A federal judge in Texas ruled that some of the mandated benefits in health plans governed by the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional. The Texas lawsuit was filed by conservative stakeholders.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor… ruled that the members of one of the three groups that make coverage recommendations, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, were not lawfully appointed under the Constitution because they were not nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
The FDA used to have a laboratory located at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2014, they moved it to consolidate with other FDA facilities nearby. Because these are reasonably careful and conscientious people, they conducted a formal clean-up before they moved, and during that process they found 327 vials of unclaimed samples of viruses “inside cardboard boxes stored in the back left corner of an FDA laboratory’s cold storage room.” Six of them contained smallpox, one contained Russian spring-summer viral encephalitis (the subject of previous lab accidents), and nine had labels that couldn’t be read.