the end of the day, our job is to serve the people of Kentucky.

The governor says the amount of money wagered so far has outpaced the predictions.

He says people are enjoying it and it proves legalized wagering is something Kentuckians want.

Now, the opioid crisis was the main topic on day two of the Saw summit and Corbin Research psychiatrist Dr. Nora Volkow was the keynote speaker.

Her work is a big reason why drug addiction is now called a brain disorder.

She talked to Kentucky Addiction or Kentucky addiction, rather, about addiction in Kentucky.

Kentucky has always impressed me in terms of its leadership that it cash in relates to politics of the importance of these.

These are issues that we cannot ignore.

The opioid epidemic, that's one.

But also from the perspective of health care systems.

They have been incredibly proactive in ensuring that there is treatment available for people that need it.

Kentucky has been a leader in that place in the perspective of science.

Kentucky has also play a very important role in the science of addiction.

In fact, the first Addiction Research Center and I mentioned that earlier, was created here in Kentucky, and it has existed since then, and it has laid our opening of researchers and scientists and discoveries.

So across how do you treat the people that have an opioid addiction?

How do you implement them?

How do you reverse overdoses?

How do you create support from the community?

What is that data that you can obtain in in communities to help you understand how you are going to intervene and what the magnitude of the problem is?

So Kentucky has led out the political, clinical, and I would say scientific in the field of addiction.

Kentucky has one of the highest rates of mortality from perspective of trajectory.

It's in a better place than many other states, but it's still these numbers are very, very high.

Bringing up these forums where actually we get people with different disciplines together so that we can discuss the challenges and understand what the other side doing and where we can help.

For us in the National Institute on Drug Abuse Fund Science, we are the Knowledge organization.

So understanding what gap areas exist.

What would someone want to know in order to develop a policy is important so that we can build the science towards it.

Now, the source summit began back in 2013 and it stands for Shaping our Appalachian Region.

Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced a $600,000 grant for saw that will go towards job training for recently released inmates with a history of substance use disorder.

Federal funding for child care during the pandemic has run out.

That money prevented 1000 child care centers in Kentucky from shuttering, according to the national progressive think tank The Century Foundation.

Is this the timely end of another COVID 19 relief program or the return to a dismal child care marketplace?

Our newest reporter, Jude Lefler, is looking into this story and has more.

Thanks, Renee.

I'm joined now by Dustin Pugel.

He's the policy director of the left leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

Dustin, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

How has this federal funding saved the child care industry since it was rolled out in 2020?

The federal government stepped in and through several different packages, provided over $1,000,000,000 in funding to just Kentucky's child care centers.

In many ways, that really saved the industry from further decline.

And it also meant that we were able to improve the program that provides assistance to folks who need it by increasing the income eligibility limit, by providing higher reimbursement to those child care centers, by allowing child care workers themselves to bring their own kids to child care with them.

So it's really been a game changer for the industry in a lot of ways.

And if we hadn't had that, we probably would have lost even more child care centers than we already have up to this point.

And the funding has expired as of September 30th.

That was last Saturday.

So we're still early into this change.

But what do you anticipate will happen to these child care centers?

Bush's administration has said they've found enough money to provide one more payment.

This year that they plan on sending out in December.

And so I don't think we'll see the effect of the expiration of that federal money quite yet.

But it does give the child care centers enough runway to get through at least the early months of next year while the General Assembly makes a plan for how they're going to deal with that.

So as the General Assembly looks at funding next year as they work on their two year budget, what would you recommend to them on this issue?

How to support child care centers?

Yeah, I think if we've learned anything over the last couple of years, it's just how important child care is not only to the kids who use that child care center, but also to the greater economy, because we know that parents need an affordable and available place that is high quality where they can put their kids while they're at work.

And so the result of even the child care system that we have now is that 93% of young fathers are at work, but only about 64% of young mothers are at work.

And so if the General Assembly wants to make sure that we have enough capacity for all mothers and fathers who want to be able to enter the workforce or stay in the workforce, we're going to have to make sure our child care centers stay open, and that's going to require significant investment.

So Kentucky's Employee Child Care Assistance Program got off the ground this summer.

It matches the child care costs that an employer pays.

The pilot program allocated 15 million state dollars, which are to be spent by June of next year.

How has this program worked?

Are employers utilizing it?

Do we need to do more?

Yeah, the program is an interesting way of trying to support employers who want to provide a child care benefit to their employees.

I think it's a helpful tool in the toolbox.

I think it's good that the General Assembly is trying new ways of supporting working families.

But like you said, it's a $15 million program in the midst of a $300 million hole that we're facing.

So while it is a useful step forward, it's nowhere near enough to be able to handle the magnitude of the problem that we're facing.

And so far, only a few dozen families have been able to utilize that program.

So it really hasn't seen the kind of take that we might have hoped.

