Joe Biden announced the third shipment of baby formula via an Operation Fly Formula flight. The good news is that more baby formula is on the way. The bad news is that desperate parents hanging on for more baby formula have to wait more than another week. The shipment will begin from the U.K. on June 9.
The announcement of the shipment was to include the fact that it will include 300,000 pounds or about 3.7 million 8-ounce bottles of Kendamil infant formula. Unfortunately, it was Joe Biden talking about numbers and as is his history, he got the number wrong. He said it would be 3.7 bottles of formula. He left out the “million” part. I’m sure the transcription department will correct his statement for him, as they do. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a horrible subject.
The baby formula crisis is just one of many crises that the Biden administration is failing at managing. That didn’t stop the senior deputy communications director at the White House from retweeting the news that United Airlines would be transporting the baby formula shipment free of charge from Heathrow Airport in London June 9. The retweet would have been fine but the partisan hack took it too far when he included a slam to the previous administration at the end of it.
.@POTUS is doing everything he can to help, bringing the private and public sectors together, and getting the job done for families.
Huge contrast to the vacuum of leadership and experience Americans felt for four years. https://t.co/L0CVAdsDzf
— Matt Hill (@MattHill46) June 1, 2022
Here’s the thing. Every administration can be faulted for various things, that’s the truth. However, to fault the Trump administration for a “vacuum of leadership and experience” is just laughable. Did he miss Operation Warp Speed? Trump led the effort to quickly get vaccines for COVID-19 developed and to market in record time. Did the Biden communication department staffer forget how good the economy and how low unemployment was before the pandemic during those four years he spoke about? Maybe he doesn’t understand that by Trump insisting NATO members pay their full dues, NATO was better organized and prepared to come together to support Ukraine against Putin’s invasion. Did he not fill up a gas tank during the last administration and notice how reasonably priced a gallon of gas was when Trump instigated an all-of-the-above energy policy?
Biden admits he only found out about the baby formula shortage in April. That is unforgivable. He said so during a virtual roundtable with baby formula company executives.
“I don’t think anyone anticipated the impact of the shutdown of one facility, the Abbott facility,” he said, responding to their shouted questions. “Once we learned the extent of it … we kicked everything into gear.”
He said he became aware of the issue in April — though in mid-February, Abbott had issued a voluntary recall and shuttered its Sturgis, Michigan, plant, citing contamination concerns and ordering a recall.
Since U.S. manufacturers had just told him they had anticipated the impact, reporters asked Biden why he, too, didn’t see this coming.
“They did, but I didn’t,” Biden answered.
Later, at the White House briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was pummeled with more questions.
Asked repeatedly when the White House was informed and when it was decided Biden himself should get involved, Jean-Pierre said, “I don’t have the timeline on that.”
“All I can tell you, as a whole of government approach, we have been working on this since the recall in February,” she said.
ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Mary Bruce asked if Jean-Pierre was saying the administration’s response would have been exactly the same if the president had known sooner.
“I am saying that we have been working on this. We, as a whole of government approach, have been working on this since the recall, which was in February,” she repeated. “That is what I’m saying. I’m talking about internally, not just the agencies, not just FDA, USDA, but also we have been working on this for months, for months. And we’ve taken this incredibly seriously.”
The truth is that the administration hadn’t been working on it since the recall. They had no plan and no interest in executing a back-up plan, apparently. Formula company executives said they anticipated a quick and bad shortage once Abbott did its formula recall. Biden was clueless.
Spokespeople for two of the five infant formula manufacturers explicitly said they had recognized from the start how huge a problem the formula shortage would eventually become.
“We knew from the very beginning this would be a very serious event,” Reckitt’s executive, Robert Cleveland, said. He said his company had reached out to retail partners like Target and Walmart “immediately” to warn them and to start troubleshooting available inventory to ensure they could get what they had onto shelves.
“The very first thing we did when we heard about the Abbott recall was, we could foresee that this was going to create a tremendous shortage,” Perrigo CEO Murray Kessler said.
They knew. The blithering idiot in the Oval Office was the one who was unable to grasp the seriousness of the situation. And, his staff apparently failed to notice the coming crisis, either. Does no one in the White House have an ear to the ground of day to day life for ordinary Americans? The Biden administration allowed America to become like a Third World nation when the FDA shut down the Abbott formula plant. Abbott is the largest producer of baby formula. Of course there was going to be a crisis without a back-up plan to replace the formula not going to market.
We were told the grown-ups would be in charge in a Biden administration. Biden promised to hire professionals with experience in government work. These people were supposed to be the ones who know how to get things done. Too bad Biden is still so Trump deranged (as is his entire White House) because if he had followed Trump’s template on hiring people for his cabinet, he’d have business men and women who do know how to get things done. Instead we have a president who is too old and feeble for the job and a White House full of career bureaucrats who have no clue on working with the private sector to get things done. Good job, everyone.
This article was originally published by Hot Air. Read the original article.
