Those who identify as anything other than white or African-American increased from 3.85% to 7.36%. And areas with traditionally significant African-American populations, like the Delta, have decreased as much as 12% in the last 10 years.
During a series of hearings to get the public’s input before redistricting starts next year, a major concern was ensuring the growth of Black political representation in the state. As such, legislators have a “puzzle” to solve, as Harrison says, amidst the Black populace’s decline.
View our map illustrating the percentage shift in non-white populations by district between 2010 and 2020:
As director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky is constantly making critical decisions about public health in the United States.
Walensky recently sat down with reporters to answer questions about the challenges of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic at the national level. This Q&A was conducted during the 2021 Health Coverage Fellowship, which Mississippi Today health care reporter Will Stribling participated in.
Editor’s note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Reporter: How did the U.S. get to the point where we’ve fallen behind on rapid antigen testing to the point where there are shortages on pharmacy shelves? What needs to be done on the testing front?
Walensky: I think we have been doing a lot of testing.I think the way that we are using testing is evolving, not only with the times of how testing is being utilized, but also with the new tests that are becoming available. That evolution, I think, is that appropriate natural evolution and there are many different strategies for testing available.
Mississippi Today: What has the CDC learned throughout this pandemic about effectively communicating with the public? I know there’s been a lot of criticism directed your way, especially around some messaging that was perceived to be bungled near the beginning of the pandemic. What have y’all learned on that front?
Walensky: There are a lot of lessons to be learned here. So much of what we have to do is communicate and I’m learning that in this position as well. I think part of the challenge that we have had is, and I like this analogy, people look at the weather every day to see whether they should bring an umbrella. But if the science changes (related to the pandemic), they’re not necessarily willing to be as flexible as today I need my raincoat or umbrella.
There was this moment. I remember it well. It was a Friday evening, when I saw the data from Provincetown that essentially showed that if you had a breakthrough infection with the Delta variant that you could transmit the disease to others. We hadn’t seen that from breakthrough infections yet. We all saw the data and our jaws kind of dropped. The data were going to be published about a week later, which in publication land, is extraordinarily fast. And then the question was when and how do we communicate this to others? We knew we essentially needed to put masks back on vaccinated people, at least in this moment. And the question in my mind was, do we wait until the paper comes out in a week? Or do we not and say, the data is forthcoming, it’ll be out shortly, I made the decision that we need to do this so that the public is aware, but while recognizing that everybody wanted to see the data.
And I felt that it was important that parents know that they might bring disease home to their own vaccinated kids, that people might bring disease home to their immunocompromised family members. I tell that story, because I am fully aware that I’m making decisions where I will be criticized, regardless of what I do. In those situations, and really in all situations, I put my head down, and I say, ‘what’s the right thing for public health? What’s the right thing for health in the country?’ And that’s what I do. And then you pick up the pieces wherever they land. You have to communicate those decisions well, you have to get out there, you can’t be afraid to own your decisions. And I haven’t been.
Reporter: We’ve heard from state officials and local officials frustration that they’ve had with the CDC about a lack of data, or in some cases, they felt that they were kind of going it alone. So can you speak a little bit to what the biggest challenges that you see that might be driving some of these concerns that we’re seeing in our own work, and that local states are?
Walensky: I came in a year into this, and the public health infrastructure in the country was frail to begin with. Just to give you a sense of where our public health infrastructure is in this country, between 2010-2021 we have had H1N1, we have had Zika, we’ve had Ebola and we’ve now had COVID-19. And in that decade, this country lost 60,000 public health jobs. So we started really frail. We started with an infrastructure where the data from public health could not communicate with the data from a health system. People were faxing in COVID tests. We just didn’t have the laboratory infrastructure, the data infrastructure, the data systems. Even the investment in data to this day is orders of magnitude literally, less than it would cost a single system to upgrade their electronic health record. So the resources that have been there have been thin, and we are doing our best to work with them.
Mississippi Today: You’ve talked about how the work of CDC is meant to be preventative care. But we hear all the time in America that we don’t have health care, we have sick care, and that is baked into the way that public health is funded. I’ve heard from our state health officer in Mississippi that when a crisis like Ebola or COVID-19 emerges, they get all of this money that is really chained to responding to that specific crisis. No funding is given for building better public health infrastructure so they can be better equipped to deal with future crises. You also can’t use an inconsistent block of funding like that to hire public health workers. So how do we reconcile this disconnect and fix these issues if we want to have a public health system that really is focused on preventing future crises from barreling out of control?
Walensky: I’ve been to the (U.S. Capitol) Hill eight times to testify and I spent a lot of time talking about longitudinal resources. We have a lot of resources now, but we don’t have educated public health workers to hire. And even if we did, we can’t hire on a two year budget. We need to hire on a five year or 10 year budget. This, I call it staccato funding, disaster to disaster does not create a pipeline of people who have secure jobs in public health. It doesn’t have community workforces who are from the communities they serve. You know, I say that if we had had public health workers in Chelsea, Massachusetts, who went to churches and did blood pressure screenings every week, then when it came time to do testing, when it came time to do vaccinations, it would have been easy, right? They would have had trusted people on the ground. We haven’t had that and we’ve never had it.
