Patients just saw a blood testing service promising the same accuracy as a blood draw and went for it
I think you are: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient...
> To use traditional machines, Theranos had to dilute some of the smaller samples it collected. It appears that Theranos carried out another 60 tests using this method in December 2014.
> Some of the potassium results at Theranos were so high that patients would have to be dead for the results to be correct, according to one former employee. This is because, lab experts told The Journal, "finger-pricked blood samples can be less pure than those drawn from a vein because finger-pricked blood often mixes with fluids from tissue and cells that can interfere with tests."
Holmes clearly lied to investors, and even if she may have "believed" in the long term prospects of her company, she also clearly intentionally lied to investors to get their money. The investors were also obviously harmed (they lost their money). Also, the fact that VCs expect a lot of their companies to fail is totally irrelevant. VCs (and more importantly, the law) also expect founders to tell the truth on simple statements of fact, e.g. "We recieved this much revenue" or "This machine can perform X, Y, Z tests now". Again, Holmes didn't just exaggerate or say "This machine can perform X, Y, Z tests in the future". She flat out lied about the current capabilities of her company.
With patients, most of the tests were done on standard equipment. I don't believe patients were ever told "we will test your blood on Edison", and more importantly, they probably wouldn't have cared that much - they just wanted their test results. So with the tests done on standard equipment, hard to argue there was much harm done there.
Now, some tests were done on Edison, and I know Walgreens invalidated a whole bunch of Theranos tests. But even then, it's harder to say Holmes intended to deceive in that case (a prerequisite for the fraud charge) - presumably they chose to run them on Edison and not the other equipment because they thought Edison could handle those tests. The fact that the lab was sloppy, the fact that Edison had issues, that in my mind wouldn't be enough to assert wire fraud on the part of Holmes. All in all it's just kind of hard to say that patients were really defrauded at all. If Theranos had instead just completely made up some of their test results, and Holmes directed that behavior, then yes, that would have been fraud against patients, but that's not what happened.
If, like you said, the patients still got their results, the results were correct, and it was only how those results were obtained that lead to the patient fraud charges, then I think you maybe correct.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, so people should feel free to correct me if what I said was wrong.
For those unaware John Carreyrou played a major role in exposing Holmes. His book is a good read: Bad Blood and host of Bad Blood: The Final Chapter
https://twitter.com/JohnCarreyrou/status/1478158063379042304
> And the judge will probably declare a mistrial as to the 3 counts they couldn’t reach consensus on.
> The 4 guilty counts are all investor counts. The investor conspiracy count and the counts relating to the hedge fund PFM, the ex Cravath attorney Mosley and the DeVos family.
EDIT: Mistrial only on those 3 counts which got no verdict, not the full trial. Also this is only if the Feds want to do it or now which will also depend upon how many years Holmes gets as well as if she just decides to plead guilty on those 3 charges.
Yes, there are minimum security prison camps for first time, non violent offenders, which seems entirely appropriate, but a day spa it aint.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2015/...
[If you're not familiar with sentencing, the basic procedure is this:
1. Compute an 'offense level' for each count. For counts that are strongly related (which all of these likely are), combine by taking the maximum offense level. If they're not related, it's more complicated (not simply adding them up).
2. Compute a 'criminal history level'. For Holmes, that's basically "no criminal history."
3. Adjust for things like the convicted person's remorse or cooperation with investigators.
4. Look up a table that maps offense and criminal history to an actual sentencing range.
5. Adjust that (primarily, but not exclusively, in the previously output range) based on the judge's feelings.]
https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
In any case, she'll definitely do time. You're forgetting the victims in this case are not only also rich, but probably vastly better connected since they have yet to steal from their friends.
Sorry I didnt understand what you meant here.
edit: wow, reading gp's "clarification" below, I was way off
That make more sense?
Edit: I'm saying being white and being a woman helps, but being rich helps such an astronomically huge amount more emphasizing anything else feels less like informing and more like baiting.
Not sure how that wasn't crazy clear.
Are you saying white, rich people and women dont get preferential treatment in the US justice system?
Longer answer: Theranos never really got their own custom machines working. Until those machines were working, they did use other machines and processes which did work. However, their entire shtick was trying to do a lot of tests on less blood than usual, so... they simply diluted the blood samples to get enough volume for those machines to function in the first place, and correspondingly, the results were absolute garbage. Effectively, they were using working machines incorrectly to cover up for their non-working machines.
Carreyrou originally got tipped off by pathologists saying that this was impossible, then they got sued into oblivion (see thepathologyblawg).
(IANAP but this is my understanding)
Some real tests rely on having a huge blood sample (e.g. 100ml), being filtered (e.g. by centrifuge) and then a test of a known sensitivity applied.
Theranos claimed that their tests were more sensitive so could work with smaller samples. Statistically this doesn't work because with a finger-prick test (e.g. 1ml) the sample is 100x less likely to contain the target cells - cells are integers.
Additionally finger-prick tests contain only capillary blood - they're filtered by the finger blood vessels only allowing tiny cells - some of the Theranos tests claimed they could detect markers that only exist in arterial and venous blood.
(I do realize that keeping track of how precisely Theranos was lying can be frustrating, since they were doing multiple levels of lying here.)
The presumption of innocence in this case, is that she did not mislead Investors.
(IIRC, Holmes' lawyers also made the argument that it was not legally possible for her to have committed wire fraud against the patients, because any money that Theranos received would have come from their insurance companies.)
Part of the difficulty is that the empirical data that would have proven how well (or poorly) the technology worked was allegedly stored in a proprietary, bespoke database. When Theranos was ordered to turn over the data to the feds for discovery, they delivered an encrypted copy, and then claimed that the encryption key was lost and the original disk arrays were unrecoverable. Both sides of the case then blamed each other for destroying the last remaining copy of the data, which made for some fun reading.
Here's one report on an invalid pregnancy test:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient...
They decided that she had.
FWIW, every single firm that had medical expertise declined to invest in Theranos. They could see it had extremely minimal chance of success.
This doesn't hold with what was found in the trial. She was found not guilty on those counts. Just because a dude wrote it down in a book doesn't mean it's true. And the legal process found it to be, in fact, not true.
The jury didn't find that the results given to the patients were accurate. They found that Holmes was not personally, criminally culpable for wire fraud in those cases. Wire fraud is a crime that has very specific elements, well beyond the question of how accurate the test results were.
Count seven of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $99,999,984 on or about Oct. 31, 2014:Guilty.
Count eight of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $5,999,997 on or about Oct. 31, 2014: Guilty.Often shares will be split %-wise between two or more funds. I.e. 22.5% goes to XYZ Fund 1, 85.5% goes to XYZ Fund 2. These % can be super specific and make it so wires go down to the cent.