So, you know, again, we're comparing about, you know, several dozen families to 160,000 spots in child care, a little over 300,000 kids under age six.

So it's a useful project, but it's not going to fix the problem that we're facing.

That was Dustin Pugel.

He is the policy director of the left leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

Dustin, thanks for joining me today.

Thank you.

We've seen a spike in new COVID 19 cases recently, but a leading immunologist at the University of Kentucky says we've come a long way from where we were this time last year.

More in tonight's medical news.

We are in such as such different space than we were and even last year that we've had wonderful vaccines available.

We have great antivirals.

And by this point, I think everybody has either been infected or vaccinated or both in both severe cases.

Right.

So we're really different, a different place than we were a couple of years ago.

And we did see that blip in COVID hospitalizations and cases and positivity rate come up.

But I looked at the CDC tracker this morning and it looks like we kind of peaked in that September 9th, 10th.

And it looks like maybe the numbers are actually trending down, though some metrics still are a blip than we saw before.

So school is in full force and assembling more indoors as the weather we think is going to be cooling down.

But I think we're you know, we're in a different place.

And like I said, most people by now have had four or five vaccines and they've either on top of that gotten infected.

So they've built natural immunity in addition to vaccine induced immunity.

So I think we're we're really in a different place.

Right.

The vaccine that is currently available, that is what is the difference in this vaccine that currently is available.

So the new vaccine that came out is built on one of the on the ground strains that was in circulation in November 2021 and was really the dominant variant until very recently this year.

It just it just got displaced by a couple of new variants.

As you know, as we know, this virus is still adapting and still mutating.

But it's there's lots of data coming out of laboratories right now that show that antibodies made to this new vaccine are capable of recognizing the two variants, including the most most recent variant.

Are we at herd immunity?

You know, it's really hard to quantify herd immunity, but at the same time, I think where if you took a random sampling of individuals and just looked for antibodies against either a spike or the nucleocapsid protein, so the spike of the component of the vaccine uniquely causes what you get in the real virus.

If we just went outside and just gathered, you know, 100 people, I would estimate that 80% of them would have antibodies at this point.

So we are getting really close to that.

So with each time the disease mutates, my language, layman's terms, does it get weaker?

Oh, so it's really hard to it's really hard to answer that question directly because the virus is mutating.

But at the same time, we're also acquiring immunity.

And so it is really difficult in the clinical setting to say, oh, is the virus getting weaker or are we getting stronger?

Or maybe a combination of both or some sort of.

But I think the most important thing is that we're still COVID is still by, you know, the majority of cases.

COVID is an incidental finding in hospitalization.

We're still not seeing the numbers of people who are being admitted because they have COVID.

Mostly what we're seeing right now is that people are in the hospital.

And oh, by the way, they also have COVID, which is a completely different scenario than what we experienced not that long ago.

Yeah, even the hospitalization spike that you mentioned that we did experience, it was nowhere near to where we were just this time last year, let alone a couple of years ago.

Yeah.

For those who have a question about so many places, workplaces or pharmacies are saying you can get your flu shot and your COVID shot at the same time, some people might be nervous about that.

What do you say?

Well, I tell them that trust your immune system is very capable of handling more than one vaccine.

In fact, if you remember, if if any of us have, you know, our parents or grandparents or uncles, but we all have a child in our family, we took them to the pediatrician and loaded them up with six vaccines in one visit.

So if if a kid who's six months old can handle getting all those flu, all those shots at the same time, I think we can handle getting shots in the same time.

So join us tomorrow because Dr. Massoud Powers will join us again and we'll talk about a different respiratory virus that particularly impacts kids.

RSV Historically, Kentucky has had high rates of tobacco use and continues to hold one of the highest smoking rates among adults, nearly 20% in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Now, the state's flagship university will soon be home to a new research center focused on tobacco regulation in the Commonwealth.

The University of Kentucky is launching the Appalachian Tobacco regulatory science team, nicknamed Apple Trust.

The university will receive $19 million over five years from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the FDA Center for Tobacco Products.

The goal of Apple Trust is to investigate the impact of federal regulatory policies in rural communities.

UC's principal investigator of the award says he hopes this research will help people make better choices in Appalachian Kentucky.

As we know, cancer rates there are much higher than we actually are leading nationally.

And we also know, unfortunately, that combustible tobacco use is leading nationally in that area.

And we also know that controls for tobacco use unfortunately, leads to cancer.

So tobacco regulatory science really asks the question, how can we help people make better choices about the use of tobacco?

Are there ways in which people can use it that would limit their health exposure or their risk for poorer health consequences or not use it at all if that's the choice they want to make?

And in particular, we're interested in this idea that morality can be looked at in a heterogeneous space.

And what I mean by that is looking at it from a perspective that says morality is just one blanket area, but that there are micro communities in rural areas that may have different needs and different impacts that may look might augment their decisions.

