From a quick look, no patients were harmed? Am I missing something?
I think something like a million results were voided as they’re were deemed unreliable. I don’t know if that put anyone at risk though
Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#572Is 'Theranos' still copyrighted / trademarked, or can it be freely used now?
Who would want to use it?
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with everything you said, but I think the person you're replying to is less upset at the prosecutors/jury, and more upset about the laws in the first place. They protect the rich and powerful, and don't worry about the average person getting hurt.
In this case it seems to be a matter of distance, not power. Imagine that, rather than the CEO making shit up, the case was about a lowly lab technician who faked results out of laziness or recklessness. Even though his fraud ultimately impacted the patients, he would probably still get convicted for defrauding his boss or the company he directly worked for, not the patients he never met or knew.
I think you have to look at the client side of the power equation. Nobody in the government is going to stick their neck out because a few voiceless plebs may have got the wrong blood test results at Walmart.
If your client was a wealthy person or large corporation and you knowingly lied to them about the performance of your product or service which caused them damages, would you get charged?
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#574It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…
FTA: “This case was specifically about what Holmes told Theranos investors, although her lies also impacted partners and patients.“
If that’s true, it isn’t surprising she wasn’t found guilty for defrauding patients, and more cases (¿maybe one focusing on partners and one focusing on patients?) could follow. I don’t know whether something like that is in the pipeline.
Edit: reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes#Criminal_char..., that’s unlikely to happen:
“In February 2020, Holmes's defense requested a federal court to drop all charges against her and her co-defendant Balwani. A federal judge examined the charges and ruled that some charges should be dropped: since the Theranos blood tests were paid for by medical insurance companies, the patients were not deprived of any money or property. Prosecutors would hence not be allowed to argue that doctors and patients were fraud victims. However, the judge kept the 11 charges of wire fraud”
I think that leaves open prosecuting for something else than fraud for knowingly delivering unreliable test results, but wouldn’t know what that “something else” would be.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#575It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…
Cf. Sacklers.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#576Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
Argh! The linked NPR article on that tweet had me yelling at my phone: > It is unusual for tech executives to face criminal changes when their startups collapse under the weight of unrealized promises. That's because it's not illegal to over promise about your future results. It is illegal to lie about simple facts regarding the present state of your business to attract funding. I'm so sick of so many press outlets f…
> No, Theranos was outright, egregious fraud, and most startups that "collapse under the weight of unrealized promises" are not committing fraud. Most startups don't get the traction and publicity that Theranos got, however. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of founders would go to similar lengths given the chance; they just happen to have someone apply some reality check on them before things get out of hand.
I would be fairly surprised. If only because, again, this is fraud and lands you in jail.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on a very quick reading, I think the most serious offense (the $100M one) would at least land in the 97-121 months bucket. If she serves half of that, best case for her is 4 years. Not too bad.
Unlike many state systems, in the federal system the sentence is close to the actual time you’ll serve, short of a Presidential commutation or some other special intervention. Other than up to 54 days/year good conduct time, there's not systematic early release.
No post body was provided.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#579It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…
FTA: “This case was specifically about what Holmes told Theranos investors, although her lies also impacted partners and patients.“ If that’s true, it isn’t surprising she wasn’t found guilty for defrauding patients, and more cases (¿maybe one focusing on partners and one focusing on patients?) could follow. I don’t know whether something like that is in the pipeline. Edit: reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza…
Yes, negligence would be that something else.
Theranos had a duty of care to the patients and they very blatantly breached that duty.
Fraud deals with purely financial loss, while negligence deals with harm which is much wider in scope.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes me wonder how much of the rapidly established covid testing infrastructure around the world delivers actual results. Fun fact: In some places like Singapore you don't even get the chance to test again to verify the result, you just serve your time in quarantine and then get back your "safe" status.
Except for PCR has been around for decades and its basic principles are taught in first year molecular biology courses. Whereas Theranos' newfangled secret "innovation" was ... well, a secret throughout.
Blood tests have also been around decades and are taught to first year students. The devil is in the details.
In this case the people claiming COVID PCR tests were bogus were right. The US CDC has now admitted it. They recently changed their testing rules to stop PCR testing people at the end of their self isolation period because PCR tests can stay positive for up to 12 weeks whilst being clinical false positives, and thus (Rochelle Walensky's words) "we would have people in isolation for a very long time if we were relying on PCRs" [1]. Nothing changed to prompt this - no new science or discovery or anything like that. They just suddenly noticed something that random bloggers knew in April 2020: that COVID PCR positives don't imply you're infectious. Also note the use of the word "would" and not "did"; apparently she's in denial about what happened here.
There are lots of other issues with them beyond the cold positive problems of course. In theory PCR tests are precise because they triangulate the presence of at least three genes. In the beginning that's what they looked for. Over time that's slipped and they're now routinely reporting PCR tests as positive if they only detect a single gene. I took a PCR last week where the certificate stated outright they only looked for one gene.
This crops up in other ways. To detect Omicron, they were taking PCR tests that failed to trigger on one gene (thus technically should have been classed as negative) and then treated them as positives, being sent for sequencing to determine if they were Omicron or not. But only samples with Ct And all that's before you even get to the cause/effect confusion the tests represent.
No, COVID PCR testing is a mess. The only reason Holmes is a convict and those guys aren't is that Holmes wanted to be the next Steve Jobs, so she worked entirely in the private sector. If she'd been selling COVID stuff to the government she'd have been fine, even doing the same things.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/live-updates/coronavirus/?id=8...