JACKSON, Miss.—The grandsons of Mississippi Sen. Michael McLendon, R-Hernando, were stillborn in August 2025. He is pushing for more research and transparency as to what causes fetuses and infants to die before their first birthday or in utero by supporting the creation of a fetal and infant mortality review panel under the Mississippi State Department of Health.
“We got an issue in this state and every single family is at risk. We have to find what is causing this,” McLendon said on the Senate floor on March 11. “Is it because God is looking down upon us and saying, ‘Mississippi, I’m targeting you’? My God doesn’t do that. My God is a loving God. But is it something that we have created here? Is it our water? Is it our air? It can’t be our economics because it affects everyone. … So what is it about Mississippi that this happens to us?”
House Bill 1637 would establish the panel, which would review fetal deaths and the deaths of infants up to one year in age and “establish strategies to prevent infant deaths.” The health department requested that the Legislature create the panel, Rep. Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg said on the House floor on Feb. 4 when introducing her bill. MSDH would pick the members of the review panel, who would be experts in the infant and fetal mortality hemisphere, and members would elect a chairman.
MSDH, the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s office, the Mississippi Department of Human Services, medical examiners, coroners, health care providers, law enforcement agencies and any other agencies would provide fetal and infant death records for the panel to review to determine causes of death.
By Dec. 1 of each year, the panel would need to provide an annual report to the chairmen of the House Public Health and Human Services Committee and the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee. The reports would include “numbers, causes and relevant demographic information on infant mortality deaths in Mississippi, and appropriate recommendations to the Legislature on how to most effectively direct state resources to decrease infant mortality in Mississippi,” H.B. 1637 says. Findings of the panel would be confidential until it publishes the report.
The panel would be unable to provide any medical records to the public and its findings could not be used as evidence in court nor could panel members testify in court. Closed-door meetings of the panel may occur when members are discussing “records, reports, data, statements, notes, memoranda, analyses, findings, recommendations, communications or other information that is confidential or exempt from disclosure under state or federal law,” the bill says.
“We can’t go back in time and undo that, but we can investigate and try to find out what went wrong. Or what did we know now that we didn’t know previously? What could we do to improve, generally, the way we deal with births? What can we do to help other families avoid this situation?” Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee Chairman Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, said on the Senate floor on March 11.
‘We Really Need to Prioritize’
MSDH currently hosts the Maternal and Infant Health Bureau, the Child Death Review Panel and the Maternal Mortality Review Committee, and the former two submit annual reports to the House and Senate public health committees. The Magnolia State ranks 50th in the nation in deaths of children, infants and fetuses and 49th in maternal mortality, MSDH found in its 2025 Public Health Report Card.
Mississippi’s infant mortality rate increased to 9.7 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2024—the highest since 2013—the most recent data from MSDH shows. Since 2014, 3,527 babies have died before celebrating their first birthday, MSDH reported in 2025.
“Currently, we have a child death review panel that provides a report each year and it encompasses children ages zero to age 18. We know that our babies die of much different reasons than older children die of,” Rep. Missy McGee said on the House floor on Feb. 4. “We also know that we are at the top of some lists we don’t want to be at the top of—infant mortality and fetal mortality—and so, we would like to be able to take a closer look at the reason our babies are not making it to their first birthday and produce a report that we can take that information and hopefully get off the top of these very terrible lists that we are on.”
The Child Death Review Panel reported 568 child deaths from ages zero to 18 in the state in 2024 at a death rate of 84.2 per 100,000 residents, with 43% of those deaths due to external causes like suicide, homicide and accidents. Babies who died of sudden unexpected infant death made up 73 of those deaths. Sudden unexpected infant death took the lives of 759 infants under a year old from 2015 to 2024; 441 of those babies were male, 318 were female, 429 were Black and 294 were white.
The Maternal Mortality Review Committee reported 224 pregnancy-associated deaths from 2019 to 2023, finding that 73 deaths—or 33%— were related to pregnancy, noting that hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and infections were the most common underlying causes of death.
“The reality, and I really want the House to know, is that we are also leading in maternal mortality,” Rep. Zakiya Summers, D-Jackson, said on the House floor on Feb 4. “And in that data, it’s showing that Black women are dying disproportionately as the result of a pregnancy related complication. So this impacts every part of our state and it’s something that we really need to prioritize.”
Report Adverse Vaccine Reactions
The panel would also study immunization and medical records that occurred within 90 days before the infant’s “sudden death,” and the panel should verify that the infant’s family or caretakers reported any adverse reactions to vaccines to the Centers for Disease Control’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System under an amendment Sen. Angela Hill, R-Picayune, proposed. Health-care professionals do not verify claims that patients report in the system; it is just a searchable system where people can report side effects that happened after they received vaccines.
“If they truly want to look at every possible reason why a child suddenly dies, this language needs to be put in there,” she said on the Senate floor on March 11. “Because any doctor that you go to, pretty much, is going to tell you that the vaccines are not risky and that they’re pretty safe. But the parents who’ve had vaccine-injured children and children that have been killed by vaccines know that’s not the case. But if there’s nothing to fear and there’s nothing to hide to suppress the data, then I would ask that you vote to put this amendment in this language.”
To back up her amendment, Hill cited a Facebook message she received from a mother in Oxford, Mississippi, who claimed vaccines killed her baby in 2013. The senator said the mother won her case in “vaccine court”—the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a federal no-fault alternative to court that provides compensation to people who have been found to sustain injuries from certain vaccines.
Sen. Hob Bryan said H.B. 1637 allows the panel to review any available medical records, which would include vaccination records, so Hill’s amendment is unnecessary. He noted that it was hard to take Hill’s request seriously because he did not know how to react to the email she received and he was unsure of the circumstances of that baby’s death.
“I don’t think we need to be telling this committee exactly what they’re supposed to do and for that reason, I oppose the amendment,” the chairman said on the Senate floor on March 11. “Again, if this is something this committee wants to look at, they can. I don’t think it’s for us to start picking out specific things that we want the committee to study. I would rather leave this up to the discretion of the experts.”
Research continues to show that vaccines are safe for infants, children and adults, and there is a relatively low risk of adverse reactions to vaccines. Researchers investigate safety monitoring systems if they discover any noticeable patterns like increased side effects happening after a certain vaccine or among a particular group of patients, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reports.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System “doesn’t reveal how many people report the same reaction, nor how many in an unvaccinated population report the same thing,” the school reports. “By following up with other monitoring systems, researchers can determine if, for example, the population of people who report getting arthritis after a vaccine is the same as a control group getting arthritis in the same period, which would rule out the vaccine as the cause.”
The Senate approved Hill’s amendment by a 26-18 vote and passed the bill by a 51-0 vote on March 11. The House passed H.B. 1637 by a 121-0 vote on Feb. 4. Both bodies approved the conference report for H.B. 1637, which includes Hill’s vaccine amendment. The bill is headed to Gov. Tate Reeves for him to decide whether to sign it into law.
