Thread by @ENBrown

A lot of people are missing the big picture on the baby formula shortage. This isn’t just about potentially tainted formula & its recall....

As Jonathan Adler asks @reason, “in a well-functioning market, any temporary shortage caused by the removal of one company's product from the market would be addressed relatively quickly. Why hasn't that happened here?” reason.com/volokh/2022/05…

Partly, we can blame tariffs & quotas.

But another major reason is that the US gov't *doesn’t like the way foreign formula is labeled* 😔

Officials apparently think formula with labels that don’t conform to their every whim are so dangerous it would be better if kids starve

Many American parents praise baby formula imported from the EU. But they have to buy it on the black market.

The FDA won’t allow European formulas to be sold here because of inane labeling concerns (something @EricBoehm87 delves into here reason.com/2022/05/09/ame…)

The EU arguably has stricter nutritional standards for formula than the US does.

It requires baby formula to be made w/the omega-3 fatty acid DHA (which we don’t).

It bans some forms of added sugars.

European baby formula is also more likely to be organic, derived from grass-fed cows, & made w/milk fat (as opposed to plant-based fats). There are also more goat-milk based and “gentle” options sold there than there are here.

A study published in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition in 2019 found that 15 of 16 European formulas it looked at MET FDA NUTRITION REQUIREMENTS.

But “none met all FDA label requirements”. So they're illegal here. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31107795/

So, the FDA is preventing perfectly good—perhaps better than American— baby formula from coming here bc of things like labels not explicitly stating that it contains less than 1 milligram of iron per 100 calories or not listing all ingredients (which can be found elsewhere)

Because of these labeling concerns, the FDA says that a bunch of baby formula brands legal (and highly regulated) in Europe must be seized by US border agents when discovered accessdata.fda.gov/cms_ia/importa…

Here's more on American tariffs on baby formula, from @GabAboutTrade cato.org/blog/rock-bye-…

And here's more on quotas & labeling based seizures of EU formula, from @scottlincicome capitolism.thedispatch.com/p/americas-inf…

As Lincicome points out, concerns about EU baby formula safety ring especially hollow considering that “it was an unsanitary American factory that fueled our current crisis, and the FDA may have even ignored a whistleblower’s complaints about the situation"

lol/sob: and right on cue, they're trying to turn this government failure into a grab for more government power news.yahoo.com/duckworth-asks…