The Bush gang sticks to its ‘formula’

August 31, 2007

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: career Bush administration officials had an idea that would benefit the public; affected corporations balked and hired lobbyists, political appointees (“loyal Bushies”) scrapped the idea.

In the latest instance, it was a public-service campaign on breast-feeding scuttled by the infant-formula industry.

In an attempt to raise the nation’s historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.

Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.

The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. In a February 2004 letter, the lobbyists told then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson they were “grateful” for his staff’s intervention to stop health officials from “scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding,” and asked for help in scaling back more of the ads.

“Cherry-topped ice cream scoops”? Seriously?

Last month, we learned that the White House took public-health campaigns so seriously, officials politicized the Surgeon General’s office to an unprecedented extent. But this interference with a public-health campaign is even more ridiculous — instead of giving orders to a non-partisan official, this was the administration taking orders from corporate lobbyists who don’t want mothers to breast-feed.

The evidence seems rather unambiguous.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating allegations from former officials that Carmona was blocked from participating in the breast-feeding advocacy effort and that those designing the ad campaign were overruled by superiors at the formula industry’s insistence.

“This is a credible allegation of political interference that might have had serious public health consequences,” said Waxman, a California Democrat.

The national breast-feeding rate — which reportedly lags behind the rate in many European countries — was apparently unchanged by the industry-backed HHS campaign. And that, of course, was the point of the infant-formula industry’s intervention in the first place.

It seems to be, you guessed it, part of a pattern.

[C]urrent and former HHS officials say the muting of the ads was not the only episode in which HHS missed a chance to try to raise the breast-feeding rate. In April, according to officials and documents, the department chose not to promote a comprehensive analysis by its own Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of multiple studies on breast-feeding, which generally found it was associated with fewer ear and gastrointestinal infections, as well as lower rates of diabetes, leukemia, obesity, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome.

The report did not assert a direct cause and effect, because doing so would require studies in which some women are told not to breast-feed their infants — a request considered unethical, given the obvious health benefits of the practice.

A top HHS official said that at the time, Suzanne Haynes, an epidemiologist and senior science adviser for the department’s Office on Women’s Health, argued strongly in favor of promoting the new conclusions in the media and among medical professionals. But her office, which commissioned the report, was specifically instructed by political appointees not to disseminate a news release.

One political appointee at HHS reportedly gave explicit instructions that there should be “no media outreach to anyone” on breast-feeding research conducted by the agency.

I don’t imagine anyone will find this at all surprising, but it’s good to learn once in a while who’s calling the shots and pulling the strings.

Just another day in Happy Profit Corp-land where the only boobs are the poli-tutes (these guys give whores a bad name), uh, political appointees and the Johns, er, corps who pay them.

  • The right- to- birth gang strikes again……Seriously they will do everything they can to compell a woman to carry a blastocyst/fetus to term, and then they don’t give a flying eff about it. They don’t care if the child is healthy, has enough food, a good education, clean air, a viable future, hell, even a future full of hope and possibilities and the “American Dream” just so long as it is born… and then all I can guess they want is a consumer.

  • I think it’s time the GOP underwent a name change – it should call itself what it really is: the Corporatist Party; that would dispense with any illusion that there is one iota of care or concern for actual people.

  • This is only one instance you became aware of but the philosophy is the same in all federal agencies…a political appointee is in charge the agencies affairs and decisions are not based on the “good of the people” but on the interests of the corporations. When Bush announced he was appointing unqualified personnel to charge each agency I was not alone when I went WTF and now we have the results. Cutting the funding for those positions seems to be the only means congress has been able to use to influence the outcome of their actions.
    We just can’t get rid of these people quick enough. If only roach spray really worked on them. We’ve long since left outrage and have arrived at furious.

  • This issue also has the potential to combine corporate interests with so-called “family values”. I seem to remember back in the early 90s, a mother being arrested because she admitted to “enjoying” the experience of breast-feeding her child.

  • I’ll give the right credit for one thing. They’ve driven me more and more to the left.

