What has been the response of the Biden administration?
To reassure Americans, the White House hosted a summit on the issue on June 1 involving the president, top officials and executives from major manufacturers.
The discussion was intended to highlight the administration’s struggle to obtain more volume of the product, including by relaxing import rules and providing military transport to freight what was imported.
But the message fell apart right on camera, as Biden tried to get executives to agree that no one could have foreseen that Abbott’s actions would lead to a national crisis.
The executives contradicted him. “From the beginning” it was predictable, said Robert Cleveland, a senior vice president at Reckitt.
The United States organized a flight to deliver 110,000 pounds of Nestlé infant formula from Germany to Texas on June 9.
The formula, equivalent to about 1.6 million 8-ounce bottles, will be available nationwide and more announcements of Nestlé formula deliveries will be made in the coming days, it said.
“We are not going to rest until we solve this problem, and we are working to ensure safer formulas are available on store shelves across the country,” President Joe Biden said in a statement provided to Reuters.