The other thing I will say is, we need disease agnostic resources. So much of our funding at CDC and to the public health departments is line item (meaning it’s restricted to work related to a specific disease). If we have a line item for every disease, how do we treat a community? What are the things that we do to improve health in a community? It’s a huge problem and I’m trying to sort of chisel away some of the line items so we can have disease agnostic, longitudinal funding.
Reporter: When is this pandemic going to end? What do you see as sort of the necessary factors to ending this?
Walensky: Well, I would say nobody really wants it over more than I do. That may not be entirely true, but I’m probably pretty high up there. This is not going to be a very satisfying answer, but I’ll give it to you anyway. I think a lot of it depends on human behavior. We have a lot of the science right now. We have vaccines. What we can’t really predict is human behavior, and human behavior in this pandemic hasn’t served us very well. We are battling with one another, and not battling with the common foe, which is the virus itself. We have 55% of people fully vaccinated, perhaps we have some more protection by some people who’ve been recently infected.
But with the Delta variant, our R0 (a mathematical term that indicates how contagious an infectious disease is) is eight or nine. That means we need a lot of a lot of protection in that community to not have disease. And the real challenge is that there are some communities that are really well vaccinated and really well protected. And then there are pockets of places that have very little protection. And the virus isn’t stupid, it’s going to go there. So really, what this depends on is how well we coalesce together as a humanity and a community to do the things that we need to do in those communities to get ourselves protected.
And his modus operandi on others’ proposals is to not communicate any issues he has beforehand, but spring them as a last-minute gotcha. Even his fellow Republican leaders have learned they’re more likely to find out what he thinks of their plans through his press conferences or social medial posts than from a phone call or meeting beforehand.
He’s done it again, this time with the Legislature’s medical marijuana proposal.
There’s been debate among his fellows of whether Reeves’ M.O. of last-minute decrees is more political strategy or procrastination. Exhibit A: He can’t seem to make his required political appointments to various boards by deadline to save his life.
And many a House chairman spent hours cooling their heels and sweating late-night budget deadlines during Reeves’ Senate tenure. They were waiting to see what last-minute havoc he would wreak on budgets that had otherwise been long agreed to. They soon learned that just because Reeves’ Senate chairmen or staffers agreed to something didn’t mean he would when he finally got around to looking at it.
Reeves, true to form, has thrown some last-minute wrenches into months of work on a medical marijuana program by Senate and House leaders. This is despite Reeves proclaiming for months that he would call lawmakers into special session to pass a medical marijuana bill once they had an agreement.
They reached an agreement. He doesn’t like it. Now what? He hasn’t said.
As a former handlebar-mustachioed House Ways and Means Chairman once said late one budget deadline night: “Tate works in mysterious ways.”
Reeves gave lawmakers a last-minute laundry list of things he didn’t like in the bill. Lawmakers said they conceded on many of the items. But one major sticking point is that Reeves thinks the proposal would give patients too much smokable pot. Legislative leaders counter that they are using a well-researched, industry-standard dosage amount and Reeves is being unreasonable.
They note that the Initiative 65 cannabis program voters approved — but the state Supreme Court shot down — would have allowed patients to have more marijuana flower than the legislative proposal.
Reeves also indicated at a press conference last week that he wants lawmakers to further reduce the amount of THC in Mississippi medical marijuana, something lawmakers said he hadn’t communicated to them. They noted Mississippi’s proposed program is already conservative and already has THC limits, which would make it the only medical cannabis program in the country to have such limits.
Prior to his last-minute edicts about the legislative proposal, Reeves’ only stated policy on medical marijuana was that he was against it (he once referred to supporters as “stoners.”) But he later said that since voters overwhelmingly approved it, he would call the Legislature into special session once they had an agreement, to abide by “the will of the voters.”
Reeves has sole authority to call lawmakers into a special session. He has pretty much zilch authority over what the Legislature passes, other than he can veto it after the fact. For that matter, even with an agreement among legislative leaders, the proposed bill can still be changed (or killed) in the legislative process. That’s just… the legislative process.
A Greenwood Commonwealth editorial last week stated: “Tate Reeves may be forgetting in which branch of government he now works. When it comes to medical marijuana, he’s been acting more like the lieutenant governor he used to be than the governor he is now.”
There is great public pressure for the state to reinstate voters’ will and create a medical marijuana program and a lot of those voters appear to be getting irritated as months drag on. Lawmakers certainly haven’t moved with lightning speed on it, but they have put in the work and reached what appears to be a workable consensus.
Is Reeves really prepared to shoulder the blame for further delays — or failure to have a special session at all — because he wants to call the shots on intricacies and issues that are not really up to him?
A Mississippi governor can have great sway and input on legislation, and many in the past have. But that’s typically been through close communication and cooperation with legislative leaders. And it usually requires working with them early in the process. Or, others have influenced legislation with their skills in communication and persuasion. They’ve gotten the public onboard and lobbying for policy, or “worked the floors” and persuaded rank-and-file lawmakers to back their proposals.
But that’s not Reeves’ M.O. He disposes and opposes more than he proposes.
Greenville Christian Head Coach Jon Reed McLendon says he cannot find teams willing to play his No. 1 ranked team in the state.
