Biden's Baby Formula Shortage Worsening - If you can't get 'em in the womb, starve 'em out

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At the outset of his presidency, Joe Biden promised competence by a bigger, better government. A few days ago, one of his loyal allies exposed a gross incompetence by federal officials on Biden’s watch that defied that promise and inflamed a baby formula shortage now panicking parents nationwide.

Rep. Rose DeLauro, D-Conn., a reliable liberal ally, unveiled documents showing the Biden Food and Drug Administration was alerted by a whistleblower last fall about potential contamination issues at the Abbott Nutrition baby formula factory in Michigan and failed for months to act aggressively.

“The FDA reacted far too slowly to this report,” DeLauro said in releasing a letter to the Health and Human Services inspector general demanding an immediate investigation to an incident that has led to babies being sickened and dying and a belated recall that has emptied shelves of formula nationwide.

File
DeLauro_OIG Request Infant Formula Recall.pdf
The congresswoman, the chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, laid out a four-month-long trail of federal bumbles and stumbles: the report came in Oct. 20, the whistleblower didn’t even get interviewed for two months, the plant didn’t get inspected until Jan. 31 and the recall didn’t get issued until Feb. 17.

“Why did the FDA not spring into action?” she implored during a congressional hearing. “Why did it take four months to pull this formula off store shelves? How many infants were fed contaminated formula during this time, by parents who trusted that the formula they were buying was safe? How many additional illnesses and deaths were there due to FDA’s slow response?”

Now the bureaucratic stumbling has escalated into a national crisis, as video of bare shelves and panicked parents harken in America some of the same fears and images as the bread lines and rationing that befell the Soviet Union in the early 1990s just before its collapse.

The problems began even before the recall as inflation, labor shortages and supply chain slowdowns began putting pressure on the baby food staple last fall.

In November, baby formula was already substantially more expensive and supply shortages had already risen to 11%. By the first week of April, the shortages had soared to 31%, and last week the number stood at a stunning 40%, according to statistics kept by Datasembly.

The escalating shortages have prompted major stores such as Target, CVS and Walgreens to ration supplies with purchase limits.

"This is a shocking number that you don't see for other categories," Datasembly CEO Ben Reich told CBS MoneyWatch on Friday.

The crisis has both political and personal consequences.

Many millennial and Gen Z child-bearing parents were part of the coalition that propelled Biden to his election win. And some parents are now facing life-and-death consequences, especially for children with rare digestive disorders.

"If this doesn’t get fixed soon, I don’t know how my son will survive," Phoebe Carter, whose 5-year-old son suffers from a rare digestive and immune system disease, told Politico on Saturday. "I just can’t stress that enough."

The poor and working class – whom Biden promised hope in his inaugural speech – are also disproportionately affected. A food bank in Seattle was so desperate to get some baby formula it recently held an emergency drive.

Alfredo Ortiz, president of the small business group Job Creators Network, said the baby formula crisis follows a pattern of other economic failures by the Biden administration.

“The only thing the Biden administration seems to be efficient at is burying their heads in the sand,” he said. “These are the same bureaucrats that told us for months that inflation was only transitory and would resolve itself. Then they tried to tell small business owners that their supply chain issues had been resolved even though we could all see cargo ships backed up for miles at several ports nationwide.

”Unfortunately, it comes as no surprise that they have failed to protect even the most innocent Americans from their incompetence,” he added.

The shortages are also raising fears that parents might be tempted to concoct their own formulas or water down current store-bought formulas to stretch supplies, two actions experts say are fraught with danger.

The FDA strongly urges parents not to make their own formulas, saying contamination and inadequate nutrients in home-brewed formulas can lead to everything from "severe nutritional imbalances to food-borne illnesses, both of which can be life-threatening."

"Making things at home off of a Google recipe is potentially very dangerous for your baby," Dr. Stephen Lauer, a pediatrician with the University of Kansas Health System, told WDAF TV station this week.

Meanwhile, parents are desperately pleading for help on social media.

"If the MSM can talk about the toilet paper shortage ever hour, they should be talking about the baby formula shortage at least. ...We ended finding the Amazon brand online but not everyone is so lucky to be able to feed that. Please share. This is every store!" Danielle Miller tweeted with a picture of an empty shelve of formula.

The article editorializes a little bit but also provides slightly more info about the source of the crisis than most of the normie press articles I found. Details are oddly sparse. Why would a problem with a very specialized medical formula have such sprawling impact? What supplies in which chains are disrupted, and why is it so difficult to find replacements? It's suspect how few questions are being asked by the press, let alone answered.

