Fewer Kentucky kindergartners are getting vaccinated.

More about that and today's medical news.

The Kentucky Department for Public Health says immunization rates for the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine, dropped to just below 87% during the current school year.

That's the lowest rate in more than seven years and is below the national average.

The drop comes as at least ten states are dealing with an active outbreak of measles, including three states bordering Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee.

The current commissioner of Tennessee's Department of Health is a former Kentucky state senator.

Doctor Ralph Alvarado, who still practices medicine, and Clark County, Kentucky.

I caught up with him last month at the recent Illicit Drug Summit in Nashville, where he told me about his conversation with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has been and consistent in his messaging on the measles vaccine and continues to raise safety concerns about the shot and other vaccines.

What I told them was, look, if you want to challenge that, you ought to review the data that's there.

And if you want to compile a new group of scientists that don't have connections to Big Pharma, they shouldn't be anti-vaccine people.

People that are kind of in the middle review everything.

And if we're a scientist, we shouldn't be scared of that.

But to review everything from the beginning, take a look at all the safety data, all the studies that were originally laid out, why these are what the diseases are, what we're preventing, how they work.

Granted, some of the more modern vaccines would have more questions, but the ones that have been around a while are pretty steady.

And then just find out what that group agreed.

It'll take a year to go through all that data, but you'll have a bunch of saying, we should agree on this.

We should do these things.

These things are safe.

These things.

We should not do it or not safe.

And a bunch of stuff in the middle.

And then on that, then do your research and lay down new data and try to replicate it.

And I say you'll bring, you know, the people who are on the extremes, who want to believe it or not, believe it or are going to continue to feel that way regardless of what you say.

But a lot of folks in the middle, they don't know what to do today.

If you could bring them along and provide them some security to say, this is what we've learned.

If it's something new that we've replicated, then we should honor that.

But if it's the same thing we've always said all along, then they need to honor that and move forward.

And he like that approach when I talk to him, the the impression when he was very I think it was more of a curiosity.

I don't think he thought that the safety data was as robust as it should be.

So he was more curious, and I think he was he welcomed the idea of restarting things.

But again, I think it needs to be targeted to try to do all the studies that will take you forever to come to those conclusions.

And I just want to make sure that we're not starting with a conclusion and working our way backward.

It should be.

We think this might be the case.

Let's move forward and do it the right way.

If you're going to replicate them, then if it's replicable data, then you need to look at that and look at it seriously.