The Biden presidency was born from crisis. And that was by design.
The …
The Biden presidency was born from crisis. And that was by design. The country was looking for stability during the chaos of COVID-19, and the former vice president offered a shaken electorate the promise of tested leadership and trusted experience. At the very least, Biden said he could offer an improvement over the reality television politics that had defined his opponent’s time in office. And that pitch worked. He won the White House, but more crises followed. A land war in Europe, a persistent pandemic, an ugly end to the war in Afghanistan, and an unrelenting cycle of historic inflation: Each challenge came so quickly, compounding and cascading over the last, that White House staffers reportedly joked that a plague of locusts must be next. Instead, it was baby formula. 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.
