Would you be surprised that President Joe Biden’s Food and Drug Administration learned nothing from its nationwide baby formula debacle last year?
Well, I hope not, because that might make you a Democrat if you were amazed by that. Of course, the leftists haven’t learned the error of their ways. That’s what makes them the Left; “Self-reflection and correction” is not exactly their style and they always have a scapegoat to blame for their problems (white men, former president Donald Trump, not enough federal power, etc).
Anyway, a new report claims that the FDA repeated nearly the exact same mistakes it made in 2022 with the recent Reckitt baby formula shortage recall — albeit on a smaller scale than the one in 2022 that left mothers and fathers searching far and wide for nourishment for their newborns.
In February 2023, Reckitt recalled thousands of its products from U.S. store shelves due to potential bacteria contamination. Yet the genesis of that problem didn’t start in February, it actually started at least in November 2022 and possibly earlier.
The FDA, according to POLITICO, made note of contamination last fall but apparently waited until a second inspection in February to announce a recall.
“It’s stunning that it’s almost identical to what happened in 2021,” Mitzi Baum, CEO of STOP Foodborne Illness, told POLITICO. “Lessons have not been learned.”
What should have been done, according to Baum, is that the FDA should have been proactive.
“FDA continues to be reactive,” Baum explained. “It’s the internal processes that have not been fixed, if this is happening again.”
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The FDA, however, claims that it is on the industry to correct its problems and comply with existing standards. The Deputy Director of the Regulatory Affairs Center for Science in the Public Interest Sarah Sorscher says that that excuse doesn’t make much sense.
“They need to do better,” Sorscher told POLITICO.
Sorscher even pointed out that the FDA had already found safety issues relating to “sanitation issues” at the plant in question in July of 2022.
“If something like that is coming up, FDA should be back in there sooner to ensure that the corrective actions were adequate,” Sorscher told the media outlet. “That’s a problem.”
What is the FDA’s solution? Well, its leaders say that it needs more government power so that it can demand records from these companies.
It sounds as if the FDA hadn’t exhausted all of its existing regulatory powers regarding baby formula issues, however, and were late to the ball in following up once an original problem was found in the Reckitt plant.
That sort of sums the federal government up: Federal agencies are granted certain authority, federal employees fail to exercise said authority due to laziness or incompetence, and Federal agency leaders respond by saying more government control is needed to solve the solution. by pointing their fingers at everybody else.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.