first, but they figured it out when a Secret Service advance team
showed up a few days before Biden arrived.
The day of the visit, most members of the lab were instructed to stay
home while a few local news photographers and television cameras
were allowed into the building to ensure the event got some press.
Holmes took the vice president on a tour of the facility and showed
him the fake automated lab. Afterward, she hosted a roundtable about
preventive health care on the premises with a half dozen industry
executives, including the president of Stanford Hospital.
During the roundtable discussion, Biden called what he had just
seen “the laboratory of the future.” He also praised Holmes for
proactively cooperating with the FDA. “I know the FDA recently
completed favorable reviews of your innovative device,” he said. “The
fact that you’re voluntarily submitting all of your tests to the FDA
demonstrates your confidence in what you’re doing.”
—
A FEW DAYS LATER, on July 28, I opened that morning’s edition of the
Journal and nearly spit out my coffee: as I was leafing through the
paper’s first section, I stumbled across an op-ed written by Elizabeth
Holmes crowing about Theranos’s herpes-test approval and calling for
all lab tests to be reviewed by the FDA. She’d been denying me an
interview for months, her lawyers had been stonewalling and
threatening my sources, and here she was using my own newspaper’s
opinion pages to perpetuate the myth that she was regulators’ best
friend.
Because of the firewall between the Journal’s news and editorial
sides, Paul Gigot and his staff had no idea I was working on a big
investigative piece about the company. So I couldn’t blame them for
publishing whatever they saw fit. But I was annoyed. I suspected
Holmes was trying to use the positive editorial-page coverage to make
it more difficult for the paper to publish my investigation.
In the meantime, Alan Beam was coming under renewed pressure
from Boies’s henchmen. They were threatening to report him for