Way to be on it Brandon!!! ? ?
They didn’t expect a nationwide shortage, and neither did the president. “I don’t think anyone anticipated the impact of the shutdown of one facility – the Abbott facility,” Biden told reporters Wednesday, referring to the Abbott Laboratories Inc. plant in Michigan that went offline in February due to safety concerns and that has led to months-long scarcity.
But baby formula manufacturers
did anticipate the impact three months ago, and moments before Biden started fielding questions from the press,
they had just said as much in front of the cameras. Robert Cleveland, senior vice president for North American operations of the Reckitt Co., was the first of the manufacturers to speak, and he said he told Biden that “we knew from the very beginning this would be a very serious event.”
Tarun Malkani, president and CEO of Gerber, told Biden that his company might be a relatively small player in powdered formula but they were doing all they could out of a sense of “national duty.” He added that they were operating with the same level of urgency today that they did “when I got that first phone call informing me of the crisis situation.”
Murray Kessler, CEO of Perrigo Company, told Biden that as soon as his company heard about the recall “we could foresee that this was going to create a tremendous shortage.”
The other manufacturers present said the same, and yet the president admitted he wasn’t made aware of the gravity of the crisis until last month. Hadn’t those CEOs just told him they understood it would have a very big impact the moment the Abbott plant was shuttered, a reporter asked.
“They did,” Biden replied, “but I didn’t.”
That terse admission undercut the official administration line. The White House has insisted for weeks that they were quick to react and that they mounted a “whole-of-government approach” since the Food and Drug Administration issued the recall on February 17. Apparently, and at least according to Biden himself, this did not include the president until April.
Although late to comprehend the crisis, the months-long absence did not prevent Biden from telling families without baby food that he felt their pain. “There is nothing more stressful than the feeling like you can’t get what your child needs,” he said. “As a father and grandfather,” he added, “I understand how difficult this shortage has been.”
That empathy did not satisfy the press corps. Reporter after reporter pressed White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre with various iterations of the same question: What did the president know about the formula shortage and when did he know it? Jean-Pierre reiterated that the administration had taken a whole-of-government approach. “We’ve been working on this for months,” she insisted. “We’ve been taking this incredibly seriously.”