faboo mama

It must be the month of capitulation. The federal gov’t plans to run ads promoting breastfeeding hit a snag when lobbyists for the baby formula industry whined.

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.

Ha! See, once again Republicans are sticking their noses where they don’t belong. Last I checked, breastfeeding was something that occurred between a mother and child (with additional support if necessary). But the topper is this:

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.

Thank goodness Thompson dropped out the presidential race.

Gina Ciagne, the office’s public affairs specialist for the campaign, said, “We were ready to go with our risk-based campaign — making breast-feeding a real public health issue — when the formula companies learned about it and came in to complain. Before long, we were told we had to water things down, get rid of the hard-hitting ads and generally make sure we didn’t somehow offend.”

Ciagne and others involved in the campaign said the pushback coincided with a high-level lobbying campaign by formula makers, which are mostly divisions of large pharmaceutical companies that are among the most generous campaign donors in the nation.

Are you surprised? Read on…

Another top agency official who weighed in on the campaign was Ann-Marie Lynch, then in charge of the agency’s Office of Planning and Evaluation. Lynch, a former lobbyist for the drug industry trade association PhRMA, reversed an HHS decision to finance a $630,000 community outreach effort to promote breast-feeding, according to an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post. Asked to comment, Lynch said she never discussed “baby formula issues with baby formula manufacturers” at HHS.

Thankfully, (my former rep.) Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) is checking into things:

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.

This is why it’s important for real life scientists to be involved in policiy decisions. This hiring of former lobbyists and political cronies, isn’t going to do a damn thing but lead us down a path of stupidity and ignorance.

The comments section on this article has a few good points (well at least that stayed on topic did):

Message #6

What do I think? This is America at it’s finest. Money, money, money. Greed - over and over proves to win in our society. This plays perfectly into America resisting to even insure millions of children and their families. Now, without mothers becoming educated by a “negative” ad, formula companies, pharmeceutical companies and health insurance companies will benefit - NOT people - COMPANIES!! Ahhhh - the American world goes round and round.

The Breastfeeding is great, but don’t like, um focus on it by faboo mama, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.