> Theranos generated around 7.8 million test results for Arizona consumers alone. Of those, roughly 834,000 had to be voided or corrected

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.

>Theranos generated around 7.8 million test results for Arizona consumers alone. Of those, roughly 834,000 had to be voided or corrected. These were real people getting medical information they relied on.

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.

That's wild. Yeah, a quick look into the background of this author leaves little doubt about what their career is.

Thats why I found the article so interesting. I was literally thinking about this yesterday: how your story shapes who you are. It isn't particularly profound, but it is interesting how your perception is shaped by how you present yourself, what is on the internet about you, your story and crucially, who vouches for you.

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.

Incredible post. Thank you!

Unfortunately that's the big message the courts gave, isn't it. Elizabeth Holmes used the names of important government officials to deceive two classes of people:

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).

Great comment, thank you for centering it on the actual victims of her deceit.

Why only 830K of 7.8M?

> To even suggest that Elizabeth Holmes didn't really harm anyone because she in prison for investor fraud, and then have the nerve to call that distinction "nuance", is absurd.

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.

Some good points here except:

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.

I don’t know a thing about Holmes, I’m just reacting to your framing - don’t all medical tests that real people rely on have error rates? Doesn’t an 11% error rate suggest something that was real and mostly works but maybe wasn’t ready for prime time? The error rate could have been higher, perhaps. You only listed false positives, while the much more concerning problem would be false negatives - people who didn’t get scared or act when they should have. Still, a medical test error rate on its own doesn’t suggest deceit or fraud. People receiving terrifying but wrong results is a common problem that already exists in medicine.

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.