There’s no reason one plant closure should spark a baby formula crisis
By Dr. Lyndon Haviland
May 25, 2022
TheHill.com
The Biden administration is pulling every lever to expedite the delivery of baby formula across America. Invoking the Defense Production Act and sourcing supplies overseas through its “Operation Fly Formula” initiative will hopefully bring cans to store shelves over the next few weeks. For worried families, it can’t happen fast enough.
But there’s the troubling fact that got us here: How could the closure of a single production plant trigger a national public health crisis and throw the entire food supply for millions of American infants into total chaos? And what’s being done to make sure it never happens again? …
Longer-term competition must be fortified so that the closure of one plant doesn’t put us in this same predicament again. At a minimum, we must have contingency plans in place to ensure ready food supplies exist so that American children are not at risk of dying from either unsafe manufacturing or faults in the supply chain.