Greenville Christian, the tiny Delta academy ranked No. 1 ahead of much larger private and public schools in all of Mississippi high school football, didn’t play last Friday night and won’t play this Friday night.
It is not from a lack of trying.
“We’ve tried everything I know to find someone to play us,” Jon Reed McLendon, head coach of the Greenville Christian Saints, said Wednesday. “We’ve reached out to every team we could find that had an open date this Friday night. We would have traveled anywhere. We would have played here at home. We just wanted to play. We have had no takers.”
Over the course of the season, three teams have canceled games with the Saints, each citing small rosters, plagued with injuries, as the reason. That’s why, with playoffs nearing, Greenville Christian has played only seven games and has a 6-1 record on the field (8-1 counting forfeits).
The Saints’ only loss was to Collins Hill (Ga.), the No. 1 team in Georgia and a team ranked No. 7 in the country. Most impressively, Greenville Christian defeated defending Mississippi Class 6A champion and previously undefeated Oak Grove at Oak Grove in a hastily arranged game at mid-season. The Saints also own one-sided victories over much larger private schools Madison-Ridgeland Academy, Jackson Prep and Jackson Academy.
Rick Cleveland
The Saints, an all-Black team dominating Mississippi’s predominantly white private school league, have earned statewide acclaim and are on the verge of national notoriety. CBS News recently had a crew in Greenville to film a segment scheduled to air on CBS Morning one day next week. That will be nice, McLendon said, but his team would rather play ball.
“It’s just frustrating, really, really frustrating,” McLendon said. “These kids have worked so hard and continue to work so hard every day, every week and then they don’t have the opportunity to play on Friday night. There’s supposed to be a reward for all that hard work, but our guys are not getting that reward.”
Greenville Christian was originally scheduled to have played four home games by now. The Saints have played only one. They have one regular season game remaining, Oct. 22, against Delta Streets of Greenwood. The game is scheduled to be played at Greenville Christian. And, said McLendon, “The Delta Streets coaches have assured us they are going to come play.”
After that, the playoffs begin.
Southern Miss once had a football motto: “Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.” Greenville Christian has tried to adopt practically the same mantra. But here lately the Saints can’t find anyone who will play them, no matter where, and no matter when.
Two weeks ago, McLendon began searching far and wide to land an opponent for this Friday night. He thought for certain he had a foe in St. John’s College High School of Washington D.C., an undefeated, nationally-ranked team that plays in the strong D.C. Catholic league.
Greenville Christian was willing to make the 15-hour bus ride to play in return for a $10,000 guarantee to help offset the expensive trip. McLendon says the team even heard from potential donors around Mississippi who promised to help fund the trip.
“I thought it was going to happen,” McLendon coach. “The St. John’s coach seemed like he wanted it to happen. It would have been a really long trip, a really tough game, but we were ready to go. Our kids were excited.”
Then came the news late last Friday that St. John’s had decided not to play, that their coaches had decided they really needed the open date to prepare for a grueling slate of difficult upcoming league games.
“That was option one, but we already had feelers out with other schools,” McLendon said. “We contacted teams in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas, all over the place really.”
McLendon thought he had found another opponent in a private school in Clearwater, Fla., Again Greenville Christian would have had to travel, but the Saints were more than willing.
“The first indication we got from their coaches was that they really wanted to play,” McLendon said. That was over the weekend. The deal fell through Monday.
“Their coaches said their school was on fall break and after checking they learned several players already had made plans for college visits,” McLendon said.
A much more reasonable solution: Hartfield Academy of Flowood, a much larger private school team with an impressive 7-1 record, has an open date Friday night. McLendon reached out, to no avail. “I get it,” McLendon said. “They have Jackson Prep and MRA coming up the next two weeks. They probably don’t need another hard game, but we sure would have like to have played.”
McLendon thought he had two more possibilities with Memphis teams. Both decided not to play in the end.
“It’s tough, especially for our seniors and we’ve got 21 of them,” McLendon said. “This is their last year of high school football and they aren’t getting to finish it out like they wanted.”
The Saints still have the one last regular season game and then the playoffs. There is one more possibility. Greenville Christian almost surely will have a first-round bye in the playoffs. “So, we asked the state office if it would be OK for us to play one more regular season game that first week of the playoffs if we can find an opponent,” McLendon said. “They told us there is no rule against it. I don’t know if that’s what we’ll do or if that’s even what we should do, or if there is anyone out there who would play us. But we probably will explore it.
The Post-Secondary Board this week unanimously voted to recommend an overhaul of Mississippi’s financial aid programs that could completely change how the state helps students pay for college.
If adopted by the Legislature this upcoming session, low-income and Black students stand to lose thousands of dollars for college.
The program, called the “Mississippi One Grant,” was proposed Tuesday by a committee of eight financial aid directors at colleges and universities across the state.
It will replace Mississippi’s three current financial aid programs: the Mississippi Tuition Assistance Grant (MTAG), which awards between $500 and $1,000 a year; the Mississippi Eminent Scholars Grant (MESG), the state’s merit-based grant, and the Higher Education Legislative Plan for Needy Students (HELP) program, the state’s only need-based grant that covers all four years of college.
