Health and Human Services scandal with a local angle
There’s yet another scandal involving influence peddling in the Bush White House:
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.
We’ll have more about this later. Â Here’s the local angle:
Speaking to the International Lactation Consultant Association in 2005, Haynes, of the HHS women’s health office, said she was “overruled.” Veteran pediatrician and breast-feeding researcher Ruth A. Lawrence of the University of Rochester, who was on the initial advisory committee brought together by Haynes, said the science undergirding the ads was “entirely convincing. Everyone on the committee had to agree on a finding before it was approved. We were very distressed by what happened.”
Interesting how we have no problem “scaring” moms onto not doing crack when they’re pregnant, but scaring moms into doing something to enhance their baby’s lives and ensure their baby’s proper growth and development-”notsomuch”. Give me a freakin beak. Like Exile says, more on this later.