The U.S. House of Representatives has released a report on the fifty infant deaths related to Fisher-Price's (NASDAQ: MAT) Rock 'n Play inclined sleeper. The report states that the company ignored "critical warnings" from both parents and pediatricians regarding the risk of serious harm.
"Despite clear evidence that this put infants at risk of serious harm or death," the report states, "Fisher-Price... continued to market [the Rock 'n Play] for overnight sleep."
The report was released on June 7 before a Congressional hearing was scheduled to be held on the same issue.
Fisher-Price wasn't the only one under the microscope of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The committee reportedly looked at five different manufacturers of infant inclined sleepers and found that "Fisher-Price and other manufacturers... operate with inadequate oversight."
The report also states that, with its current authority, the committee is not able to "protect infants from potential death."
"What we found is absolutely shocking," the committee's chairwoman, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y. told reporters. "It is a national scandal."
The company, meanwhile, claims that it conducts extensive testing and would never put money before safety.
"I assure you that everyone at Fisher-Price believes that every product we offer is safe and we do not and would never sell any product about which we thought otherwise," Chuck Scothon, Fisher-Price senior vice president and general manager, testified before Congress.
"On behalf of myself and everyone at Mattel, I want to convey my deep and sincere condolences to parents and anyone affected by the heartbreaking tragedies we will discuss today," Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz said at the hearing. Fisher-Price is one of Mattel's subsidiaries. "I am a father of four children, and I can only imagine that there cannot be a more terrible loss than that of a child."
The Rock 'n Play was introduced in 2019, meaning it was on the market for a decade before this investigation began, October 2019. The Rock 'n Play is a soft, collapsible sleeper that holds the baby in a semi-upright position.
According to the report, Fisher-Price was warned by the company's internal safety committee about the fact that sleeping at an inclined angle could potentially be deadly to infants long before bringing the product to market and still allegedly performed only rudimentary testing prior to release.
The company reportedly also only consulted with one doctor before approving the sleeper for sale. That so-called doctor has also since been accused of practicing without a license by the Texas Medical Board.
Once the sleeper made it to market, its popularity boomed amongst mothers around the world. Soon, the single product was bringing in "millions of dollars" for the company on a yearly basis. Over the full decade, the product brought in $200 million in revenue.
"We trusted a name brand, and we were wrong," Erika Richter, who testified before the congressional committee regarding her daughter's Rock n' Play-related death in 2018. By that time, the company has confirmed that it knew about 14 deaths related to the sleeper.
It was in 2010, at most a year after the product's release, that Fisher-Price received their first warning about the Rock 'n Play. In Australia, the company was "privately warned" by the country's consumer protection agency that using the sleeper for sleeping "is at odds with widely accepted and promoted best practices."
In 2012, the first infant death was connected with the now "wildly successful" Rock 'n Play. According to the report, a two-month-old "'stopped breathing'" while in the sleeper but was revived. Tragically, a 15-week-old died while in the sleeper in the same year.
While the information regarding Fisher-Price's alleged disregard for infant life is undoubtedly horrifying, the report actually describes what might be an even deeper problem.
"The Committee's investigation revealed grave flaws in the U.S. consumer product safety system, in which manufacturers are largely left to police themselves," the committee writes.
The report argues that Fisher-Price and manufacturers like it are "permitted to conduct unregulated research into the safety of [their] own products, help develop the industry's voluntary standards to govern those same products, and override attempts by CPSC to release important safety information about their product to the public."
To make matters worse, most of the sort of regulation CPSC is writing about is voluntary. Even direct warnings from agencies like the CPSC are not enough to force a company to take the danger seriously.
For instance, Fisher-Price allegedly specifically and only decided to recall the Rock n' Play after the committee obtained and threatened to reveal data on the infant deaths related to the product associated with the product. The data was obtained when Fisher-Price "inadvertently disclosed" it to the committee.
Prior to the release of the CPSC report, Fisher-Price recalled two other sleeper products that had been connected to at least four infant deaths in less than a year. The Fisher-Price 4-in-1 Rock 'n Glide Soother and the 2-in-1 Soothe 'n Play Glider have both been recalled.
On the bright side, the CPSC has now established a federal safety standard that baby sleeping products will have to meet before going to market. Now the agency will hopefully have the authority to protect infants from "inclined sleepers, travel and compact bassinets, and in-bed sleepers, which have been linked to dozens of infant deaths."