“We had a lot of conversations, we had multiple meetings, we ran hundreds of scenarios,” said Paul McKinney, the director of financial aid at Mississippi State University who headed up the committee, said when he introduced the program. “I’m very proud to announce that, at the end of the day, with what we presented, it was unanimous.”
The proposed program will award financial aid based on their need and merit. “Need” will be determined by a student’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), and “merit” by composite ACT score. The poorest students with the best ACT scores will receive the highest award of $4,500.
For the average low-income student who currently receives the Higher Education Legislative Plan for Needy Students (HELP) grant, that is a loss of more than $1,500 in financial aid. Students who receive HELP got an average award of $6,172 last year, according to the latest annual report from the Office of Student Financial Aid.
Eliminating the HELP grant — and not replacing it with a similar program — is going to make it much harder for low-income students to afford college in Mississippi, advocates for college access told Mississippi Today.
“It just breaks my heart,” said Ann Hendrick, the director of Get2College, a nonprofit that helps students complete the FAFSA. The HELP grant is “such a game-changer for students who didn’t think they could afford college.”
Notably, the program lacks input from students who rely on financial aid to go to college and their families. The committee did not reach out to those stakeholders for their thoughts.
“The way I see it is that we’ve got these individuals who spent their whole career doing financial aid awarding (on the committee), and they are also on the front lines with students and parents and they know the impact it’s gonna have … but point well taken, we never intended to pull in the public,” said Jim Turcotte, the chair of the Post-Secondary Board.
Despite the unanimous support from the committee and the board, advocates for college access are concerned about the policy.
On the whole, the Mississippi One Grant will result in more students being eligible for state financial aid. The committee estimated that about 4,500 more students will qualify for financial aid under the new program.
At the same time, students across the board will receive lower aid awards under the new program. The average student will receive $228 less than they would under the current system.
The average white student, however, will receive just $83 less than they would under the current system, according to the committee’s presentation. The average Black student will lose out on $689 of state financial aid.
Toren Ballard, the director of K-12 policy at Mississippi First, said that at scale, the new program amounts to “a massive transfer of resources from non-white students to white students.”
Under the new program, non-white students at four-year universities will lose approximately $1.1 million in state financial aid while white students will gain nearly $1.6 million, according to released by OSFA after the meeting.
“It’s like spreading the pie among more people, and cutting more even slices of each piece, rather than giving the largest ones to people who are more hungry,” Ballard told Mississippi Today.
Turcotte told Mississippi Today that this shift in resources was “not an intended outcome” of the new program. The committee didn’t “deliberately say, ‘let’s take money from this group and give it to that group,” he said. “We didn’t want to have a disparate impact on low-income students, white or Black.”
“There’s one pie and we can divide it up in various ways,” Turcotte said at the meeting. “We’re suggesting we want to help more students. There are winners and losers.”
At the meeting, the committee was asked whether gaps in funding created by the proposed program would lead to low-income students in Mississippi taking out student loans.
McKinney conceded that was a possibility. Student debt “gets a bum rap,” he said. “If used responsibly, it has a positive return. I can’t tell you how much more I made in my career because of student loans.”
The Office of Student Financial Aid, which works under the Post-Secondary Board, has warned for years that Mississippi’s financial aid programs — and the HELP grant in particular — were growing at an unsustainable rate.
As more and more students sought out and were awarded the HELP grant, the OSFA saw its budget balloon. Meanwhile, the funding from the state Legislature has not kept pace, leading OSFA’s director Jennifer Rogers to warn in 2019 the office had reached a “tipping point.”
At the Post-Secondary Board’s request, Rogers proposed an ambitious new program that same year. She recommended eliminating MTAG and MESG, and expanding the HELP grant. The rationale was simple: MTAG and MESG do not accomplish what the state created them to do, whereas study after study has shown the HELP grant is effective.
According to a study commissioned by NSPARC, about 75% of students who received HELP as a degree-seeking freshmen graduated in six years, compared to about 67% of students who were eligible for HELP but did not receive it.
But the Legislature never acted on Rogers’ proposals, and Turcotte, the chairman of the board, was asked to take another stab at revamping the programs. When Turcotte created the current committee, he charged it with proposing a single, indexed grant that would:
Smooth out HELP and MESG’s eligibility cut-offs
“Support needy and/or high achieving students”
“Have a positive impact on as many students as possible”
Stay within the current appropriations of $48 million
To qualify for the proposed One Grant, students who are Mississippi residents must complete the FAFSA, have a 2.5 high school GPA, and take at least 12 credit hours a semester. They must also score a composite score of at least 18 on the ACT.
Currently, students must score a 15 on the ACT to get MTAG, a 29 for MESG and a superscore (highest cumulative score) of 20 for HELP.
Raising the ACT scores was one way the committee hopes to keep the proposed program on budget, McKinney said at the meeting.
Turcotte is now writing a letter recommending the new program to the Legislature. He said he hopes lawmakers will solicit input from stakeholders like students when it considers the recommendation this session.
If the new program is put into place, there will be a four-year transition period for students who currently receive HELP, MTAG or MESG.
In the meantime, Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, who has been an outspoken proponent of the HELP grant, requested a meeting with Turcotte and members of the redesign committee to better understand the proposal. Hendrick and other college access folks are also looking over the numbers and have requested OSFA send them additional data about the program. They have a lot of questions about what the proposed program hopes to do.
