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Mississippi has the worst HPV vaccine uptake in the nation, and women are dying of preventable cancer

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The vaccine with the poorest track record in the U.S. has its worst uptake in Mississippi. Nearly 20 years after the first FDA-approved HPV vaccine was introduced to the public, Mississippi has one of the highest rates of cervical cancer deaths in the country.

The Human Papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccine protects against the nine most common and high-risk strains of the virus that cause cancers and genital warts in both males and females. Despite its efficacy, it has one of the lowest immunization records of recommended vaccines in the country, with a national average of only 63% of teens up to date on their two-dose vaccine.

In Mississippi, only 39% of teens are up to date on immunization. Practitioners say the biggest barriers to immunization against the virus are the stigma around how the virus is thought to be transmitted and misunderstanding about who the vaccine is for.

Dr. Anita Henderson, pediatrician at Hattiesburg Clinic and the former president of the Mississippi chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that it has taken time for the public to understand that the vaccine is not simply preventing a sexually transmitted disease.

“That is not what the HPV vaccine was developed for – it was developed to prevent cancers,” Henderson said. “And unfortunately, I think the misinformation around this vaccine has played a significant role in its poor uptake.”

In fact, despite the longstanding definition of HPV as a “sexually transmitted disease,” research is now bringing to light instances of non-sexual contact transmission. Some pediatricians are seeing HPV transmission from mother to baby during birth.

“We have had several babies with HPV in their airways causing stridor and difficulty breathing,” Henderson said. “The pediatric ENT made the diagnosis of HPV warts in the airway with diagnosis and treatment via upper airway endoscopy.”

Dr. Anita Henderson, a pediatrician at The Pediatric Clinic, speaks in support of Senate Bill 2212 during a press conference at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, February 22, 2023. The bill would extend postpartum coverage from two months to one year. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

For parents who associate the virus with sexual behavior, it can be confusing why practitioners recommend the vaccine at such a young age. But the impact of age on efficacy of the vaccine is also misunderstood.

“The vaccine is about 90% effective against cervical cancer when given at the age of 12 or 13, it is about 60% effective if given at the age of 14 to 16, and it is about 30 or 35% effective if given at the age of 16 to 18,” Henderson explained.

According to Henderson, that has to do not only with the fact that earlier immunization increases one’s chances of vaccinating prior to exposure, but also with the fact that “when you’re younger, your immune system does a better job of developing the appropriate antibodies to the vaccine.”

The HPV vaccine has been an outlier in childhood vaccines in Mississippi. The state has been at the forefront of childhood immunization for years, often ranking first for vaccination in young children – a title that only now could be challenged as Mississippi joined other states in allowing religious exemption for childhood vaccination last month.

The widespread association of the HPV vaccine with sexual activity is part of what makes HPV vaccine hesitancy so unique and pervasive in the state, explained the Mississippi HPV Roundtable Coordinator Amy Ellis.

The Mississippi HPV Roundtable works to increase HPV vaccination rates by offering online resources for parents and coordinating health initiatives across the state. Member organizations come from a diversity of sectors including academia and state and local agencies.

“If it was a vaccine to prevent any other type of cancer that wasn’t sexually transmitted, I don’t think it would be this controversial,” Ellis said.

And while some parents might fear that the vaccine encourages sexual behavior, studies show there is no evidence to support that claim.

“A misconception that some parents have is that if their kids get the HPV vaccine, that that is going to give them permission to have sex, and that has just not proven to be the case,” Ellis continued. “Kids don’t even know what vaccine they’re getting.”

While the state has the worst HPV vaccine rates, there are a number of Mississippi initiatives to change that statistic that Ellis is excited to see play out. One of the most successful so far, she said, is the college campus initiative, that aims to inform college students who never received the vaccine, for whatever reason, about the HPV virus and vaccine.

“Ole Miss is taking the lead on that and doing an amazing job,” Ellis said, “educating students about the vaccine, and then if they want to get it, they can go get it at a clinic on site.”

The Mississippi Board of Dental Examiners also ruled in April 2021 to allow licensed dentists in the state to administer the vaccine, according to the board minutes. Currently, there are no dentists who have completed the process to store and administer the vaccine on site, but the policy is in place for that to happen in the future.

“We are ahead of the game there,” Ellis said. “There are not many states that have dentists that are able to give the vaccine, so that is exciting for Mississippi.”

Cervical cancer is a more known example of HPV-related cancer because there are so many studies and an abundance of data and marketing highlighting the connection to the HPV virus. But Tara Smith, an epidemiologist and professor at Kent State University College of Public Health whose research is rooted in science denial and vaccine hesitancy, noted there are also several debilitating cancers for males.

HPV can cause penile, anal and oral cancers in men, the last of which has been on the rise in recent years.

“I don’t think some people have gotten past the idea that the only reason to get it for boys is to protect their female partners,” Smith said. “I think that that education campaign has been kind of lacking.”

Smith also said that one of the biggest causes of this miseducation is the reluctance to talk about these topics – both on the part of parents and practitioners.

“I think there is a lot of misunderstanding that if teens behave in a manner that the parents would like them to, as far as abstaining, that that will protect them, which unfortunately, it really doesn’t,” she explained.

Even teens who abstain from intercourse might end up engaging in other forms of sexual activity, all of which can transmit the virus. For those who do abstain entirely, Smith said, “you still don’t know who they’re going to marry.”

What makes these conversations even more trying for parents, Smith explained, is that they “can sometimes bring up more uncomfortable topics about things like rape and sexual assault, where your child may not be protected, and it may not be their choice to engage in sexual activity.”

But for Smith, there is nothing more important than setting up the dialogue between parents and practitioners as early as age 9, which is the youngest age the HPV vaccine can be administered.

“We need to be talking about it, and talking about it earlier,” she said. “When you get to the time when kids are recommended for the vaccine, which is generally around 12 or so, parents are starting to think about things like their child growing up, and bringing in that conversation about sex is sometimes difficult. So I really think it’s about the dialogue, and starting early, and not being afraid to talk about these things.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-03 13:02:00

Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting. 

Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.

The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID. 

The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots. 

The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion. 

Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor. 

England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking. 

The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber. 

England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.

“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said. 

Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting. 

To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice. 

Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures. 

Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.  

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.   

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.” 

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature. 

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube. 

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:13:00

The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.

Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.

The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend. 

House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session. 

“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.” 

But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.

The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.

The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass. 

Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget. 

“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said. 

The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.

But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.

The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.

The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session. 

But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget. 

On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.

If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later. 

“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said. 

If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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