Elizabeth Holmes isn’t fooling anyone. Well, almost anyone.
The convicted fraudster and founder of the defunct medical start-up Theranos, is waiting to begin an 11-year sentence in federal prison. She received this punishment for misleading investors about her lab-in-a-box technology, which she claimed could run hundreds of tests on a few drops of blood. In reality, when Theranos’s Edison device wasn’t exploding, it was delivering unreliable results to frightened patients. Holmes’s fall from grace—she was once the youngest self-made woman billionaire—has been described over and over again. But there’s still a little more blood left in this stone.
On Sunday, The New York Times ran a profile of Holmes—which included the first interview she’s given since 2016. The author, Amy Chozick, suggests that she was charmed by Holmes, the devoted family woman. Chozick writes that Holmes is “gentle and charismatic,” and “didn’t seem like a hero or a villain. She seemed, like most people, somewhere in between.” This flattering or at least ambivalent tone was not well received. The Axios editor Sam Baker picked the article apart on Twitter. The emergency-medicine physician Jeremy Faust called it “credulous drivel.” Journalists and doctors alike argued that the Times had erred by helping Holmes rehabilitate her image.
When mistakes happen in the health-care system, doctors try to trace their origin to broken processes. Errors are addressed at the system—not individual—level: If a patient receives an incorrect dose of a medicine, for instance, the blame doesn’t necessarily fall on the nurse who administered it or the physician who prescribed it. The entire drug-delivery process, from pharmacy to bedside, is carefully inspected for unsafe practices. The media—and their content-delivery process—have been going through a similar postmortem over the Theranos debacle. Before John Carreyrou broke the bad news about the company at The Wall Street…
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