Serving more people is “easy to do,” Hendrick said, “But what does that mean? Does that mean more people graduate from college or have access to college or is there a financial aid gap closed? I just wanted to understand what the rationale was behind some of the decisions they made, rather than stick to the budget and give more people money.”
Clarification: The proposed program would apply to new college students. Students who currently receive HELP, MTAG and MESG would not be affected.
Editor’s note: Get2College is a program of the Woodward Hines Education Foundation, a Mississippi Today donor.
Republican legislative leaders on Wednesday said Gov. Tate Reeves is holding up a special session to consider a medical marijuana program with last-minute, “unreasonable demands.”
The leaders, in comments on Wednesday to Mississippi Today, said they’ve conceded to numerous last-minute requests from Reeves for changes to a medical marijuana proposal they’ve worked on for months, but have reached an impasse with him on the amount of smokable marijuana patients could have.
The holdup is over 0.7 grams of a dosage unit of marijuana flower — the amount by which Reeves wants it lowered.
“We have worked long hours on this,” Rep. Lee Yancey, R-Brandon, told Mississippi Today on Wednesday. “… We have brought forward a bill that many have said would be the best program in the country. We are ready to have a special session. We have the votes to pass this. An overwhelming number in the House and Senate are ready to pass this, and we have a majority of people in Mississippi who voted for us to pass this.
“If there is any further delay, that will be squarely on the shoulders of the governor, rather than the Legislature.”
Lawmakers crafted legislation to create a medical marijuana program to replace one approved by voters in November but shot down by the state Supreme Court on a constitutional issue in May.
Reeves, who has sole authority to call lawmakers into special session, has said for months he would do so if lawmakers reached agreement on a bill. They did so, and informed Reeves of this on Sept. 24.
But Reeves has not called them into session. He has instead called for lawmakers to make numerous changes to their proposed program. Yancey said legislative leaders agreed to numerous changes Reeves requested, but that his requested limit on the amount of marijuana flower a patient can receive is unreasonable.
The proposed legislation defines a medical dosage unit of marijuana as 3.5 grams — or about an eighth of an ounce — which Yancey said is an “industry standard” across states with marijuana programs. The bill would allow a patient to purchase up to eight units, or 1 ounce, of smokable marijuana per week, or 4 ounces per month. The Initiative 65 program passed by voters would have allowed up to 5 ounces a month, which Yancey said lawmakers felt was too much.
Yancey said lawmakers have long been agreed on the amount of smokable marijuana allowed after much research, and Reeves’ request for a change has come in the eleventh hour. Despite being fellow Republicans, Reeves, a former two-term lieutenant governor, has clashed often with legislative leaders and communication, and cooperation between the executive and legislative branches has been spotty.
Reeves, Yancey said, on the advice of state Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs, wants the dosage unit reduced to 2.8 grams. He said that Dobbs has said that nationally, the content of THC — the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana — has increased by 23% nationally since 2015, therefore the amount of marijuana a patient should be allowed should be reduced by a similar amount.
“An eighth of an ounce is an industry standard,” Yancey said. “Medical marijuana machines are calibrated on eighths of an ounce … We have told the governor, no, we are not going to change, that we are going to do just like 37 other states and the District of Columbia, and use the industry standard and allow people with debilitating conditions the same relief as other states with medical marijuana … We already would have one of the most conservative programs in the country. We told him no on that.”
Yancey said that after lawmakers said they wouldn’t budge on the dosage, Reeves countered with a proposal for physicians to be able to approve the 3.5-gram doses, but nurse practitioners, physicians assistants and optometrists would be limited to 2.8 grams. Yancey said this would be unworkable, and would create more “scope of practice” debate, which the state has already seen for years with other health care issues.
Reeves’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. In a Tuesday press conference, Reeves said, “I think getting it done right is more important than getting it done quick. But I also recognize the will of the voters.”
Yancey said that under the legislative proposal, Mississippi would have one of the only medical marijuana programs in the nation with THC limits: 30% for smokable flower and 60% for concentrates.
Yancey said lawmakers were shocked to hear Reeves in a press conference on Tuesday indicate that he was pushing lawmakers to reduce THC levels as well.
“He’s never said a word to us about THC levels,” Yancey said. “It was all about dosage.”
Yancey said lawmakers agreed to changes Reeves proposed, including:
Not allowing marijuana companies to receive state taxpayer funded business incentives.
Requiring the Department of Health to conduct background checks on caregivers dispensing marijuana to patients. Yancey said lawmakers agreed to change “may” to “shall” on this provision.
Prohibiting people convicted of certain felonies from working for marijuana companies for 10 years, instead of five years as lawmakers proposed.
Increasing the amount of time state agencies have to issue marijuana licenses and permits from 90 days to 120 after passage of the measure.
Yancey said legislative leaders did not agree to some of the governor’s proposals, including that the Department of Public Safety be involved in regulating the program. Several other concessions, Yancey said, were made.
As governor, Reeves can call a special session and broadly set its agenda. But he cannot control what the Legislature passes, and any lawmaker can attempt to amend any bill brought for a vote. Reeves could veto any legislation passed, but lawmakers could override a veto with a two-thirds majority vote.
