A report released by the Arizona Child Fatality Review Team (CFRT) has generated severe backlash from Arizona State Representatives Quang Nguyen and Selina Bliss, who serve as Chair and Vice-Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. The backlash came after the CFRT made the blatant unconstitutional recommendation to “remove all firearms in households with children,” claiming that “the presence of firearms in a household increases the risk of suicide among adolescents.”
According to a press release from the Arizona House of Representatives, Reps. Nguyen and Bliss penned a letter to Jennie Cunico, Cabinet Executive Officer of the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS), voicing in the strongest possible terms their objections to the CFRT’s report.
✅Representatives @QuangNguyenAZ & @SelinaBliss Denounce CFRT’s Radical Call to Remove Firearms from Arizona Homes
“We are appalled that the CFRT, speaking on behalf of the Arizona Department of Health Services, is actually advocating for stripping Arizonans of their Second… pic.twitter.com/d2wlF55brF
“We are appalled that the CFRT, speaking on behalf of the Arizona Department of Health Services, is actually advocating for stripping Arizonans of their Second Amendment rights in their own homes. This radical proposal is reminiscent of New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s 2023 gun control order, which attempted to prohibit carrying of firearms in public for self-defense. You may recall that Governor Grisham’s order—accurately characterized as ‘insanely unconstitutional’ and ‘outrageous’—was swiftly blocked in court.
“The CFRT’s ‘do something’ approach to child-fatality legislation would not only violate the constitutional rights of millions of Arizonans; it is also irrational from a policy perspective. The CFRT’s Report notes that 31 children drowned in 2023 and that the majority of these deaths occurred in pools and hot tubs. Yet the CFRT does not recommend the elimination of pools and hot tubs. Instead, the CFRT advocates for common-sense ideas: ‘close, constant supervision of children when around water, increased availability and affordability of swim lessons for children, and proper pool enclosures.’
“Effective policy solutions—even for problems that are difficult and complex—must be designed to fully protect constitutional rights and liberties. We urge you to direct the CFRT to reconsider its unjustified attack on the Second Amendment and amend its Report.”
“Proposals to strip citizens of their firearms are not only unconstitutional but also lack common sense,” Nguyen explained. “While the report suggests reasonable safety measures for other risks, such as drowning, the CFRT overreaches by advocating for the elimination of firearms entirely from homes with children.”
“Our state should focus on education and safe practices, not on extreme measures that undermine individual liberties,” Representative Bliss agreed. “We stand firm in defending the Second Amendment rights of Arizona families.”
Anytime Roberts writes about my work negatively, I know I’m doing the right thing. I’m very sure she’s okay with abortion of innocent children. pic.twitter.com/K1P1QXc8JP
In a later post to X, Nguyen acknowledged an op-ed from AZCentral’s Laurie Roberts criticizing him for his stance writing, “Anytime Roberts writes about my work negatively, I know I’m doing the right thing. I’m very sure she’s okay with abortion of innocent children.”
Roberts suggested the report’s call to remove guns from Arizona homes does not violate the Constitution and “goes on to recommend that ‘parents of adolescents should remove all guns from their homes, especially if there is a history of mental health issues or substance abuse issues.’ This because more children are dying by suicide, with close to half killing themselves with guns.”
However, as the Representatives point out, the language explicitly used by the report is as follows:
“Since the CFRP determined that access to guns was the biggest risk factor for firearm deaths, CFRP believes that the most effective way to prevent firearm-related deaths in children is to remove all firearms in households with children because the presence of firearms in a household increases the risk of suicide among adolescents.”
The recommendation of the CFRT is direct, unambiguous, and lacks the nuance suggested by the local columnist.
The CFRT is comprised mostly of appointees nominated by the state officers who were in turn appointed or nominated by Democrats Governor Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes.
The Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) is proposing to put a strict limit on childcare enrollment, but a policy group says that’s illegal.
The Goldwater Institute advised ADHS in a letter that such a cap on childcare facilities (preschools, daycares, and day camps, for example) would violate statutory requirements on agency rulemaking.
Arizona law restricts agencies from making any rules that exceed authorized subject matter areas, that supplement a more specific grant of rulemaking authority, and that aren’t specifically authorized by statute.
The Goldwater Institute argued that the proposal to impose a maximum group size on childcare facilities constitutes an authority that ADHS doesn’t possess within their regulatory powers.