  • I hate to disagree with everyone on this one, but I think we’re so used to disagreeing with the administration that we can’t see when they get it right. True, the administration’s motives were fueled by its desire to keep its corporate allies happy, but lets not let that get in the way of a good result. These ads were really offensive. Providing solid information about healthy babies is one thing, but using scare tactics such as pictures of syringes with nipples crosses that line. It doesn’t serve to educate, it serves to scare women and make them feel guilty about choices they make as a parent. When I had my first daughter, I had every intention of breast feeding her, but she wasn’t getting the nutrition she needed and I had to switch to formula. As a mother who only wanted the best for her daughter, I felt very guilty and cried for months over the decision. Years later, with two healthy children and little perspective, I know I did what was best. When I heard of this initiative, I was outraged that our government was using these fear tactics to promote its agenda. I see this proposed initiative as one more way the right is trying to control women’s health issues. Don’t get me wrong, breastfeeding is best for children, but perhaps instead of scaring women into breastfeeding, we should providing more support and health care to mothers to make it viable option.

  • Well I was going to make a bad joke about a Rethug senator from Louisiana, babies and breastfeeding but at this point the jokes write themselves. As a proud Cheeshead I apologize for Tommy the Twit again. Sorry folks!

  • zgirl, I think the point is that the breast feeding rate is lower here than is possible… So if you could come up with what harm would happen if more people would realize that breastfeeding should be normal and default and not something that only hippies do.

    Honestly, I don’t think the numbers would change much.

  • For crying out loud – is there any part of a woman’s body that these idiots won’t try to politicize, corporatize, or otherwise try to control? Every other mammal on earth feeds their offspring with their breasts – what is the big deal about wanting humans to do what’s natural? It’s all about money and control. There are very few reasons to feed a baby artificially. Corporations have taken advantage of the few instances when breastfeeding is not possible and have been very successful convincing women that their boobs are for the pleasure of men and that using them to feed a baby is icky and ruins a woman’s sex appeal. Ri-fucking-diculous, and just plain wrong.

  • same thing happens with the vaccine industry who has pushed the government to mandate more vaccines in an aggressive schedule that exposes children’s immune systems before they are fully developed to multiple toxions in addition to the actually virus/bacteria they are vaccinating for in the first place. Like antifreeze, mercury and aluminum.

  • Perhaps these republicans trying to stick a penis in their mouth in men’s rooms were not breast fed as babies?

  • My parenting experiences are similar to zgirl. I am outraged by the Bush Administration’s complete subservience to corporate lobbying, but the government should not be employing scare tactics to promote breastfeeding. Post-partum depression is through the roof. I can’t prove a causal link between the mommy wars and other forms of social pressure on new moms and depression, but both my intuition and my anecdotal observations suggest that it probably exists. I know that I felt horrible guilt for formula feeding my children even though I was physically incapable of providing my children with enough breastmilk to sustain them.

    To Crissa’s question, it would be beneficial if more people understood the benefits of breastfeeding and if more people did breastfeed. That doesn’t make fearmongering an appropriate vehicle to encourage breastfeeding. It also doesn’t address low maternity leave, lack of workplace support for breastfeeding or pumping, the difficulty for new moms in getting lactation consulting or other breastfeeding resources, or other more fundamental barriers to widespread breastfeeding.

    Blue Angel, in our society there are a lot of reasons to use formula. They include low breastmilk production, inability of an infant to latch, maternal health, and inadequate resources available to a mother. There are women who choose to use formula due to misconceptions about breasts, lactation, and breastfeeding. However, the proposed ad campaign would have tarred every formula feeder with the same brush.

    We need to make it possible for those who can breastfeed to do so, and we need to promote breastfeeding in a constructive and positive way. It is not the government’s role to use fear and negativity to encourage better health.

  • Previous commenters have a good point about fearmongering as well as the guilt associated with not breastfeeding. As a mother that couldn’t get my kids to latch, I chose to pump instead and I got guilt trips from other folks because I didn’t keep trying to make them feed directly. Still, there are two points to make here: first, fearmongering does a great job of motivating people who would otherwise not act (just look at the terrorist-under-every-bush mentality we’ve currently got); second, perhaps the commercials were over the top, but the fact that it was an industry with a very clear conflict-of-interest which caused the commercials to be pulled rather than “consumer” outrage (or should I say producer?) indicates that there is a serious problem. How would you feel if the dangers of lead poisoning to your kids, which forced the removal of lead from paint, were reduced to a single line “May cause problems” in fine print on the side of a paint can because the paint industry had lobbied just like the formula industry? Or a past scandal, when baby food like Gerber’s had the most ungodly things put into it until the government forced them to clean it up? The bottom line (pun intended) is that most corporations are in business for themselves, which is fine and what they need to do to survive, but they have no vested interest in protecting people from their product. That is what government is for and in this case, it failed.

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