Biden’s press secretary defended the decision-making processes that brought the problem to the President’s attention after formula manufacturers said they knew there would be a problem in February.
“We’ve laid out timelines over and over again,” Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Thursday. “By late in April, sales were going down, and shortages were appearing. So that is what we learned in late April. And since then, through May, across the Administration, we’ve aggressively invoked the [Defense Production Act] and used it three times.”
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Jean-Pierre ran through the Administration’s response, including a measure to airlift formula into the country and a decision to “cut red tape” to speed up domestic supply. The U.S. formula market is highly concentrated, with four manufacturers overwhelming roughly 90% of the market. In February, a recall of toxic Abbott Nutrition formula and a subsequent plant shutdown exacerbated the shortage.
On Thursday, Jean-Pierre repeatedly pushed back on questions about why Biden did not know about the scale of the crisis sooner.
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The President was informed of the shortage by “senior White House staff” in April, Jean-Pierre said. “There’s no specific person that I can call out to you.”
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The Biden Administration has been slammed for its slow response and its communication on the issue to the public. In mid-May, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield repeatedly declined to call the shortage a “crisis,” which she dismissed as a “label.”
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The shortage is particularly critical for parents of babies who require specialty formulas to address allergies, as well as gastrointestinal or metabolic conditions.
“The baby formula out-of-stock issue continues to be a major problem for the industry, and we see no indication of a slowdown,” said Ben Reich, CEO of consumer product analytics firm Datasembly. “Baby formula demonstrated inflationary spikes in July of 2021, and the situation has continued to worsen throughout the first few months of 2022.” Here’s a breakdown of the shortage, what’s driving it, and how people are dealing with it.
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The market for baby formula has stayed relatively the same since birth rates began declining in 2007, with most of the industry’s recent growth coming from formulas made for infants with special dietary needs. The industry was not prepared for the product-hoarding at the onset of the pandemic in spring 2020 and has since struggled to catch back up.
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“The market for infant formula has been a weak market for a long time, and the result of that is that they weren’t exactly positioned to respond to a sudden positive shock,” said Lyman Stone, an economist at Demographic Intelligence, which provides U.S. birth and marriage forecasts. “When a crisis comes, suddenly, you can’t find your formula. Why? Because the economic case for investing and producing it at scale wasn’t there for a long time.”
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