“[A]n across-the-board cap on ‘group size,’ independent of any relevant considerations such as child-adult ratio, is not a regulation of ‘staffing per number and age groups of children’ [per their regulatory authority] and it is not justified by any other provision in the statute,” said the Goldwater Institute.
The organization also predicted in its letter that such a proposal would result in a greater burden on childcare facilities and a greater cost for families, in addition to reducing overall childcare availability.
The proposal concerns amendments to two rules pertaining to staff-to-children ratios: 9-5-404 and 9-5-726. The amendment adds on limitations of group size per age group.
Group size limitations begin small with younger children and expand as the ages rise: infants are limited to 10 in a group; one-year-old children are limited to 12 in a group; two-year-old children are limited to 16 in a group; three-year-old children are limited to 26 in a group; four-year-old children are limited to 30 in a group; and both five-year-old children and school-age children are limited to 40 in a group.
The amendments also struck provisions allowing volunteers to be counted as staff in staff-to-children ratios and restricting student aides or qualified teacher caregiver aides from being counted as staff. Also replaced were any instances of staff as “caregivers,” instead renaming them as “child educators.”
In a press release, Goldwater Institute staff attorney John Thorpe said the group size restrictions would not only be an exercise of authority beyond ADHS’ scope, it would serve to restrict families’ critical access to childcare facilities. Thorpe marked the proposal as another example of “ill-informed, heavy-handed bureaucratic regulation” within the state and nationwide.
“Imposing an arbitrary cap on the number of children allowed in a space — regardless of the size of the space, nature of the activity, or number of adults supervising — makes no sense,” stated Thorpe. “It’s especially pernicious during a childcare shortage, as it will force good preschools and childcare facilities to turn away families they’re perfectly equipped to serve for no other reason than an irrational bureaucratic requirement.”
Last December, a report by the Council for Strong America estimated that Arizona lost close to $5 billion annually in earnings, productivity, and revenue due to lack of adequate childcare. Over half of responding parents said they were late for work, leaving work early, missing days of work, or low in their productivity at work due to their childcare struggles.
Nearly 20 percent reported having been let go or fired from their work related to those struggles.
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The Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) will give $25 gift cards to attendees of an LGBTQ+ “health equity” event on Tuesday.
Attendance was limited to 30 people, or $750 in gift cards. Attendees were required to be at least 18 years old, living in Pima County, and identifying as an LGBTQ+ community member.
ADHS partnered with the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation (SAAF) to host the event. SAAF confirmed with AZ Free News that there would be about 12 participants. Also helping facilitate the event was Lenartz Consulting — a company owned by Tracy Lenartz, a health planning consultant for ADHS. Recordings from these in-person listening sessions are anonymized and transferred to ADHS for review before being destroyed.
According to ADHS, referencing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “health equity” is defined as the fair and just opportunity for all to achieve the highest level of health. Equity is also at the center of the CDC’s 10 Essential Public Health Services framework, unchanged for 25 years until September 2020 — less than four months after the death of George Floyd, which spurred months of Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots and social justice campaigns across state and local governments.
“To achieve equity, the Essential Public Health Services actively promote policies, systems, and overall community conditions that enable optimal health for all and seek to remove systemic and structural barriers that have resulted in health inequities,” stated the CDC. “Such barriers include poverty, racism, gender discrimination, ableism, and other forms of oppression. Everyone should have a fair and just opportunity to achieve optimal health and well-being.”
ADHS adopted an “equity focus” as one of its core values, and added “advancing health equity” to their strategic map issued last year.
The map noted that “equity focused” meant that ADHS valued and respected diverse life differences. In order to understand its equity focus, ADHS suggested resources for the community such as training modules on social determinants of health and how health inequity is rooted in “powerlessness.”
In honor of #NationalMinorityHealthMonth, ADHS is proud to highlight our Office of Health Equity and their work to reduce health disparities in Arizona by supporting communities of color. Thank you for all that you do! pic.twitter.com/8Luh8CDtvE
The ADHS definition of social determinants of health suggests that personal behaviors and clinical care are only a minor part of what determines one’s health. The other, greater factors would be social, economic, and environmental conditions: policies, programs, systems, communities such as transportation options, segregation, housing, discrimination, crime, and poor quality of education.
The concept of powerlessness referenced by ADHS comes from institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO), which theorizes that a lack of social and institutional power inequities results in poorer health in the poor, minorities, and women. The WHO suggested that political interventions must be implemented in order to reverse negative health trends: legal reform, or changes in economic or social relationships.
