We Starve Babies, Don't We?

Nothing exposes the rampant corruption in the American media more than the baby formula crisis. True, the media did offer a few sketchy reports about the problem when the Biden administration was pretending to deal with it. But now, as the Biden administration has failed and the problem continues and as new mothers are agonizing about how they will feed their babies, the story has disappeared from the headlines.

I should not need to mention it, but if a Republican president were in charge of dealing with the crisis we would be hearing about it nonstop. The front page of the New York Times would be filled with pictures of starving babies, accompanied by accusations that the Republicans were killing babies.

Given the fact that the mainstream media has become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, the truth is, we no longer have a free press. People around the world who look at what is happening to America can easily see that our claims to a free press are compromised by the fact that the media is more concerned with making Democrats look good and Republicans look bad. That makes it propaganda. In many ways, that’s its only mission.

So, young mothers cannot find baby formula, but the papers reported this morning that the big baby who supposedly runs our country cleaned his plate yesterday. Yes, indeed. Joe Biden ate it all, and acted like a toddler. If you thought that Biden’s mental age was in single digits, you were right.

Anyway, thank God for the Daily Mail. Today, the British tabloid reports the baby formula crisis. New mother Stacy Liberatore, a woman who must feed her baby formula, writes two stories about the crisis. Her reporting puts other media outlets to shame.

So, why not pass along some of the bad news.

America's baby formula shortage dominated headlines earlier this year when the Abbott plant, the country's largest manufacturer, suddenly shut down amid fears over contamination. 

There was round-the-clock coverage of the crisis and promises from the Biden administration that all red-tape would be slashed in order to feed babies and calm mothers' fears. 

But nearly six months later, the infant care shelves in drugstores around the US remain bare and this week, the shortage reached a new low with 28.5 percent of products now completely out of stock.  

Biden's solution has been to fly in foreign formula to try to plug the gap, but the 802,446 bottles that arrive per shipment barely line the stomachs of the 3million babies born every year.

In the last six months, the White House has flown in 60million bottles in total - enough to feed America's babies for just one week.

Six months of urgent flights has produced enough formula to feed babies for one week. And you thought that we were a serious country. One recalls that Tom Friedman was greeted with the usual chorus of derision when he declared that a country that could not build high speed rail was not a serious country.

How serious is the country when it cannot find enough baby formula and when no one aside from young mothers seems to care. Considering that this mostly involves women, you might imagine that feminists would be up in arms about this flagrant misogyny. In truth, they are up in arms about abortion, which would, dare we say, make formula less needed.

Liberatore describes her own experience as a young mother who must feed her baby formula:

Staring at row upon row of bare shelves where baby formula should be, I was gripped by a now-familiar cocktail of emotions - frustration, dread, exhaustion, panic – as I asked myself repeatedly how I was going to feed my five-month-old daughter.

I broke down in tears in the middle of the aisle in a CVS in New Jersey, pushed to my limit by the sheer helplessness of navigating the acute baby formula supply chain crisis that’s gripping America, leaving supermarket and pharmacy shelves bare and millions of new parents like me struggling to find enough produce to feed their children.

Desperation descends on her American family:

My fiancé John and I spend countless hours trawling mommy groups and online marketplaces, stopping at supermarkets and pharmacy chains in hopes of some new stock on the shelves.

In desperation, last week I paid $40 - almost double the retail cost - for two bottles of ready-feed that lasted us two days after trawling a website where people buy and sell formula for the only brand that doesn’t make my daughter ill. 

Am I helping support an underground market in these goods that's making this issue worse? Probably. Do I care about that right now? No, I do not. I'm desperate. I'm doing what I need to do to feed my child and if that means relying on strangers’ social media help through posts they share offering swaps or information on where they've seen certain brands, email alerts, hours trawling the internet and spending a small fortune on an essential product, that's that we must do. We have a child to feed and this urgent situation doesn’t feel like it's going to ease any time soon. 

How bad is it? By the numbers, please:

According to the market research firm IRI, which tracks inventory across 125,000 stores in the U.S, about 30 percent of powdered formula products were out of stock for the week ended July 3. That's less stock than in May when media coverage was at its peak. The variety of products on shelves has shrunk too.

The most recently available data, from the week ending June 17, shows 22 percent of all formula is still out of stock in the U.S. It's a marginal improvement but I don't see a difference on the shelves. In New Jersey, where I live, and in New York, where I work, stock is down 30 percent and 29 percent respectively. 

And then, Liberatore asks the salient question:

It's since become a familiar theme. Every day I ask: 'How can this be happening in America?'

I feel forgotten by my country. This shortage has been happening for months – affecting millions of parents in red and blue states from coast to coast - yet mine and others’ struggles feel like they just aren't important enough for those in power to have gotten a proper grip on.

When President Biden announced his big import drive, he made a point of saying he was not briefed on the issue before it became a crisis in April - even though formula manufacturers insist they warned him about the looming shortages in February. The FDA temporarily eased its strict rules on importing foreign-made formula to allow the government imports and though the White House has invoked the Defense Production Act that allows it to intervene in private industries, but it feels very much like a case of too little, too late.

How can this be happening in America? Well, it isn’t your father’s America any more. It is Joe Biden’s America. And, dare we say, the media, intrepid watchdogs guarding us against the least manifestation of Trumpism, does not care if babies starve.