Overall, it's curious how little coverage this is receiving given both how important the issue is and how unusual it is for something like this to occur with a true life essential. The TP shortage got much more coverage- but no one is going to go hungry or die because they had to use a wet wipe.

For those who have not had children or are lucky enough to have never needed to supplement with formula, you may not know, you cannot just switch brands on the child suddenly without potentially having anything from extreme stomach upset to an actual medical emergency. It's similar to how dogs can't just switch foods suddenly without vomiting and getting the shits, but worse. Some babies will vomit blood from a brand that doesn't agree with them. It's even worse with infants who have some kind of medical need.

And for the bootstrap crew, you can't just start breastfeeding a child again after months on formula. The milk dries up and goes away. A lot of the kids who need formula were born early or had some other difficulty in their first days that resulted in them not being able to gain weight from breastfeeding. A lot of mothers try to keep breastfeeding on top of the formula feeds but the feedback system of the mammary glands is very fussy and it is almost impossible for many to keep this up, especially since it involves things like waking up every 2 hours at night on a schedule, on top of whatever waking up the infant does, and exhaustion in itself can make the milk dry up.

tl;dr There is a reason a lot of babies died before we had technology.

That this is not being treated as a national emergency and has been allowed to fester so long screams "sabotage."

 

[Dracula's Spirit Animal]

Plus, with cloth diapers you need two things:

A shit-squeegee to scrape the shit out of the diaper before you wash them, because sometimes baby shit is as thick as paste. If they sat on it, it's this thick paste that if it goes in the washer isn't going to get broken up by the agitation and you'll pull someone out with a dollar bill sized chunk of baby shit glued to it.

Plastic/rubber pants so they don't pee and it soak immediately straight through to the floor.

If you really want to get fancy and have the time and energy to put in the effort, you do the metal washtub and the washboard for the initial scrubbing, then toss them into the washer. You want soap with no perfume or dyes. Lye soap for cleaning and a LOT of washing to make sure the soap is out often works well.

Dove is another good one. Yup, the bar soap. Just rub the bar on the washboard, wash the diapers, throw in the washer.

Always pre-soak to get out urine and any leftover poop.

Too many people think you can just toss cloth diapers straight in the washer and are then shocked when they've got a thin chunk of baby-poop on clothing, the tub of the washer, or the basket of the dryer.

Some kids (like the quoted poster's kids) have severe diaper rash problems, even if they switch cloth types (avoid polyester, which for some reason cloth diapers are made out of and avoid Made in China) to try to avoid allergies. You also have to change QUICK, because there's no fluid lock like with disposables, and acidic pee or poop can rash the kid right up.

I did cloth diapers for a while back in the 1990's. They're doable, but be ready to put in the work.

Oh, one last thing, you have to know how to FOLD a cloth diaper onto the baby. It ain't easy. Two pins usually, one pin for experts.

True experts can do that shit one handed to impress their wife.

We did the cloth diapers thing for a bit, and I only ever did the two pin type. Polyester? Yeesh. Cotton all the way. We switched to disposible after about 6 months though. Finally ending up with our daughter was all worth it, but we had a lot of grief with miscarriages and whatnot, and in the end, we were lucky to even get our one daughter.

I’ve never heard anything about breast size having much to do with it in general, but I’m having a hard time understanding how an A cup on average can produce more than a say, C cup.

I’m sure on a woman to woman base it varies but that’s interesting.

Tits are fat bags with empty milk bags unless lactating. The breast size can't really tell you much about milk production.

 

[Sparkling Yuzu]

This has nothing to do with Biden. The article is blaming a baby formula shortage and contamination on him instead of fully blaming the company. This kind of thing is typical of capitalism. Of course they put profit over baby safety.

 

[Blobby's Murder Knife]

Some women actually have trouble producing milk. It's actually a more common problem then people realize, and largely due to humans evolutionary path for using breasts as sexual plumary instead of the intended use. Women with larger breasts have a harder time producing milk then women with smaller ones.

It is because breastfeeding is taxing on the woman as an organism. Nature wants the woman to provide breastmilk only to the point that the kid doesn't die of starvation and be weaned as soon as possible so she will be fertile again and breed. Nature considers the burden so awful, it will turn it off at any excuse and for our species, that is not necessarily fatal for a few reasons:

1) Colustrum is not necessary as the vast majority of immunity is passed through the placenta, not through breastmilk. For good reason, as the mother had a decent chance of dying in childbirth.
2) Adoption and wet nursing is a thing common to our species until like literally now. If you couldn't nurse your baby for whatever reason, probably one of your sisters or sister-in-laws could until they could get the kid on gruel ASAP.

