I got one of these! I called my New York doctor in a panic because apparently my kidneys and liver were failing. We ordered a bunch of rush tests, they came back fine, then we did a bunch more to confirm. That was a lot of stress, wasted medical professionals' time and cost for a single person. (The only reason I didn't go straight to ER is I was doing my start-up at the time and, America being America, didn't have the best health insurance.)
I don't think my doctor reported that result as being wrong. I certainly didn't–I was too busy confronting my impending doom. So my HDHP wound up paying for not only the un-needed follow-up tests, but also for the Theranos test. (I don't remember if I paid a deductible. It was at a Walgreens.)
> She did it before for Paul Logan and Anthony Scaramucci, and now is softening the road for Elizabeth Holmes pardon
She's maintaining access to powerful people. It's a well-known problem with access journalism.
Yes, CNBC is a prime example :-)
I’d been reading about them for a few years, never got personally involved in any capacity, was in Phoenix for a long-distance relationship and saw the billboard and thought “why not?” When I saw the results I panicked. Ex post facto I figured something went wrong with my draw (full venous draw, by the way).
I have no background in medicine, and I was probably considerably stupider at the time inasmuch as I was in my twenties, so I never connected it to being a fraud, instead concluding their kit didn’t work reliably and that they’d launched prematurely and would have to pull back from the market and regroup (and get sued) for a while.
So yes
Those are rookie numbers.
When Merck hid data showing Vioxx was causing heart attacks and death, not only did no one go to jail, but the fines were less than the revenue of the drug.
Vioxx would go on to kill an estimated 50,000 people before being pulled off the market.
Holmes made the mistake of having too few lobbyists and FDA insiders.
Whataboutism aside, "having too few lobbyists and FDA insiders" isn't going to save a product that doesn't work and that doctors stop relying on. Once people were shown behind the curtain, it was game over.
Then I got to the end of the article and saw all of those other articles with other people with "reputation issues". It was so meta. Even having this story hit the top of Hacker News might have been calculated.
a) as you point out, give wrong medical information to nearly a million people. Information they probably acted on and damaged themselves.
b) deceived investors.
ONE of these things matters to the American justice system.
Whose names did she use for that?
Henry Kissinger (former United States Secretary of State);
Jim Mattis (retired Marine Corps four-star general);
George Shultz (former United States Secretary of State);
Richard Kovacevich (former CEO of Wells Fargo);
William Perry (former United States Secretary of Defense); and
William Foege (former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
However, the prosecution did bring charges for both against Holmes, harm caused to patients by Theranos, and the defauding of investors. She was only convicted of defauding investors, by a jury of her peers.
Sunny Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients and Theranos did settle a class-action lawsuit against them.
I do believe the publicity around Holmes in part was about distancing the investors (the list you provided) from any kind of responsibility or PR blowback.
Anyway, the game is rigged, I just think it's important to see how it is rigged. I don't like to shed doubt on jury decisions, it really is the best thing we have. Prosecution motivation can be swayed, defense can be under/over funded, but a jury of your peers, while imperfect, really is the best way to make these decisions.
I also don't know what legally an investor can be held accountable for.
Now he only has the option to let people go for crimes, either by pardoning them or instructing prosecutors to do nothing.
Trump has used both options he has, so the ability to convict people would have been disastrous.
While I agree to the larger point you are making, I am hard pressed to understand what they could have done. Its not like they were not involved at all, there are plethora of accounts of these people receiving reports which just lied. They were blocked from access to the actual equipment for "security reasons" so they couldn't get a third party assessment done. At some point you have to believe your business partner will not outright lie because otherwise how do you do business with them. Life cannot run on cryptographic proofs.
In November 2021, a woman named Erin Tompkins testified in Elizabeth Holmes's trial that Theranos had given her a false-positive HIV result in 2015
I have been blown away by all of the efforts to rehabilitate Holme’s reputation and erase any of her wrongdoings.
I’m sure some of it is coming from directly seeded or funded efforts from Holmes doing PR work, but I think most of it across social media is actually organic. Elizabeth Holmes was so clearly caught out committing fraud that it’s triggering contrarian reactions among people who think they’re the ones who can see the real story behind every media narrative. Unlike other unpopular figures like Zuckerberg or Musk, most people had never heard of Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos until her fraud was revealed and became a major news story. When the media introduces a figure as a bad person, some people are so hardwired to be contrarian that they must take the opposite position.
The other difficulty with this story is that many people still don’t understand what she did wrong. This is common all over social media and even on Hacker News in this thread. I see a lot of arguments that she was only doing “fake it till you make it” like every other startup from people who don’t understand what that phrases means (it means you present yourself as a bigger, more established company to overcome resistance to being a small startup, not that you literally fake that your product works). I responded to another comment from someone who thought that because all blood tests have error rates, Theranos having problems was no different than any other blood testing company, which is a false equivalence that doesn’t even begin to compute if you know anything about the fraud they were doing.
