The infected individual is a Mississippi resident and the infection was confirmed at the Mississippi State Department of Health Public Health Laboratory. The health department said that it is currently trying to identify people who may have encountered the infected person.
Over the past few weeks, the Monkeypox virus has spread to dozens of countries and infected thousands. As of July 22, there were nearly 2,900 Monkeypox cases nationally, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. Nearly all infections outside Africa have occurred among men who have sex with men.
Mississippi was one of the few remaining states with no reported cases before Monday. MSDH has received a limited number of doses of a Monkeypox vaccine that the department says will be used to treat individuals the department identifies who have been exposed to Monkeypox.
The monkeypox virus, which is part of the same family of viruses as smallpox, has not caused any deaths yet, but does produce painful symptoms.
Symptoms of monkeypox can include: Fever, headache, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion. Infected persons often experience a rash that looks like pimples, or blisters that appear on many parts of the body. The illness typically lasts for two to four weeks.
Transmission often occurs through close skin-to-skin contact with an infected person. Airborne transmission also occurs during prolonged close contact with an infected person.
The World Health Organization declared Monkeypox a global public health emergency on June 23, the first time it has taken this step since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Monkeypox, COVID-19 and polio are the only diseases that have this designation.
Caden LeMieux smiles on the day he was discharged from UMMC. He left for Houston the next day.
Caden LeMieux is lying in a bed at Hermann Memorial Hospital in Houston, Texas, more than 500 miles away from his home, his mother and the majority of his friends and family in Neshoba County.
He’s 450 miles from the doctors and nurses at the University of Mississippi Medical Center he’s been seeing for more than a year for primary sclerosing cholangitis, a serious and long-term liver disease that has been treated at Mississippi’s only organ transplant center.
The 28-year-old was admitted to UMMC July 7 following excruciating stomach pain and high levels of bilirubin, which caused his skin and eyes to turn yellow. LeMieux, who is 6’2, usually weighs somewhere in the 130-pound range, but weight kept coming off.
He was told he was in active liver failure and needed a transplant imminently. But UMMC couldn’t do it, his doctor said. The reason: the hospital’s ongoing contract dispute with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi, which left the state’s largest hospital out of network with its largest private insurer since April 1.
While the two parties are currently in mediation, there is no resolution in sight.
“They (the UMMC doctors and nurses) tried their best to find a loophole around it … the best they could,” said LeMieux, who has Blue Cross through his stepmother’s Texas plan. “They couldn’t come up with anything.”
LeMieux’s mother Cristi Montgomery described the difficulty of that moment.
“I tell you, they were teary-eyed because they knew it wasn’t fair,” Montgomery said of the doctors and nurses who’d been taking care of LeMieux at UMMC.
Caden LeMieux at his youngest brother’s graduation in May 2022. Credit: Courtesy of Cristi Montgomery
“I really didn’t want to leave (UMMC),” LeMieux said on Monday, a day after undergoing a procedure to drain fluid from his lungs to allow him to breathe more easily. “It’s been a lot of nights I’ve gotten overwhelmed.”
Neither UMMC nor Blue Cross responded to requests for comment for this story by the time of publication.
Montgomery said the dispute between UMMC and Blue Cross has forced her son out of his comfort zone in a trying time.
“You’re having to meet people that you’re not comfortable with, establish new relationships — we ain’t got time for that. We’re sick enough, don’t take us out of our comfort zone,” said Montgomery.
UMMC and Blue Cross are butting heads over reimbursement rates and the insurance company’s quality care plan. UMMC, the state’s only academic medical center and safety net hospital, is asking Blue Cross for substantial increases in its reimbursement rates. Blue Cross officials say this is unreasonable and would necessitate an increase in members’ premiums.
Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney has issued calls for the two parties to come to an agreement to no avail. He recently informed Blue Cross his department will be conducting a target market conduct examination of the insurer to determine whether it is compliant with the state’s network adequacy regulations, which require insurers to provide adequate in-network care to customers.
LeMieux made the nine-hour drive to Houston just over a week ago. His mother drove him from Jackson to Baton Rouge, where his father, who lives in Houston, met them. He finished out the ride with his dad and was back in the hospital the next day.
