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Theranos Faces Congressional Inquiry Over Faulty Blood Tests (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to blood analysis startup Theranos asking for them to explain their failure in providing accurate results to patients using its proprietary blood test technology. The company has faced serious backlash after government and regulatory agencies questioned the results of their proprietary 'Edison' machine, that the company claimed could detect hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood. Not only have the feds proposed banning founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes and the company president Sunny Balwani from the blood-testing business for two years, but Holmes' net worth has been cut from $4.5 billion to zero. Most recently, Walgreens decided to cut ties with the company. House Democrats Frank Pallone, Gene Green and Diana DeGette sent the letter on June 30th, asking Holmes to explain what went wrong, what steps the company is taking to help medical professionals and patients who might have been affected by the manipulated results, and how Theranos plans to comply with regulators. "Given Theranos' disregard for patient safety and its failure to immediately address concerns by federal regulators, we write to request more information about how company policies permitted systemic violations of federal law," reads the letter. Theranos says it plans to clear things up with these lawmakers.
I hope one day the people behind this masterful smearing campaign to destroy a truly disruptive company are identified and shamed.
This reeks of the same manipulative schemes used in the torts reform operation, with "woman suing McDonalds for a hot coffee" being used to mislead and outrage honest people and get them to do the puppet master's dirty work (in that instance, Karl Rove). If you don't know the outcome of that operation, wait until your kid get permanent brain damage caused by tainted cold medication, and you end up with a $25,000 check to pay for a lifetime of specialized care because of quotas the jury wasn't aware of when they awarded you ten millions.
That's easy to buy in the "Theranos is crooks" narrative and join the collective witch hunt. Just like it was easy to join the commie hunt in the 40s and 50s. Feels good to be self-righteous.
Workers on Apple's production line commit suicide. Chinese reporters went to jail after Yahoo shared their account info with the Chinese government. People were raped in Uber cars. Teens committed suicide because Facebook is too busy making a commodity of people's private life to deal with harassment on its website. But hey, that Holmes bitch said she could diagnose cancer from a drop of blood and cheated on tests when it failed to happen (according to the WSJ, based on their interviews of people who worked at Theranos for 3 weeks 5 years ago) and 81 people had to redo their blood tests after a careless lab manager skimped on QA, so clearly if we can only afford one pitch fork mob at this point we'd better target Theranos and their evil CEO.
To anyone who jumped on that bandwagon, congratulations for being one of the thousands of paper cut that will collectively do the bidding of Theranos competitors.
What's truly sad is that it took that disgusting witch hunt to make me realize that feminazis are maybe not totally wrong after all. This fucking bullshit wouldn't have made a blip if the CEO didn't have a vagina.
lucm, indeed.