sacrificed her boyfriend. She broke up with him and fired him. In a
press release, Theranos dressed up his departure as a voluntary
retirement.
A week later, we reported that Theranos had voided tens of
thousands of blood-test results, including two years’ worth of Edison
tests, in an effort to come back into compliance and avoid the CMS
ban. In other words, it had effectively admitted to the agency that not a
single one of the blood tests run on its proprietary devices could be
relied upon. Once again, Holmes had hoped to keep the voided tests
secret, but I found out about them from my new source, the one who
had leaked to me CMS’s letter threatening to ban Holmes from the lab
industry. In Chicago, executives at Walgreens were astonished to learn
of the scale of the test voidings. The pharmacy chain had been trying
to get answers from Theranos about the impact on its customers for
months. On June 12, 2016, it terminated the companies’ partnership
and shut down all the wellness centers located in its stores.
In another crippling blow, CMS followed through on its threat to
ban Holmes and her company from the lab business in early July.
More ominously, Theranos was now the subject of a criminal
investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco and of a
parallel civil probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In
spite of all these setbacks, Holmes felt she still had one card to play to
turn public opinion around: wow the world with a display of her
technology.
—
ON A MUGGY SUMMER DAY at the beginning of August, more than 2,500
people crowded into the grand ballroom of the Pennsylvania
Convention Center in Philadelphia. Most were laboratory scientists
who had come to hear Holmes speak at the annual meeting of the
AACC. “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones was playing on
the public announcement system, a choice of music that didn’t seem
like a coincidence.
The invitation the association had extended to Holmes was highly