President Joe Biden will meet infant formula manufacturers on Wednesday in an effort to solve ongoing supply chain problems, almost four months after the product first started disappearing off shelves.
The White House said Biden would host a roundtable with leaders of manufacturers ByHeart, Bubs Australia, Reckitt, Perrigo Co. and Gerber.
AP reports the list has one notable omission: Abbott Nutrition, the company whose Michigan plant was shut down in February over safety concerns, sparking the shortage in the United States.
Biden will have at his side Heath and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
The meeting is expected to provide an update on what the administration has dubbed Operation Fly Formula to import formula from overseas into the U.S. and deploy the Korean War-era production law to require suppliers of the formula manufacturers to prioritize their orders in a bid to ease any production bottlenecks.
The White House previously claimed Biden’s administration made the baby formula crisis a top priority as early as February, even though the president claimed ignorance of the problem as recently as last month, as Breitbart News reported.
Meanwhile a growing number of likely voters nationally are showing concern over the crisis, according to a survey by left-wing think tank Data for Progress.
The poll, taken from May 20 to 24 with 1,169 likely voters, showed that 94 percent of voters are concerned about the country’s baby formula shortage.
Fifty-three percent said they were “very” concerned, 31 percent said they were “somewhat” concerned, while only ten percent were “only a little” concerned. Seven percent said they were not concerned at all.