LeMieux was fortunately still considered an active patient at Hermann Memorial Hospital after living there with his father several years ago. His family thought he would only be in the Houston hospital temporarily and then return to his father’s house to wait for a liver to become available. Doctors have since decided he’s too sick to leave, and he will have to stay in the hospital until his transplant.
Until then, he and his loved ones play a waiting game. He will have to spend an additional 10 days in the hospital after receiving the transplant — assuming there are no complications — and then will have to remain in the Houston area for at least a year. His transplant follow-up care will include twice-weekly clinic visits with the goal of eventually reducing the frequency.
But LeMieux, Montgomery, and Colville LeMieux, Caden’s father, aren’t looking that far ahead yet. They’re focused on the immediate situation. They feel lucky to have the support and prayers of their community, Montgomery said.
But they can’t help but wonder.
“I asked the hospital, ‘What if his daddy hadn’t lived there? We would have to go live in Houston or go to UAB or Ochsner’s?’ Of course you want to do what’s best for your kids, but let’s be real, we own our own businesses, we don’t have any vacation time, we can’t just take off,” said Montgomery, who runs a bakery in Philadelphia with her husband.
Colville LeMieux, Caden’s father, had a similar take: “I don’t know what we would’ve done if we hadn’t had him under care here at a Houston doctor also. What is a person supposed to do?”
On Monday, Montgomery started the drive to Houston. She doesn’t know how long she’ll be there or how her bakery in Neshoba County will stay afloat in the coming weeks and months. But she does know she needs to be with her son.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Either you trust God or you don’t,’ but that’s all we have is to trust and believe and take it one day at a time. When Caden’s nine hours away and he sends you a message that says, ‘I’m scared,’ and then calls and he’s crying …” she trailed off.
“It’s just a lot. But you still do what you have to do.”
Barry Lyons, the caboose of the athletic Lyons brothers of Biloxi, made the Big Leagues as a catcher for the Mets in 1986.
Editor’s note: On July 30, the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame inducts its Class of 2022. What follows is Part V of a series detailing the achievements of the eight inductees, today featuring World Series champion Barry Lyons.
When Barry Lyons made the Major Leagues as a New York Mets catcher in 1986, naturally he felt as if he represented his beloved hometown of Biloxi and his treasured alma mater Delta State. But there were people even more dear to his heart Lyons was representing.
Says Lyons, “What brought so much joy to me was when I put on that Mets uniform was I felt like I was putting it on for the entire Lyons family, my father and my mother and my three older brothers. When I put on that New York Mets uniform, I was representing all of them.”
Rick Cleveland
There’s a story behind the story there. Barry’s father, Kenny Lyons Sr., was a baseball man. He had played in high school before serving in the U.S. Navy.
Kenny Sr. never went to college. He became mail deliverer and then coached all four of his sons in youth baseball. As it turned out all four sons were standout athletes, each with professional potential.
“I was the caboose,” Barry Lyons says. “All my brothers had the ability to make the Big Leagues. Because of injuries and bad luck and whatever for my brothers, I was the one who finally made it. That meant so much to me.”
Kenny Lyons Jr., the oldest of the sons, might have been the most gifted. A football and baseball star in high school, Kenny seemed well on his way to being the next Archie Manning at Ole Miss before a shoulder separation and then a gruesome knee injury changed that.
Here’s how good Kenny Lyons Jr. was in baseball: Because he was a quarterback competing for the job as starter, he didn’t play baseball until his fourth year at Ole Miss after the injuries. And still, he hit .298 with power and was one of the Rebels’ best players.
Next behind Kenny came Tommy Lyons, a hard-throwing pitcher drafted out of high school by the Cleveland Indians. “Tommy had an incredible arm,” Barry says. “They weren’t using the radar guns back then, but I’ve seen a lot of hard throwers in my day and Tommy was right at the top.”
The Indians badly wanted Tommy Lyons, but Kenny Lyons Sr., who never went to college, insisted all his sons to have a college education. Tommy followed Kenny to Ole Miss, but injuries to his pitching arm curtailed his carer.
Pat Lyons, the third son born to Kenneth and Germaine Lyons, was another pitcher who doubled as an offensive lineman in football. He played both sports in high school and for Gulf Coast Community College, eventually earning a scholarship to Morehead State in Kentucky. A knee injury ended Pat’s athletic career.
