insisted we continue using for his protection, and called him on his
burner phone. But my email went unanswered and the phone
appeared to be turned off and didn’t have a voicemail. I continued to
try the email address and the phone for several weeks, to no avail.
Tyler had gone dark.
I suspected Theranos was putting the screws to him, but I couldn’t
confront the company about it since he was a confidential source. I
hoped he wouldn’t cave under pressure and I took comfort in the fact
that he had already sent me his email to Holmes questioning
Theranos’s practices and the complaint he had filed with New York
State. When added to the internal email trail about proficiency testing
I had obtained from Alan Beam, it made for a damning trove of
documents.
I pressed forward with my reporting, calling the New York State
Health Department to inquire about what had come of Tyler’s
anonymous complaint. It had been forwarded to the federal Centers
for Medicare and Medicaid Services for investigation, I was told. But
when I called CMS, I learned that no one there could find any trace of
it. It had somehow been lost in the shuffle. To their credit, the folks
who ran the agency’s lab-oversight division seemed serious about
following up on it now that they knew of its existence. They asked me
to forward it to them and assured me it wouldn’t be overlooked this
time.
Meanwhile, Matthew Traub was continuing to give me the
runaround. It seemed I was the only reporter in America to whom
Holmes wouldn’t grant an interview. She had recently appeared on
CBS’s morning news program, Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN, and
Jim Cramer’s Mad Money on CNBC. The icing on the cake was when
one evening in early June I glanced up from my computer at one of the
TVs in the newsroom and there she was in her black turtleneck
carrying forth on Charlie Rose. During a heated phone conversation
the next day, I told Traub that Theranos couldn’t keep putting me off
indefinitely. If not Holmes, someone from the company needed to
meet with me to address my questions and it had to happen soon, I
yelled, pacing back and forth in front of my stoop in Brooklyn.