On Wednesday, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said in a statement: “Chairman Kevin Blackwell worked with his colleagues in the House and Senate, citizens, state agencies, policy experts, and healthcare and industry professional for months to develop the current medical cannabis legislation. Public hearings were also held. A draft of the legislation was sent to the governor and many of the recommendations received were incorporated into the bill. We are ready to consider this legislation in special session.”
Yancey said: “If he doesn’t want to call a special session for this, we will do it on the first week of January in regular session and he can deal with it after we pass it. The delay is not because of the Legislature. The delay is because the governor keeps coming to us with unreasonable demands.”
This was the spring of 2005. The first Mississippi Braves — ever — were holding spring training in Orlando, and my employer at the time dispatched me down there to preview the new team. That’s where I met their leader Brian Snitker, who now manages the Atlanta Braves and should be the hands-down winner for National League Manager of the Year.
Rick Cleveland
My first impression of “Snit” — what his players, even the 19-year-olds called him — back then? That’s easy. I just remember thinking that if I were a baseball player, I’d love to play for this guy.
You watch the Atlanta Braves these days and you quickly realize this about them: Those guys, so many of them former Mississippi Braves, would try to run through a brick wall for Snitker, a 64-year-old grandfather and baseball lifer who never changes expression whether the Braves are six games behind — or four games ahead — in the standings. Watch Snitker in the dugout and you cannot tell whether or not they are down 10-0 or ahead 7-6.
Tuesday, Snitker’s Braves defeated the Milwaukee Brewers 5-4 to advance to the National League Championship series, where they will face either the San Francisco Giants or the Los Angeles Dodgers beginning Saturday. That the Braves are even playing in the postseason seems a miracle considering all they went through this year, including losing several of their best players to an assortment of injuries and legal problems.
They lost their ace pitcher Mike Soroka. They lost one of baseball’s best players, Ronald Acuna. They lost their clean-up hitter Marcell Ozuna. They lost a lot more, but they kept plugging away under Snitker’s steady hand. Yes, general manager Alex Anthopoulos made some critical acquisitions before the trade deadline. But it was Snitker who stayed the course and blended all the old and new, young and old, and kept them playing hard and believing even when they were below .500 in July.
Former Brave and lifelong Mississippian Jay Powell, the Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer who played on that first M-Braves team for Snitker, has watched from afar and is not surprised by Snitker’s success this season.
“There are certain managers or coaches you just want to do the best you can for them,” Powell said Wednesday morning. “There’s a respect there, a trust. I was fortunate to play for some Baseball Hall of Fame managers including Bobby Cox and Jim Leyland, and I put Snit right in there with them. He gets it. He gets baseball.”
How so?
“He understands the longevity of the season,” Powell said. “He understands you can’t go crazy over one bad play, or one bad game or one bad stretch. Baseball is a grind. Snit understands that and manages with that in mind.”
Powell was on a rehab assignment in Mississippi in the spring of 2005 recovering from elbow surgery. He was an established veteran, having already won Game Seven of a World Series. Snitker gave him a lot of leeway, and, in return, Powell helped polish the young Braves pitching prospects. Funny story. I was in Snitker’s office one afternoon when Bobby Cox called to ask how Powell was progressing. Cox asked Snitker how well Powell was doing at holding runners on base.
“Hard to say,” Snitker answered. “When Jay’s pitching, nobody gets on base.”
Phillip Wellman was Snitker’s hitting coach on their first M-Braves team and later was the M-Braves manager. The two shared a house at the Barnett Reservoir. Snitker always gave Wellman much of the credit for helping Brian McCann and Jeff Franceour zoom straight from Trustmark Park in Pearl to the Atlanta Braves, skipping Class AAA all together. Wellman laughed about that in a phone conversation Wednesday from his home in Chattanooga.
“Me teaching McCann and Frenchy how to hit is kind of like touching up at Rembrandt,” he said. “I didn’t mess them up.”
Wellman, too, gives Snitker so much credit for the Braves persevering through all the turmoil to become one of the five Major League teams left standing.
“He stays the course,” Wellman said. “Snit never gets too high or too low. He’s never changed. We go way, way back, 30 years at least. I couldn’t be happier for him. We’ve been friends since we were both young, skinny and had hair on our heads.”
Wellman continued, “I am not surprised at all by his success. Snit has never changed. Guys love playing for him because they know he has their back. I’ll tell you this much: What the Braves have achieved this year, with all they’ve been through, that’s a testament to Snit. That’s who he is.”
So many former Mississippi Braves — Freddie Freeman, Dansby Swanson, Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley and more — have been heroic for these Atlanta Braves. Important to remember: The glue to it all is the one they call Snit.
In 1921, scientists in Canada discovered insulin. After winning the Nobel Prize, they sold the patent for $1 each, saying the hormone for battling diabetes “belongs to the world.”
Now, a century later, many Americans are crossing the border to buy the life-saving medicine for themselves and their families, or ordering it online, because insulin can be up to 10 times cheaper there.
That’s no surprise given that the list price for a vial of insulin has skyrocketed in the U.S. from 75 cents to $250 in a little more than a half-century.
Mississippi is the first state to sue both the three drug makers that control the U.S. insulin market — Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi-Aventis — and the pharmacy benefit managers, such as CVS Caremark, that negotiate prices with those companies.