Then came Barry, a superb football offensive lineman and baseball catcher. Barry first went to Delta State on a football scholarship, with the agreement he could also play baseball. Once Boo Ferriss, the Delta State baseball coach, saw Barry Lyons catch and hit, he offered him a full baseball scholarship. Barry, who liked football, loved baseball and adored Boo Ferriss, went the baseball route becoming one of Delta State’s all-time greats and making All-Gulf South Conference all four seasons. He helped the Statesmen to the Division II World Series as a senior. Back then, Delta State played about half its games against Division I teams and regularly defeated teams such as Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Southern Miss and Alabama.
Drafted by the Mets, Barry Lyons quickly moved through the various minor league levels, making the biggest splash for the Class AA Jackson Mets at Smith-Wills Stadium, where he was one of the most productive players in the history of that franchise. He led the ’85 Jackson Mets to the Texas League championship. He hit .308, knocked in 108 runs and was named the New York Mets’ Minor League Player of the Year. Next stop: New York and Shea Stadium, and it didn’t take long.
Barry and Julie Lyons at Barry Lyons Day in 2015 at MGM Park.
Lyons won a job with the parent club in spring training the next spring. When the New York Mets played their last exhibition game against the Jackson Mets at Smith-Wills, Lyons caught the game, got the biggest cheers and got a hit as well. Those New York Mets went on to win the World Series, and Barry Lyons got a World Series ring, later lost to Hurricane Katrina. Making it all the more memorable for Lyons: The Mets issued him jersey No. 33, the jersey number of Ferriss, his Delta State coach and Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer.
Lyons wound up playing 10 seasons in professional baseball and played for four different Major League teams. His baseball life continued with minor league coaching and managing jobs and a several years-long quest to bring professional baseball to the Gulf Coast and his home town of Biloxi.
But Barry Lyons has endured more than his share of misfortune, including losing a house and belongings to Katrina, the death of Pat Lyons, the brother closest to him in age, his own bout with alcoholism and drug abuse, and a divorce.
Through the grace of God and his wife, the former Julie Pinson, Lyons says, he has turned his life around. He has realized his dream of helping bring professional baseball to his hometown and serves the Class AA Biloxi Shuckers as the team’s paid ambassador, representing the team in the community and “doing anything and everything I can to raise the profile of my hometown’s professional baseball team.”
For Lyons, it’s a dream come true in a life of many baseball dreams that came true.
•••
The 2022 Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Induction Class includes Tyler, golfer/golf commentator Jim Gallagher, football great Eric Moulds, world swimming champion Maggie Bowen-Hanna, basketball coach Kermit Davis, Sr., baseball standouts Barry Lyons and David Dellucci, and football coach Willis Wright.
Mississippi Today’s political team discusses an important week that will officially kick off the anticipated 2023 statewide and legislative election cycle.
Mississippi Today journalists won numerous honors in the 2022 Society of Professional Journalists’ Green Eyeshade Awards, created to recognize “the very best journalism in the southeastern United States.”
In total, nine Mississippi Today journalists won or placed in categories against the Southeast’s digital news outlets, featuring reporting published in the 2021 calendar year.
Six Mississippi Today journalists took home top honors, earning first place in several categories:
Reporters Will Stribling, Julia James, Geoff Pender and Bobby Harrison collectively won first place in the “Deadline Reporting” category for their thorough coverage of Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban going before U.S. Supreme Court.
Sports columnist Rick Cleveland won first place in the “Sports Reporting” category for his series on the Greenville Christian football team’s 2021 success.
Other Mississippi Today journalists placed in several other Green Eyeshade Awards categories:
Reporter Bobby Harrison placed third in the “Serious Commentary” category for a collection of political analyses published in 2021.
Sports columnist Rick Cleveland placed second in the “Sports Commentary” category for his column about Rusty Thoms and the Mississippi State baseball winning trip to Omaha in 2021.
Economy & jobs reporter Sara DiNatale and photojournalist Vickie King placed third in the “Business Reporting” category for their piece on how Mississippians were affected by the $300 unemployment check ending.
To see a full measure of the impact our journalists continue to have on Mississippi, read our 2022 Impact Report.