Nature considers breastfeeding a necessary evil, not some sort of hippie mother earth space weed event that should last until the kid is 11 years old. At around 4-5 months, human infants start the process of self-weaning where they show interest in your food and want to try. True weaning occurs between 9-12 months. You can continue to breastfeed them if you want until 2, but I think it is somewhat unlikely for most women would as they would be pregnant again by then, whether or not they carried to term and the supply would dry up.

 

[Disc]

This has nothing to do with Biden. The article is blaming a baby formula shortage and contamination on him instead of fully blaming the company. This kind of thing is typical of capitalism. Of course they put profit over baby safety.

If you're not producing product, you're not getting money either.

If one brand or a related group of brands were the only ones suffering from a shortage, you'd have a point. Instead, it's literally every brand at once. That's an issue beyond the scope of a company to fix (though it may not be beyond the scope of each company to individually cause for themselves - e.g. taking manufacturing to a different country).

 

[I am the Muffin Maker]

I’ve never heard anything about breast size having much to do with it in general, but I’m having a hard time understanding how an A cup on average can produce more than a say, C cup.

I’m sure on a woman to woman base it varies but that’s interesting.

because it has to do with glandular tissue, and not with size of the breast which is mostly fat

 

[Meat Target]

 

[Jimjamflimflam]

I’ve never heard anything about breast size having much to do with it in general

Generally what i heard was that alot of women's breasts are becoming too big and round that babies just can't get a hold on them to properly latch.

Also it's insane but hospitals charge like 20 bucks an oz for their donated milk. Also breast milk taste gross. Tried it when we had some (they give you the first sample for free to get you hooked)

 

[Haramburger]

This has nothing to do with Biden.

Nice try corn pop, but you try to run interference for Big B, you out yourself as "ain't black."

 

[Sparkling Yuzu]

Nice try corn pop, but you try to run interference for Big B, you out yourself as "ain't black."

I'm not getting paid by any gov agency to post my piss poor takes.

 

[Bakarina]

Also it's insane but hospitals charge like 20 bucks an oz for their donated milk. Also breast milk taste gross. Tried it when we had some (they give you the first sample for free to get you hooked)

Breast milk is surprisingly really sweet, but thin. Best way I can describe it is like sweetened almond milk or some other kind of nut milk like cashew.

Also, the rationings have begun! Or about to at least, my neck of the woods is talking about only allowing purchases of ONE CAN PER MONTH and ID will be expected. Dunno how it's going to be enforced but it's an idea that was pitched.

 

[Blake Chortles]

Breast milk is surprisingly really sweet, but thin. Best way I can describe it is like sweetened almond milk or some other kind of nut milk like cashew.

Also, the rationings have begun! Or about to at least, my neck of the woods is talking about only allowing purchases of ONE CAN PER MONTH and ID will be expected. Dunno how it's going to be enforced but it's an idea that was pitched.

If its the small cans you will burn that in 2-3 days for a baby <6 months old. Big cans are more like a week.

When my daughter was like 10 months we’d go through a big can in like 3 days.

I had friends and family check around and snap up some more. Rural areas still have a little stock I’m seeing but I live in the suburbs where everyone is raising families and we are wiped out.

Spent 2000 bucks in the last two months for about a 3 month supply of his allergy stuff. Normally that would be around 1000.

My daughter was cured of it by around 10 months maybe he will be too so we can go generic. Its not just discomfort but a nasty colitis its not something we want to just deal with. I had it as a baby too.

Its a milk allergy that resolves thats from birth to around 1 year. I have zero allergies today but if they didn’t have non milk formula I’d have been sickly, malnourished, or even died. It took us 3 months to figure out what was wrong as she was shitting blood and vomiting half of what we gave her near the end. Switched it and within a week completely resolved.

 

[Cuckoman]

I looked at the formula aisle in the three stores I had to stop at in order to find fucking cat litter for my ancient feline today. Wiped out. Not in bad neighborhoods at all, either.

Ouch, but there is always an opportunity.
You know that neighbor or relative you hate with all your guts?

You know these notes you see at the community board where they offer something for sale and there are small tabs with a name and phone number you can tear off?
Make a note that say you have stocked up on the baby formula and have 4000 boxes and you are willing sell. And you quote a price that is 7 times the normal price. Then put your neighbors full name, address, and phone number on the note.
Put one of these notes on the community board in every local grocery store.