Then-attorney general candidate Lynn Fitch speaks during the Madison and Hinds County Republican Women candidate forum at The Lake House in Ridgeland, Miss., Monday, August 26, 2019. Credit: Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America
“As the mother of a diabetic, I know the emotional, physical, and financial toll the unacceptable price of insulin has on families,” Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch told MCIR. “I filed this lawsuit on behalf of every Mississippian who relies on this medication to survive. Even though the cost of producing these drugs has decreased, these companies have raised the reported prices of their diabetes drugs up to 1,000%, in lockstep, and down to the decimal point within a few days of each other. They are making record profits at the expense of diabetics and Mississippi taxpayers, who have been overcharged millions of dollars a year for outrageously inflated diabetes medications.”
She put the figure for the treatment of Mississippians suffering from diabetes at $3.5 billion a year. Nationally, the direct medical costs top $237 billion.
The lawsuit, which seeks punitive damages, claims these drug makers have been hiking insulin prices and then paying a huge chunk of that to pharmacy business managers in exchange for placing their drugs on lists from which patients pick their medications.
The drug makers and managers deny they have been colluding to raise prices.
“Lilly denies the allegations, and we will vigorously defend ourselves against these accusations,” Lilly officials told MCIR in a statement. “We also have taken numerous steps to ensure people living with diabetes can fill a monthly prescription of Lilly insulin at an affordable cost.”
Novo Nordisk said the allegations are false: “We are aware of the complaint and disagree with the allegations made against the company. We are vigorously defending ourselves in these matters. We have a longstanding commitment to supporting patients’ access to our medicines.”
CVS responded that the allegations “are built on a false premise and completely without merit.” CVS placed the blame for high insulin prices on pharmaceutical companies: “Nothing in our agreements prevents drug manufacturers from lowering the prices of their insulin products, and we would welcome such an action. Allegations that Caremark plays any role in determining the prices charged by manufacturers for their products are false, and we intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit.”
For centuries, Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence, often killing children in less than a year.
Recognizing that diet played a role in diabetes, doctors experimented with potatoes, rice and even opium as possible cures. Other doctors limited patients suffering from the disease to only 400 calories a day. All of the patients died.
Enter the unlikeliest of heroes: surgeon Dr. Frederick Banting, who had been such a mediocre medical student he didn’t know how to spell diabetes.
In Type 1 diabetes, the pancreas produces little or no insulin, a hormone needed to allow sugar to enter cells to produce energy. With help from two students, Banting began research on the problem at the University of Toronto in 1921. They were able to extract insulin from an animal pancreas that they gave to a diabetic animal. The blood sugar dropped dramatically.
The discovery began to save lives. In 1923, Banting and his team were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work.
The team sold the patent to the University of Toronto, which in turn worked with Eli Lilly to develop the first commercially produced insulin.
Initially, all insulin was derived from animals, but in 1982, Eli Lilly created the first synthetic insulin, which was marketed as Humulin.
Fourteen years later, the drug maker unveiled its first analog insulin, a laboratory-grown “human” insulin. Other companies followed suit.
In recent decades, drug makers have introduced pills that seek to address Type 2 diabetes. Some prevent the kidneys from absorbing glucose. Some make the body more sensitive to insulin. Others help control appetite and blood sugar levels.
Insulin pumps and pens are taking the place of syringes, and continuous glucose monitors measure blood sugar levels, transmitting that information to a smartphone or computer. In 2020, the FDA approved a device that integrated these two.
Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi all provide assistance programs to aid patients who can’t afford insulin.
Catie Santos, a 28-year-old from New Orleans, grew up knowing about Type 1 diabetes because her brother was diagnosed with the disease at age 10. On her 23rd?birthday, she was horrified to learn she had the same disease.
Since then, she has met people who were diagnosed in their 50s with the disease once known as “juvenile diabetes.”
The monthly price of her insulin, she said, ran as much as the new Sony PlayStation 5, which can carry a price tag of more than $1,000.
Santos went on her parents’ insurance, but that assistance ended when she turned 26. “You really have to figure out this insurance thing quickly,” she said. “I’ve known [Type 1] diabetics who had to take corporate jobs just to stay alive.”
Some have to move back home with their parents to make it financially, she said. She is one of them.
Her most recent scare took place in the wake of Hurricane Ida, which left her family without power for three weeks. She had to cram a month’s worth of her insulin into the refrigerator of her aunt, who happened to have a generator.
The high cost of insulin has prompted some Americans to head for Canada or Mexico and still others manage to get the medicine or diabetic supplies through an underground network.
“You think, ‘It’s America, it’s 2021. Surely, you don’t have to pay somebody $50 to travel to meet you with insulin after traveling for six hours,’” said Santos, who works in that network. “But the reason you do that is it’s risky shipping insulin because it’s heat sensitive.”
Through social media, she connects people, she said. “If I hear people are in need, I’ll start a Twitter thread. We’re not trying to profit off of people; we’re trying to work the system that profits off of people.”
In 2019, Congress heard testimony from diabetes experts and others regarding the high cost of prescription drugs.
