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Wall Street Journal’s Article About Theranos

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Well, it’s flawed, first of all, in a number of respects. First of all, it was flawed in the sense that it was inaccurate and false. But second it was flawed in the process in which the journal approached it. The journal approached it from a thesis that they developed in part talking to a few disgruntled employees, and in material part talking about it with Theranos competitors. And they developed this thesis for weeks before they even went to the company.

And then when they went to the company, when they began to go to the company’s customers, they went there not to find out what the facts were but to try to demonstrate this thesis, which was essentially just too good to check. Theranos had this revolutionary technology, and they wanted to say the technology doesn’t work. Now, that would have been a great story if it’d been true. The problem is it wasn’t true, and so what they did was they did two things.

First, they tried to get misleading information. For example, they would go to doctors and patients and say, We understand the technology doesn’t work. Can you give me some illustrations of the technology not working? as opposed to saying, What do you think of the technology? Does the technology work? So, they tried to bias the responses. The other thing that they did was they ignored what independent people had said about the technology.

And then a third thing that they did that also, I think, was very bad journalism and I think contributed to some of the later articles was that they would conflate two separate things. I mean, for example, the company had some operational problems at one of its labs. It had two labs, one in Newark, California, on in Arizona.

And there was some operational problems in the Newark, California lab. And, not minimizing those operational problems, those operational problems didn’t have anything to do with the technology and whether the technology worked. And you knew that from two different things.

First, the technology was working fine in Arizona, and second the operational problems went to things like documentation, calibration and the like, and the ability to prove calibration through documentation which go to how tests are run, not the value and ability of the technology to accurately perform the tests. But, they would conflate those two together to try to give the impression that the fact that there were these operational problems somehow impacted the technology.

Probably the worst thing that they did was, before the first article was run, we went to talk to them. The reporters actually given some interviews to Vanity Fair and the like about when we came in to talk to them. And you wouldn’t recognize what actually happened from his description of it. Now, what happened was actually recorded, so we have proof of what happened.

And one of the things that they never mention, and they’ve never written about, is the fact that before the very first article was written, we went into them and we said, If you’ve got doubts about the technology, this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna bring the machine that runs these tests right here into the Wall Street Journal offices. We gonna put it on this consul tape, and then what we’re gonna do is run a test on anybody that you want.

And then you can have that person tested by whatever other lab you want and compare the results, and then find out whether it works or not. Because the best way to know whether the technology works is to test it. They refused to do that. They just flat-out refused to do that. Now, ask yourself; if this were a legitimate search for truth, if they were really trying to report on whether the technology worked, wouldn’t you wanna have the opportunity to test it?

New York Litigation attorney, David Boies, discusses the Wall Street Journal’s article published about the false claims made by the company Theranos.

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