Apple Trust will focus its research in three areas of Kentucky, Boyd Counter and Greenup Carter and Greenup counties and Northeast Kentucky and a more rural group of counties in southeast Kentucky.

Breath it not Leslie Letcher and Perry.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and it's easy to forget it's not just adults who can be affected by relationship violence at the YMCA of Greater Louisville.

Teens are learning how to create healthy connections through the Love Notes program based on a national curriculum.

The program is designed to teach teenagers relationship guidance and safety.

We think about domestic violence in marriages.

We don't think about it in dating violence.

If a person is threatening to harm or even to kill themselves.

If you break up your life, you must you must reach out to your parents.

Your ex's parents Love Notes is an evidence based program.

It's a healthy relationships curriculum, so it teaches teens and young adults about healthy relationships.

That includes sexual risk avoidance things, but also things like domestic violence.

How to break up, how to know yourself so that you can be in a relationship Better Stay away from the revenge game not to protect you don't fit into the statistics are very alarming when it comes to dating violence, especially for teens.

One of the statistics is like one in three in their lifetime will experience it versus one in 12 in the past year.

And so, like if you think about one in three and then you look at a room of 20 teens like that's like six of them, I would say we are always breaking up.

We normally have a couple of lessons each day, so 2 to 3 lessons every day.

And then in the afternoon we spend some time in the teen tech center.

And during that time they do things like podcasting, they record music videos, they create social media graphics.

We have three sex lessons that are at the end.

So there's the one that we consider the the body lessons.

So that's the informative facts about STDs, pregnancy, all of that kind of stuff.

And then we have the heart lesson, which is more about like how sex impacts your relationships or how it can impact your relationships.

Know my schools, but don't talk about that.

But it's really important to learn.

So that's why I'm here.

Like I, I count this as a school.

Like it's really something important that teens in my age and older and under willing should be willing to learn about.

I've been here for three years and I've never gotten bored.

This is really entertaining.

And the more I come in, the more stuff I learn before I feel like I had a decent amount of knowledge about what we're learning about that.

But not on me.

I know so much more and it's so much more helpful because I know once I get into a relationship, I know what to look for and that can be relationships with anyone like your mother, your coach, your neighbor, your boyfriend and girlfriend, this and that.

It doesn't have to be only for boyfriend and girlfriend.

I think teens are left out of the conversation around domestic violence because I think it's hard for us adults to think that it's happening to teens.

And so I think some of it's the terminology thing.

But also I think that adults are just scared, I guess, to to think that it's happening to their kids.

So this is like the second time that my daughter signed up.

I was interested in doing it because I teach a lot about relationships not only within her self but also within her family, her friends and the community as well.

Relationships is something that they develop each and every day.

And at the start, when they're younger, some of it is violent from home and some of Islam from other friends.

It's just all how, you know, their varmint that they involved in is how they pick up on what relationship that they grow into with relationships starting younger and their emotional maturity not necessarily being there.

I sometimes I don't think that they know any different and they haven't really seen any different.

And so a program like Love Notes where we can talk about communication skills, we can talk about what a healthy relationship actually looks like.

It doesn't look like what you see on Instagram and TikTok and music videos and things like that.

If we can show them healthy examples, then hopefully they're more likely to have those healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships.

Finally tonight, Ada Lamont of Lexington is the nation's poet laureate.

She's the winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant, the grant of $800,000.

And that's artists, writers, scientists and other innovators pursue their work.

In a statement, the MacArthur Foundation praised Lamont as a poet, quote, heightening our attention to the wonders of the natural world and our connections with one another across six books of poetry.

She melds close observations with a direct tone that resonates powerfully with a wide readership.

Congratulations to her.

Something big was here in Lexington today.

A 43 foot tall, £7,000 Golden Rail spike was unveiled at the Henry Clay Estate, crafted by the Kentucky artist Dow Blumberg.

The monument was commissioned to recognize the unsung heroes and efforts that went into building the Transcontinental Railroad.

Really, in the past, the story has been really about probably more than financiers and others.

But really, it was a Herculean effort by a whole bunch of nameless, faceless peoples and oftentimes despised.

And we kind of wanted to send the message out to the world that, hey, diverse people working together can do great things.

One, The spike began its own transcontinental journey here in Lexington and will go on to cross the nation before landing permanently.

And Brigham City, Utah, safe travels.

We hope you'll join us again tomorrow night at 630 Eastern.

530 Central for Kentucky Edition, where we inform, Connect and Inspire.

It's Friday and we'll recap the week's events inside Kentucky politics.

You'll want to hear that.

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Visit us on the PBS video app and send us a story idea at the address you see on your screen.

Public Affairs at KET dot org Thanks again for watching tonight.

And I we'll see you right back here again tomorrow.

Take care.