Bob Tyler as Mississippi State head coach in 1974 when the Bulldogs finished 9-3.
Editor’s note: On July 30, the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame inducts its Class of 2022. What follows is Part IV of a series detailing the achievements of the eight inductees, today featuring coaching legend Bob Tyler.
Soon-to-be Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer Bob Tyler gained his most fame as the program-reviving head football coach at Mississippi State in the 1970s, but some older experts believe Tyler might have been the state’s greatest high school football coach.
Mac Barnes, who qualifies as an expert having won more 333 games himself as a high school coach, is one of those. Barnes played one season for Tyler at Meridian High School.
Rick Cleveland
“In my opinion, Coach Tyler earned Hall of Fame status before he ever became a college coach,” Barnes said. “He turned Mississippi high school football upside down. He really did change the landscape. He showed everybody how it could be done.”
What Tyler did was win. He spent his last three years (1965-67) as a high school coach at Meridian. His Wildcats for those three seasons won 38 games, lost zero and tied one. Nobody’s perfect.
While 99% of Mississippi high school teams in that era ran the ball 90% of the time, Tyler’s Meridian teams threw it all over the field.
Said Barnes, “Nobody could stop us. Coach Tyler was light years ahead of everyone else in terms of offensive scheme and preparation. He was the smartest coach around.”
Barnes went on, “You know in high school, there’s no draft and you don’t recruit or you’re not supposed to. You have to play with the guys you have. Coach Tyler didn’t have just his system and make his players adjust to that. He adjusted his coaching style to the players he had.
“At Meridian, we had guys who could throw it and catch it, so that’s what we did.”
The only blemish on Meridian’s record over three seasons was a tie with Columbus in 1967. Said Barnes, “They left the field slapping each other on the back, celebrating. We left the field crying.”
Barnes says he used many lessons he learned from Tyler to become the head football coach at Meridian at the age of 26 and to continue coaching and winning in high school football for the next 40 years. “What I saw with Coach Tyler was the influence he had on a community, on his players and his coaches,” Barnes says. “I saw the love he had for his players and how he treated them. This was back at a time when most high school coaches wouldn’t let their players have water and had them taking salt tablets before every practice and game. He changed all that. In many ways, he changed the way high school football was coached in Mississippi.”
Tyler had a lasting influence on his players, even one he coached for only one game. That player’s name: Archie Manning. Tyler coached Manning in the 1967 Mississippi High School All-Star Game after Manning had coached tiny Drew High School to a 5-5 record his senior year.
Archie Manning, 1966.
Tyler’s Meridian High quarterback, Bob White, was also a quarterback for the North team in that game. Manning didn’t know how much he would even get to play, but said, “I was excited anyway because I knew we were going to throw the ball. Plus, even though Bob (Tyler) had his quarterback there, he treated me great.”
For his part, Tyler had not heard of Manning before he helped select the roster for the team, but he got a call from Ole Miss coach John Vaught asking him to please consider choosing Manning. Said Tyler, “When Coach Vaught asked you to do something back then, you just did it.”
Long story short: White, a high school All-American, who had also signed with Ole Miss, started the game but suffered a career-altering knee injury in the first quarter. Manning came off the bench and threw for four touchdowns and ran for another in the North’s 57-33 victory.
Manning and Tyler have been friends ever since. In 2017, 50 years after the memorable all-star game, the North team held a reunion at Millsaps where they had stayed and practiced the week of the game. Says Manning, “We had a blast. I think Bob had more fun than anyone.”
Vaught created a position of wide receiver coach at Ole Miss for the 1968 team. He hired Tyler to fill it. Said Manning, “I thought Bob really improved us at that position. We had great ones, you know: Floyd Franks, Vernon Studdard and Buddy Jones.”
Tyler moved to Alabama to coach for Bear Bryant in 1971. That Bama team won 11 games and the SEC Championship. Then, Tyler spent the 1972 season as offensive coordinator at Mississippi State before becoming the head coach. His 1974 Bulldogs are fondly remembered by State fans. State finished 9-3, trounced Ole Miss in the Egg Bowl and then beat North Carolina in the Sun Bowl.
Later on, Tyler also coached at North Texas and at Millsaps, where his 2000 Millsaps Majors defeated Mississippi College 20-19 in the first-ever Mississippi Backyard Brawl.
