Slashdot Mirror
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.
Why are we even bothering with enquiries?
There is so much documented fraud.
One county. Two classes.
How in the world did these people get a license to begin with? Well. now we got this, and the MRI fiasco. I'm trying to figure out what's next on the list.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Is why CMS paid and continued to allow Theranos to accept tests that were being subbed out, basically just scalping a profit.
There will away be snake-oil sellers where there are buyers with more money than sense but isn't that WHY CMS WAS CREATED??
It's yet another amazing wholesale fleecing of taxpayer by members of "the club".
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
With the "small government" approach the scam would continue.
"Libertarians" take note.
Being free to scam others without consequence doesn't do a lot for the liberty of those being scammed.
Sunny Balwani and Elizabeth Holmes; the Theranos Board; all Theranos investors; and, Theranos strategic partners and suppliers ALL need to be investigated regarding their knowledge of potential fraud and collusion. If evidence is gained showing intentional fraud from*any* one of the foregoing, jail them!
"House Democrats Frank Pallone, Gene Green and Diana DeGette sent the letter on June 30th, asking Holmes to explain what went wrong,"
What went wrong is they got caught. That's what "went wrong".
This was all just a "magic snake oil" scheme designed to suck in wealthy, gullible investors, nothing more, nothing less.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
First she was making it all about her, not about brilliant scientists, but about her her her. Second is that the stuff about her was all about how she is better than the rest of us. Admitted to the top university, gets up 2 hours before she goes to bed, works 28 hour days; basically all that in your face, I am better than you Type-A bullshit.
But the icing on the cake is that after she had raised funds from non-pharma types she just kept promoting. I could barely crack a science publication or a science section in any publication with her single drop of blood hype.
Where I am from the government is huge on being able to "pick a winner" so about twice a year I see the same micro-bubble that is hype hype hype with some front man, usually some vaguely good story about rubber that will make tires good for 300,000km. Then a nice line-up of vaguely important local investors. And just before it all blows up they are in some local business publication with the title "Top 40 under 40' or some other bullshit.
Then it all goes to hell, there are recriminations about government money in the toilet, a useless audit, and then it is forgotten as the latest batch of sure thing winners follow down the same path.
While all this is amusing/enraging; the worst part is that she has now made it nearly impossible for any legitimate company to actually do this research. If some real bio-researcher comes up with some blood tests needing only one drop they won't get one investor to take their calls or conferences to let them talk. They might as well work on cold fusion or herbal cancer cures.
Failure what failure. Everything went according to typical psychopathic capitalism plans, privatise the profits and socialise the losses. Things only went wrong if the insiders lost money running the scam, if they generated millions in personal profits, then that is exactly the way, free market psychopathic capitalism is meant to work. As for health insurance companies who refuse to pay, or charter schools that abuse children or military contractors that foment war or security organisation spying for economic advantage for corrupt insiders, etc. etc. Everything is functioning exactly as designed, maximise short term profits, fuck everything else and dump the losses and problems on the idiots that vote the lessor evil, election after election, gumbys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (they are laughing at you and make no mistake).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You feel terrible for a fraudster. I have a great investment opportunity for you.
that the company claimed could detect hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood.
bleeding edge bio-tech
Too bad it turned out to be bleeding edge marketing, and now people are out for blood.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
If it sounds too good to be true, it it almost always is. Nobody at that age has that kind of skills. It takes high potential, will and decades of experience to get to a point where you can make even significantly smaller breakthroughs than claimed here these days. My guess is that the youth-madness that pervades society has made too many people utterly blind to the realities.
Now, I do not actually think she is a fraudster. If she was one, she would have sold the company at the first good offer (and there must have been quite a few if Forbes valued her at 4.5 Billion). I think she had a good idea, but youth and inexperience prevented her to see its limitations and how much ruther R&D was actually required. Add to that, that as a female "wunderkind", she had probably quite a few (not too bright) fans among people with money early on. In essence, she may have gotten funded into failure, when a decade or two of solid research may actually have had some useful results that would have held up in practice.
The other thing that may have been at work here is an almost hysterical search for new heroes that can "make America great again". That one is not going to happen. Everybody successful today is a global actor, even if that is sometimes hard to see.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If we start holding CEOs accountable, the terrorists have already won.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Quit falling for the smear campaign, it's unsightly.
Whether or not Theranos is guilty of the claims is irrelevant. You're deciding she's guilty before they've even presented any real evidence based solely on hearsay. Not that you should trust the evidence presented in court.
You feel terrible for a fraudster.
That's not fraud. It's simply millenial over-self-confidence making its inevitable acquaintance with reality.
They almost certainly believed in their idea originally. The point at which it became fraud is the point at which they started using other people's machines with diluted blood against the specification. She wasn't a "fraudster" to begin with but it really looks, from the media reports, like she has become one.
It's a hard lesson for life, but there's a point where what looks grey and just "enhancing your business opportunities" suddenly turns out to be completely black and clearly fraud. You have already stepped over that line when you start carrying out medical procedures such as blood tests in ways which haven't been verified to work.
Whose money did they take, and what didn't work?
You talk as if we were in a post-Enron analysis situation, but that's not the case at all. First they're still in business, still making money doing regular tests at a lower price than the competition (which I start to believe is the root cause of this whole charade). They're still doing research and perfecting their process and technologies, with the goal not to detect cancer from a drop of blood, but to lower even more the cost of blood tests.
As for investors: this is a private company and we don't know what they share or didn't dhare with their private investors, and we don't know what kind of return they get on their money, what kind of deal they made. How come everyone is talking as if it was a few retiress who had lost their savings in a Ponzi scheme? Because outsiders claimed it was "worth" billions at one point, and zero later on?
This is all bullshit.
lucm, indeed.
Exactly. If she had raised money, failed, and not tried to sell the product anyway then its just failure. Feeling sorry for her is reasonable.
But she raised money, failed, hid her failure, and then pretended it was working while giving inaccurate test results. That's fraud.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Yet the FBI is still using lie detectors.
Iraq is only now removing the placebo bomb detectors that were found to be worthless five years ago.
Anti-vaxxers are rife despite it being based on a fraud by an English doctor who wanted to sell the alternative vaccine that he had patented.
There's a long list of frauds that do not suddenly go away because of the "magic of the market".