ADHS also participates in an annual Arizona Health Equity Conference which tackles these issues. This year, they will be joined by Arizona State University (ASU) Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center, Arizona Alliance For Community Health Centers, A.T. Still University, Dignity Health, Esperanca, Equality Health, FSL, Honor Health, Mayo Clinic, Mercy Care, and the University of Arizona (UArizona) Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.
After more than two years, Arizona is finally out from under the COVID-19 Declaration of Emergency ordered by Gov. Doug Ducey on March 11, 2020.
“Today I am terminating the state’s COVID-19 State of Emergency. Thanks to the hard work of many — health care workers, businesses, public and private sector employees — COVID-19 is no longer an emergency in Arizona,” Ducey said Wednesday of his action which takes effect immediately.
The Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) reports that suspected COVID-19 cases now represent less than 1.5 percent of emergency room visits and hospital admissions. Ducey noted that while COVID-19 is not gone, the availability of the vaccine and other measures has allowed Arizonans to be better positioned to manage and mitigate it.
“COVID-19 challenged us in ways we never could’ve imagined. No corner of our state – no corner of our country or the world – was spared,” he said. “But we met that challenge head on by prioritizing lives, livelihoods and individual liberties. The time is right to move forward.”
ADHS’s website shows 29,268 death in Arizona attributed to COVID-19 since the pandemic started in 2020. Less than 400 COVID deaths were reported across the state in the last week.
Dr. Richard Carmona, who is serving as Ducey’s special advisor for public health preparedness, expressed confidence Wednesday that Arizona is prepared to address an expected future increase in cases due to virus mutations.
“We now have the experience and tools in place to address what may be to come while public health continues doing what we do best: infectious disease surveillance, prevention, and control,” Carmona said.
The termination of the public health state of emergency does not mean the end to various tracking of COVID-19 cases. According to ADHS, information about immunizations, deaths, hospitalizations, and lab results will continue to be gathered.
Ducey’s announcement allows each of the state’s 15 counties to continue any emergency declarations they currently have in place. The same is true for any cities and towns.
In response, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors formally ended the county’s own emergency declaration from March 2020. That won’t stop the county from expending millions of dollars of American Rescue Plan Act funds to address the ongoing economic impact COVID-19 has had on Maricopa County residents, businesses, and schools.
Absent from the Arizona Department of Health (ADHS) report last week that unvaccinated individuals were 31.1 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than their vaccinated peers were any comorbidities. ADHS also claimed that the unvaccinated were nearly five times as likely to test positive for COVID-19. ADHS disclosed that they omitted length of time since vaccination and other demographics in addition to underlying conditions.
In similar sample studies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a study indicating that comorbidities exacerbated the effects of the virus — even for the vaccinated. In the study released last week, the CDC found that 78 percent of the 36 vaccinated individuals who died had four or more comorbidities. All of the nearly 200 people who experienced a severe outcome from COVID-19 had at least one comorbidity.
“Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020 [through] October 2021, a total of 2,246 (18.0 per 10,000 vaccinated persons) developed COVID-19 and 189 (1.5 per 10,000) had a severe outcome, including 36 who died (0.3 deaths per 10,000),” read the report.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky stirred controversy by remarking on the study to ABC on their show “Good Morning America.” Walensky cited the fact that the overwhelming majority of deaths from vaccinated individuals that contracted COVID-19 within the study had multiple comorbidities.
“The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with,” said Walensky.
In response to uproar over her comments, ABC updated their interview with Walensky to include an extended version in which she discussed the data within the context of the study.
One major comorbidity shared by nearly two-thirds of the nation is excess weight: approximately 42 percent of adults are obese, with another 30 percent overweight. The CDC warned that obesity increases the likelihood of serious illness from COVID-19.
The ADHS report preceded this week’s major developments on the pandemic that appeared to have turned the tide on the nation’s approach to perceiving and responding to COVID-19.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) struck down President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate requiring employers with 100 or more employees to mandate the vaccine or weekly testing.
Prior to that, major news outlets such as the Associated Press and The Atlanticupdated their internal guidance on COVID-19 coverage to eradicate mention of case numbers. The outlets asserted that the case counts weren’t high enough because they relied on reportable cases by health authorities, not at-home tests or those that don’t get tested because they’re asymptomatic.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