Tyler, who turned 90 on July 4, has long since retired and is living in Water Valley where he was born and where he was hired for his first high school coaching job in 1957 – the beginning of career that saw him when 95 games while losing only 28 as a game-changing high school coach.
•••
The 2022 Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Induction Class includes Tyler, golfer/golf commentator Jim Gallagher, football great Eric Moulds, world swimming champion Maggie Bowen-Hanna, basketball coach Kermit Davis, Sr., baseball standouts Barry Lyons and David Dellucci, and football coach Willis Wright.
Late in the 2021 session, legislative leaders set a revenue estimate of $5.93 billion. That estimate represented the amount of revenue the state was expected to collect in the upcoming fiscal year and the amount anticipated to be available to fund the budget.
That fiscal year ended on June 30, and the state in reality — based on early numbers —collected $7.38 billion or about $1.46 billion more than the estimate set way back at the end of the legislative session in April 2021. In other words, lawmakers budgeted based on expected revenue of $5.94 billion, but the state collected $7.38 billion instead, resulting in the surplus.
According to data compiled by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee, revenue collections for the fiscal year that began on July 1, 2021, and ended on June 30 increased 9.5% year over year. That spike in revenue collections comes on top of an increase of a record-breaking 15.9% for the prior fiscal year. It is important to note that in most fiscal years growth in revenue collections is 3% or less.
In terms of state revenue collections, these are truly historic times. The only time in recent memory when the state experienced similar growth was in the 1990s with the start of casino gambling and all the construction related to the new industry and in the 2000s in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the construction that ensued after the Gulf Coast was pummeled. The above average growth for the 1990s lasted for much of the decade while the growth after Katrina was more short-lived, lasting only a couple of years.
Time will tell how long the current revenue growth spurt lasts, but the past two-year period is unprecedented even when compared to what occurred during the casino boon and what happened after Katrina.
During the past fiscal year, sales tax revenue grew 13.8% or $309.3 million while income tax revenue inceased $273.4 million or 12.3%.
In other categories for the just completed fiscal year:
Oil and gas severance taxes grew $15.5 million or 85%.
Use tax collections increased $20.2 million or 5%.
Casino tax revenue grew $15.4 million or 10%.
Corporate tax collections increased $9.4 million or 1.1%.
Revenue from the tax on cigarettes, beer and liquor decreased $10.9 million or 3.8%
The staff of the Legislative Budget Committee, which tracks state revenue, has long said that the final surplus tally is not known annually until sometime in August when the books are closed on the prior fiscal year. But based on the early numbers, the surplus — somewhere around $1.4 billion — will be the largest recorded at the end of a fiscal year.
The Legislature will most likely decide what to do with those surplus funds during the upcoming legislative session beginning in January. The Legislature entered the 2022 session with about $1.1 billion in surplus funds and spent $956 million of those funds on projects and on specific needs for state agencies, leaving about $150 million in what is known as the capital expense fund.
The Legislature opted to spend the funds on literally hundreds of projects, such as building and renovation projects on various governmental properties and on tourism projects. In the past when such gargantuan surpluses did not exist, the Legislature paid for such projects by issuing long-term debt.
After an initial drop in state tax collections in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, revenue soared and has continued to soar. Threats of a national recession have not slowed Mississippi’s revenue collections.
Mississippi is not unique. Federal stimulus funds provided to deal with the coronavirus have helped spur tax collections in nearly every state. In addition, increased wages have provided the states more revenue from the taxes levied on income. And inflation also has provided states more revenue — especially for states more reliant on the sales tax such as Mississippi.
After all, a 7% sales tax on groceries now generates more revenue for the state since groceries cost more thanks to inflation. The same can be said for car sales and for just about every other retail item impacted by inflation.
In the 2021 session, legislators did not consider the impact of inflation when budgeting. Most agencies received small increases in funding or no increase at all other than for specified purposes. But in reality, gas and various other items that schools and state agencies must purchase have increased in cost thanks to inflation. If the Legislature does not provide funds for those increased costs during the 2023 session, many schools and other state agencies could have difficulty making ends meet.
Legislators have no excuse not to fund those inflationary needs. No doubt, the Legislature will have the surplus funds needed to do so.
