@sshole of Government: Biden Admits He Didn't Even Know About the Baby Formula Crisis Until "Early April"

He was just complaining in that NBC "News" article that the walkbacks from his staff gave the impression that he wasn't in charge.

The impression.

Meanwhile, the baby formula crisis began in October, when a whistleblower complained of unhealthy conditions at the Abbott manufacturing plant. It intensified over the fall as babies fell ill, supposedly due to the Abbott formula, and then hit red alert level in February when the FDA very unwisely shut that plant down without making any plans for reopening it or any plans for ramping up production at other plants.

Remember, the formula affected was special-recipe formula for babies with either allergies or food sensitivities or both. It was specialized formula, and not many plants made it.

Furthermore, this particular plant was the main supplier of formula to food-stamps programs.

And Biden didn't "become aware" of this crisis until "early April."

Why?

Ed Morrissey points out that the President is indispensable in this situation -- only he can invoke the Defense Production Act to order factories to produce the critically-needed product.

Noted Turnip Karine Jean-Pierre tried to walk-back Biden's admission by claiming there was a "whole of government" response to the crisis.

She just kept repeating this, as if it was some sort of magic incantation from Harry Potter books that would make Peter Doocy stop asking her questions.

Via Twitchy. She makes one long for the eloquence, preparedness, and candor of Jen Psaki.

She was also perplexed when asked why it took the White House literally months to respond to the baby formula crisis, and why the President was not informed until newspapers were reporting that desperate moms could not find formula for their babies on supermarket shelves.

Apparently, like his friend Baracky, he learned it from the newspapers, too.

She kept repeating the same empty, meaningless bullet-point which had been written out for her, which is that there was a "whole of government" response to the crisis and that the president "takes this very seriously." She kept offering this as some kind of non-response to questions about why the president was not actually involved in this "whole of government" response until very late in the crisis, and wasn't even aware of it until "early April."

How could he have been "taking it seriously" when he didn't even know about it?

Ed Morrissey notes that even partisan hack Jake Tapper didn't accept a "whole of government" response in which President Ice Cream Cone was out of the loop:

TAPPER: I guess I still just don't fully understand why you didn't tell the President until April. If the problem was reported to the FDA last fall, the FDA didn't check it out until, I think, December and then they shut down the factory in February. The President, the guy who -- the only one who can invoke the Defense Production Act to force companies to produce this incredibly direly needed infant formula. He's not told until April.

Karine Jean-Pierre, your press secretary, just said this has been a whole of government approach. That doesn't include the President?

DEESE: The FDA took the appropriate measures to shut down the facility in February. And when that happened, the FDA and the relevant officials from across the government were on -- focused on the effort to try to increase production from other producers, and also figure out how quickly they could get that facility back online. It took too long to get that facility back online. It took too long to get Abbott to agree to a consent decree.

Once it was clear that that facility was not going to be able to come back online, it was clear we were going to need to even more greatly increased production, particularly of those specialty formulas. But I want to be very clear that the President's role in this has been, at the right and appropriate moments when we needed to do things like the Defense Production Act, when we needed to take extraordinary measures like Operation Fly Formula, he has been informed, he has directed the action that we have taken.

TAPPER: OK. So, the whistleblower complaint in the fall, the FDA waited till December to act, waited until February to shut the plant down, President Biden wasn't told about until April, you don't think any of that should have been done more quickly or sooner? You think everything just went exactly how it's supposed to?

When you've lost Jake Tapper, you've lost Ed Morrissey, AllahPundit, and the 40 commenters who support them at HotAir.

posted by Ace at 01:00 PM

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