and used for their testing. But no one closely regulated tests that labs
fashioned with their own methods. Elizabeth and Sunny had a testy
exchange with Hunter over the significance of the change. They
maintained that all the big laboratory companies mostly used
laboratory-developed tests, which Hunter knew not to be true.
To Hunter, the switch made it all the more important to check the
accuracy of Theranos’s tests. He suggested doing a fifty-patient study
in which they would compare Theranos results to ones from Stanford
Hospital. He’d done work with Stanford and knew people there; it
would be easy to arrange. On the computer screen, Hunter noticed an
immediate change in Elizabeth’s body language. She became visibly
guarded and defensive.
“No, I don’t think we want to do that at this time,” she said, quickly
changing the subject to other items on the call’s agenda.
After they hung up, Hunter took aside Renaat Van den Hooff, who
was in charge of the pilot on the Walgreens side, and told him
something just wasn’t right. The red flags were piling up. First,
Elizabeth had denied him access to their lab. Then she’d rejected his
proposal to embed someone with them in Palo Alto. And now she was
refusing to do a simple comparison study. To top it all off, Theranos
had drawn the blood of the president of Walgreens’s pharmacy
business, one of the company’s most senior executives, and failed to
give him a test result!
Van den Hooff listened with a pained look on his face.
“We can’t not pursue this,” he said. “We can’t risk a scenario where
CVS has a deal with them in six months and it ends up being real.”
Walgreens’s rivalry with CVS, which was based in Rhode Island and
one-third bigger in terms of revenues, colored virtually everything the
drugstore chain did. It was a myopic view of the world that was hard to
understand for an outsider like Hunter who wasn’t a Walgreens
company man. Theranos had cleverly played on this insecurity. As a
result, Walgreens suffered from a severe case of FoMO—the fear of
missing out.
Hunter pleaded with Van den Hooff to at least let him peek inside