Kroger and Walgreen followed Walmart and Supervalu in removing Enfamil Newborn baby formula from store shelves, Bloomberg News reports, adding, "Officials screening samples of the formula and water used to prepare it said results may not come until next week....If bacteria are conclusively found in unopened formula, a formal recall could follow, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said."
The left-wing caricature of greedy businessmen feeding dangerous products to consumers until government regulators tell them to stop has in this case been turned on its head. Instead, the businesses are taking the product off market on their own initiative, before the FDA has even decided the product is at fault, let alone issued a "formal recall." Sometimes self-regulation works, in part because it is in the business's own self-interest not to risk poisoning its own customers, in part because individual businesses can sometimes move faster than a government bureaucracy.
That doesn't mean we should get rid of all public health agencies — state or local-level mortality monitoring may have helped pick up this initial issue, if the formula was indeed at fault.
