. . . sort of. I can't believe Walgreens fell for this crap. That aside, she's a sociopath. She purposely got pregnant to try to evade prison and get sympathy. Probation and an ankle bracelet with home confinement coming. Alright, maybe not; but I was born jaded. https://time.com/6132636/elizabeth-holmes-guilty/ She's a POS.
Wild story. We all have those people at our jobs that pretend they have all the answers even when they don't. "fake it till you make it" BS. This woman made millions doing that
She had GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Novartis in the mix. Unreal. The infuriating part is only investors who were bilked will get a reward that probably doesn't half-exist anymore. What about the duped patients? Between her, Epstein, and Maxwell, sometimes you just have to throw your hands up.
The ironic part is that since Holmes got caught, fraud has become cool, and everyone's doing it. Musk and his stock fraud, Matt Damon hocking crypto on TV, that ridiculous hedge fund manager Cathie Wood, etc. So it doesn't surprise me at all that people fell for her, considering people are falling for the current generation for frauds as we speak.
It's worth mentioning that she was 19 when this wild ride began and lots of 19 year olds do ethically challenged things to get ahead. This is particularly true if the context is "everybody is doing it and getting rich" and the stock market has been on a major bender for half a decade now. I'm not defending her but I have no trouble believing the brains behind the fraud was her sugar daddy and she only gradually realized exactly how corrupt the things they were doing were. As to the getting pregnant to avoid sentencing I think the odds are pretty good that she got pregnant to have a child before she went to prison for 14 years or whatever the sentence effectively turns into. She's in her mid-30's now and her window is closing and my guess is she just wanted to get it done before prison made it a lot more complicated.
She came up with an idea and thought she could will it into existence before the lies caught up to her. The problem was she put peoples lives in play... but I think she was found not guilty on charges related to that. I don't think she'll do much time in prison.
Forgive my ignorance on the case but how did she put peoples lives in danger? Wasn’t the big fraud of the entire deal just that her medical device couldn’t produce the results and they instead just took the blood and pushed it through traditional lab tests that took longer than advertised? I haven’t read too much into it but most articles just center around her whacky quirks and shit and not the flawed technology. America loves the drama way more than the actual device facts.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-patients-hurt-by-theranos-1476973026 Agony, Alarm and Anger for People Hurt by Theranos’s Botched Blood Tests Sheri Ackert worried she might have a new tumor. Steve Hammons stopped taking his blood-thinning medication. Kimberly Toy emptied the pasta and sweets from her cupboards and said: “I can’t believe this happened.” What they have in common are dubious test results from Theranos Inc. A review of regulatory records and interviews with patients shows the Palo Alto, Calif., company didn’t just burn investors who bought into its promise to revolutionize the world of blood testing. It also left a trail of agonized patients who had been drawn to Theranos by its claims of convenience, low cost and reliability. While inaccurate tests can occur at any laboratory, Theranos failed to maintain basic safeguards to ensure consistent results, according to regulators, independent lab directors and quality-control experts. Questionable test results from Theranos caused some patients to become alarmed and others to adjust the amount of medicine they were taking. Rattled patients who told The Wall Street Journal they sought more information about their results said they got no response, and weeks or months passed before Theranos told many patients that their results were unreliable. Mr. Hammons, a retired marketer who lives in Peoria, Ariz., and had heart surgery last year, found out only last Friday that Theranos had corrected a September 2015 test showing his blood taking more than six times longer than normal to clot. The results from five different visits to Theranos in six weeks varied so much that Mr. Hammons said he was told by his doctor to stop taking his blood thinner, called warfarin, and switch to a less potent medicine. Theranos sent him the corrected report for the one test after the Journal asked the company about his results. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and the company declined to comment for this article. In April, the company told federal health regulators it had voided all test results from its proprietary Edison devices from 2014 and 2015, as well as some other tests it ran on conventional machines. In all, Theranos said it issued “tens of thousands” of voided or revised test results to doctors or patients.
Selling snake oil cures off of a wooden cart in the 1830s and defrauding investors now is as old as America and apple pie.
We know for a fact her magic testing device told people they had diseases they didnt actually have resulting in misdiagnoses and unnecessary medical procedures. Just as worse though, it gave clean bills of health to people that were sick and doesnt get talked about as much. Imagine someone with HIV, they don't have insurance so they never go to the doc but they take her test at Walgreens cause it's easy. Test says their blood is good because its a piece of shit. They go on to have sex with multiple partners.
Got it. Thank you. I didn’t see a lot on this. Only a ton of articles about those poor multimillionaire investors of course.
The problem with this analysis is that the device in question didn't really exist. Theranos was outsourcing the testing to prop up claims that the device was working. By the time they effectively threw in the towel on it they had done millions of tests on other companies devices and then returned the info to the patients in question. Theranos probably had normal testing failure rates plus a small co-efficient based on the extra step of jiggering the process to report results. What is unknown at this point is how many samples were not large enough to work on the other devices, forcing Theranos to make shit up or request additional blood samples from the patients. That number could be significant. The selling point of Theranos device was that it required far less blood to work it's magic. It supposedly prevented the long process of having a phlebotomist draw multiple tubes of blood that we have all experienced at some point and some of us regularly.
I read the book "Bad Blood"... the author absolutely destroyed the Theranos house of cards. It really was a medical charade... Holmes described the miniLab as “the most important thing humanity has ever built”. But at best, the lab could do immunoassays using microfluidics. The tiny blood sample had to be diluted extensively (for which there are no reference standards or precedents), leading to artefacts and spurious results. Later inspections by the FDA demonstrated poor quality control of multiple lab tests using Theranos equipment, and several examples of failed proficiency testing. The rest of the hundreds of routine assays the lab was supposed to deliver would require cytometry, general chemistry and DNA amplification. These were done using routine commercially available lab equipment, or were hived off to other facilities. That was the well-kept secret inside the toxic work environment that Bad Blood exposes. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05149-2
Elizabeth Holmes and Martin Shkreli would have made great bedfellows. Theranos was a complete sham from the get-go.