“I can help [patients] shop for the best price of insulin, connect them with a discount pharmacy, sometimes switch to a less expensive product,” said Dr. Kasia J. Lipska, an endocrinologist and assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine. “But these are Band-Aid solutions. What we need to do is exert pressure on drug makers to reduce those prices.”
Over the past quarter century, the prices of products have increased an average of 75%. That’s a fraction compared to the huge hike for insulin. A vial of Humalog (insulin lispro), which cost? 21 in 1996, now costs as much as $400 — a more than 1,800% increase.
During that time, “there’s been no innovation to improve Humalog,” Lipska said. “It’s the same exact insulin hormone. The only thing that’s changed is the price.”
A study she worked on found that 1 in 4 rationed insulin because of the high price.
Executives for the drug makers and the pharmacy benefit managers acknowledged to Congress in 2019 that the cost of insulin had become too expensive.
Kathleen Tregoning, an executive vice president at Sanofi, testified that while the treatment of diabetes has been transformed by medical innovations, “the landscape in which patients access medications has also fundamentally changed, and not for the better. We understand the anger of patients who cannot afford the insulin they need due to rising, out-of-pocket costs.”
She pointed out that while the list price for Sanofi’s insulin had risen 126% between 2012 and 2018, the net price had actually fallen 25%.
Out-of-pocket costs for those with insurance and Medicare Part D have increased about 60% over this time, she said.
“We want these rebates, which have grown in recent years and have resulted in substantially lower net prices, to benefit patients,” she said. “Unfortunately, under the current system, savings from insulin rebates are not consistently passed through to patients in the form of lower deductibles, co-payments or coinsurance amounts.”
U.S.Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Kentucky, during a 2019 hearing said Congress wants to “figure out the economics” behind the high insulin prices. Credit: Office of U.S. Rep. Brett Guthrie
Pharmacy benefit managers denied a role in the high price of insulin. “Rebates are not the cause of increasing drug prices,” Amy Bricker, senior vice president for one of the pharmacy benefit managers, Express Scripts, told Congress. “In the system today, rebates are used to reduce overall health care costs for consumers.”
If manufacturers wanted to reduce their list prices, “there would be no implication to their rebate status,” she said.
U.S. Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Kentucky, said Congress was trying to figure out why there’s a higher price “that seems to be caught up in the system. … We need to figure out the economics.”
During the hearing, drug makers testified they are paying billions in rebates each year to the pharmacy benefit managers in return for better placement on drug lists for patients. The drug makers say the managers are the ones to blame for the high insulin prices, because they’re failing to pass on the savings.
The managers, however, deny this, insisting that their practices have helped lower the price of insulin.
“The status quo is not going to continue. It can’t,” then-U;; Rep. Joe Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, said during a 2019 hearing on insulin prices, Credit: Office of U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy
Then-U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, said it’s frustrating to hear the drug makers and the pharmacy benefit managers point their fingers at each other for insulin’s high prices. “The status quo is not going to continue,” he said. “It can’t.”
Mike Mason, a senior vice president for Lilly, said their net prices have declined since 2009.
Asked if Novo Nordisk had lowered its price, President Doug Langa replied no, saying the best way to reach the most patients in the most affordable way are through the drug lists. “Anything that risks that … is something we have to strongly consider.”
Kennedy asked Langa, “What do we do to try to make sure patients in this country get access in this country to life-saving medication that was sold for a buck to make sure that every person gets access to it? What do you suggest?”
“I suggest that we all come together for solutions, get together with Congress to make sure rationing never happens again,” Langa replied. “One patient [dying] is too many.”
On Sept. 28, Lilly officials announced a 40% price cut next year for the generic version of its bestselling insulin, Lispro, which will be 70% less than its name-brand version. The new list price will be $82 a vial and $159 for a pack of five pens.This is Lilly’s second price cut in two years.
Laura Nally, a pediatric endocrinologist and assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine, questioned the value of this price cut since “most people know that you can get Lispro using a GoodRx coupon for $40 per vial.”
Since Lispro doesn’t appear on a drug list for patients, she said, “this won’t help decrease the cost of the medications that insurance companies have to pay, and so the high cost of insulin is still going to translate to the person with diabetes or other individuals with private insurance. PBM’s are still able to make money, insulin manufacturers are still making money by only allowing expensive, brand name insulin on the formularies, and now can make extra money by charging $80 for a vial that only costs $6 to produce.”
Dan Hurley, author of Diabetes Rising: How a Rare Disease Became a Modern Pandemic, and What to Do About It, said drug makers have raised the prices in recent decades because they can.
“The incredible speed with which vaccines and antibodies against COVID-19 were developed demonstrates what’s awesome about the pharmaceutical industry,” he said. “The incredible prices of insulin and other life-saving drugs demonstrates what’s wrong.”
MCIR J-Lab student Karli Carpenter contributed to this report.
This story was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and funded in part by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. It was also produced in partnership with the Community Foundation for Mississippi’s local news collaborative, which is independently funded in part by Microsoft Corp. The collaborative includes MCIR, the Clarion Ledger, the Jackson Advocate, Jackson State University, Mississippi Public Broadcasting and Mississippi Today.
Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit news organization that is exposing wrongdoing, educating and empowering Mississippians, and raising up the next generation of investigative reporters. Sign up for our newsletter.