Fun!

 

[Cuckoman]

Breast milk is surprisingly really sweet, but thin. Best way I can describe it is like sweetened almond milk or some other kind of nut milk like cashew.

Also, the rationings have begun! Or about to at least, my neck of the woods is talking about only allowing purchases of ONE CAN PER MONTH and ID will be expected. Dunno how it's going to be enforced but it's an idea that was pitched.

Rationing always leads to higher average prices. Every time.
What happens is that a parallell market develops and then you will have people that would ordinarily never purchase this product do it in order to gain from the arbitrage between the markets.

So, instead mostly being people with infants buying the formula at the store, you will now have very large numbers of new actors that go buy the maximum ration every months and making some beer money re-selling it on the grey market instead.
Hey, if you are a student and can make some extra beer money with minimal effort, why wouldn't you do it?

This always happens and it leads to even more severe shortages at the stores since all these new actors are shifting often large volumes of the goods onto the grey market.

When you have a shortage, rationing will always makes things worse. Rationing makes the shortage worse and the prices higher.

 

[Larry David's Opera Cape]

Breast milk is surprisingly really sweet, but thin. Best way I can describe it is like sweetened almond milk or some other kind of nut milk like cashew.

Also, the rationings have begun! Or about to at least, my neck of the woods is talking about only allowing purchases of ONE CAN PER MONTH and ID will be expected. Dunno how it's going to be enforced but it's an idea that was pitched.

One can will theoretically last a week for a kid who is eating all or mostly formula. More like 5 days if he's having a growth spurt.

WTF do they expect people to do?

 

[Bakarina]

One can will theoretically last a week for a kid who is eating all or mostly formula. More like 5 days if he's having a growth spurt.

WTF do they expect people to do?

Idk. I think the suit that pitched the idea has never been around infants (or has only been around children whose mothers were able to breastfeed without having to ever supplement).

As I've said, there's talk in my area and it hasn't happened yet. Hopefully it doesn't cause the husband is albeit antsy over it. I had to stop at the store for milk and there was still the specialty formulas on the shelf, which I hope get bought for children that need it and not the scalpers.

 

[NJBear]

Went to Shop Rite and on the way out stopped at the courtesy desk and saw 6 cans of formula left. The clerk said that's all they have left and don't know when they will get more in.

The real insurrection may be coming soon.

 

[Larry David's Opera Cape]

Interesting...

Bill Gates, Bezos, Zuckerbook back "eco friendly formula alternative" plan.- From 2020 (archive)

An artificial breast milk start-up that offers a green alternative to baby formula has received $3.5 million (£2.8m) from an investment fund co-founded by Bill Gates.

It has been estimated that around 10 per cent of the global dairy industry — a major producer of greenhouse gases — is used to manufacture baby formula.

However, US firm BIOMILQ is working to artificially produce human breast milk from cultured human mammary epithelial cells on a commercially viable scale.

I wonder where they are getting those cells...

And then CNN revived the story last week. (archive)

The BIOMILQ team creates its product from cells taken from human breast tissue and milk, donated by women in the local community, who get a Target giftcard in return.

Uh huh...

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

I find it funny that yesterday I saw people posting home made baby formula recipes from hospitals back in the 50's and 60's, and now tonight I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how awful all of these recipes are.

 

[WhatInTheActualFuck]

I find it funny that yesterday I saw people posting home made baby formula recipes from hospitals back in the 50's and 60's, and now tonight I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how awful all of these recipes are.

If your primary goal is to crush a group of people and make them accept rule from outside, creating an unbearable situation, following it up with a glimmer of hope and then crushing that by denigrating/attacking attempts at self-reliance seems like a not-too-terrible plan of attack.

 

[A-Stump]

Not really a Biden problem. It's more of an FDA problem which has been seriously underfunded and understaffed as long as most of us have been alive. Nobody wants to acknowledge the problem until something fucks up on their watch, then they remember it exists for as long as the bodies are fresh and promptly forget.

Oh, and here's something. Almost half of FDA funding comes from the companies it's supposed to regulate. Why? Because the federal government has been proven time and time again to not wish to foot the bill. So you've got an agency which is supposed to be neutral and forthright, practically owned by the one's they're supposed to oversee. It makes no fucking sense and it'll likely never unfuck itself as long as people keep pointing fingers at the wrong parties.