Then there are layers of other social issues being injected into the controversy. I knew someone in person who grew suspicious that the only reason Elizabeth Holmes was prosecuted was because of her gender. They lived in a social media bubble where all CEOs were evil criminals doing frauds all the time and therefore the only reason Holmes could be singled out and treated differently was due to her gender. This led to a wild argument that going after her was unfair, actually, even acknowledging that she did the fraud. That was a conversation I exited from because there’s no overcoming that type of belief with logic.
The most interesting conspiracy theories I continue to see are the belief that Theranos technology actually was working and she was on the way to solving it all, but that the industry didn’t want to be disrupted and therefore they had her taken out. This one doesn’t even hold up to minimal research but it persists among those with deep conspiracy theory tendencies.
It’s wild to observe how often this plays out. Something about this cases triggers a lot of people’s desires to doubt and defend, and there’s a large audience for content that takes Holme’s side no matter how illogical or contrary to the facts.
Not disagreeing with the rest of your comment, but regarding this tangent: haven't there been a ton of (say) "AI" companies that quietly used humans in the background and gave the impression AI was doing the work, because their vision was that that was the future?
Not that I think that would excuse this case in any way regardless - just mentioning because of the drawn comparison.
These stories were popular during the period when people didn’t understand how AI worked or what was possible. It was feasible to produce fake demos that relied on humans doing the work because few people understood how AI worked. If your demo took an input and produced an output 1 to 12 hours later with variable delay nobody questioned it because they didn’t know what AI looked like. They thought maybe that’s how long the computers had to think or that there was a single computer working through a backlog.
Now everyone has used ChatGPT and understands that actual AI doesn’t work like that, and if the task actually took 12 hours of crunching on tokens the bill would be an eye watering large number. So you can’t get away with faking your AI responses with a few humans doing the work.
There were also follow on stories where writers got confused about hybrid systems that had humans doing review and RLHF, thinking that any involvement of a human in the loop was equivalent of faking AI by having humans do the work. Most of the stories I saw toward the end of this trend were this style.
They’re also unfamiliar with FDA-regulated spaces where it’s not unheard of for VPs and C-suite types to receive fines and jail time and bans from the industry.
It is outrageous to say an early stage company giving inaccurate diagnostics "is like" giving patients incompatible blood transfusions.
10-15% of people who get the wrong blood die. People who get inaccurate diagnostics get scared.
Very different and this undermines the credibility of your otherwise valid point.
That's only true if those people always follow up with a second test using traditional means. If they don't follow-up and instead immediately go past diagnostics into some sort of action, then it could be catastrophic in a manner exceeding being scared.
Now you can argue that if the patient is working with any medical practitioner worth their salt, that med will surely ask for a second test. But is it obvious that that will always be the case?
Google tells me the FIT test for cancer has a false negative rate of between 8% and 26%. That appears to be likely worse than the Theranos numbers you cited here.
However saying “all tests have error rates, therefore all tests with error rates are equally bad” is a completely wrong takeaway. One of the things Theranos was doing was using traditional equipment to run the tests as a smokescreen for the fact that they didn’t have any working technology. So the results should have been similar to anyone else running them when that was the case.
But there is a problem that when a company is saying they’re doing one thing or using one technology but your actual tests could be run on unknown combinations of unknown lab hardware depending on the day and the whims of a CEO trying to defraud investors, you don’t know what kind of results you’re going to get.
Real labs have established controls and ship reference ranges for their test results because they control their processes. If Theranos was doing who knows what to keep the test results flowing to keep the illusion up for the primary purpose of satisfying investors, that’s not what you want to see out of your test lab.
> Google tells me the FIT test for cancer has a false negative rate of between 8% and 26%. That appears to be likely worse than the Theranos numbers you cited here.
You’re looking at the wrong thing. The Theranos number above is for tests they determined had to be voided because they weren’t run properly due to procedural errors they identified. Their own incompetence or fraud. And those are just the ones they admitted to!
The false negative rate for the test you Googled is a false negative rate, which is a simple fact that tests can’t reliably diagnose everything even when run properly. Tests look for markers in samples as a proxy for a condition, and those markers aren’t always present at levels that meet the thresholds even if the condition exists. Even when run absolutely perfectly, a test like that will have false negative rates.
The part you’re missing is that the Theranos voided and invalidated tests were due to problems on top of the normal test variation rates because they were from Theranos doing things wrong, which is directly downstream of Holmes manipulating investors.
> But there is a problem that when a company is saying they’re doing one thing or using one technology but your actual tests could be run on unknown combinations of unknown lab hardware depending on the day and the whims of a CEO trying to defraud investors, you don’t know what kind of results you’re going to get.
Exactly. They were using Siemens machines, but they often had insufficient blood because they were trying to maintain a pretense of "nano collection". Siemens' machines weren't even trying to pretend they could work like this, so Theranos kept trying to figure out ways to dilute or diffuse the samples they did have to get to a usable volume for the tests. But of course every experimentation there was destructive, so they had even less to use.
So we're not talking about error rates on properly calibrated machines, with sufficient blood that re-tests could be performed before needing another collection, we're talking about error rates on effectively misusing machines.
Also, the standard for tests in the medical world is usually much higher than 11%, except for things that are life threatening for which no better test exists.