Is "MAHA" Revenge for Theranos?
Big Tech's War on American Healthcare
Well, here’s a hot take to kick off an article!
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by Wall Street Journal investigative journalist John Carreyrou is the definitive work telling the tale of the failed blood testing scam-up Theranos, and its eccentric CEO Elizabeth Holmes. For the unfamiliar or those who need a refresher, Holmes’ claim to fame was that she would revolutionize medical testing. Holmes was a Stanford dropout with no medical or scientific experience. She promised to replace drawing multiple vials of blood and the large machines with a compact device known as the “Edison,” and later the “MiniLab,” that only required a single drop of blood to run over 70 different blood tests simultaneously.
“The device seemed to consist of nothing more than a pipette fastened to a robotic arm that moved back and forth on a gantry. [Theranos employees] had envisioned some sort of sophisticated microfluidic system. But this seemed like something a middle-schooler could build in his garage.”
Being a female CEO in the highly male dominated Silicon Valley, mainstream media quickly rushed to make her a star. Not just in finance media like Forbes and CNBC, but across mainstream outlets like USA Today, NPR, CBS and CNN as well. There was one small problem, however: the revolution she promised was physically impossible. Literal Star Trek tricorder fantasies.
“With her black turtleneck, her deep voice, and the green kale shakes she sipped on all day, Elizabeth was going to great lengths to emulate Steve Jobs, but she didn’t seem to have a solid understanding of what distinguished different types of blood tests.”
The vast majority of journalists refused to bother with doing their due diligence and call up anyone with hands-on experience in medical testing to ask just why you cannot run dozens of tests off a single drop of blood. Neither did many early investors, made up of former statemen, congresspeople, and military officers such as Henry Kissinger and General Mattis. Holmes was also cozy with Democrat leaders like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, whose staff did not bother to verify her outlandish claims. Predictably, this would end in a great deal of suffering and tears.
A great deal of embarrassment could have been spared if people possessed an ounce of scientific skepticism. Instead, our problems have only grown worse, leading to a national crisis of anti-intellectualism. Now what?
The reason to revisit Bad Blood in 2026 is that, as part of the “Make America Healthy Again” crusade again modern medicine, Elizabeth Holmes has yet again began to pop up in the news. As easily misled sheep who struggle to maintain a grip upon reality, “MAHA” considers Holmes to be a sort of martyr; a victim of beauracratic tyranny. On Twitter, Holmes maintains her innocence:
It would not be completely unreasonable at this point to see the Trump Administration pardon Elizabeth Holmes. In truth, the Theranos saga became a model for much of “Make America Healthy Again.” So just what exactly did Holmes do? Let’s review!
The Holmes School of Innovation
The one thing you need to understand about Theranos is that it was always a scam, from the very beginning. A Stanford dropout with nothing but two semesters of chemical engineering under her belt, Elizabeth Holmes prioritized figuring out how to mislead investors & circumvent FDA regulations over figuring out how to make her Star Trek fantasies come to life. Instead of bothering to produce a finished prototype that reliably delivered accurate results, Holmes figured the best way to develop the “Edison” was to test it on terminally ill cancer patients, or even on swine flu patients in Mexico. Holmes thought the epidemic was “a great opportunity to showcase the Edison.” This did not end well:
“Frequently, the readers flashed error messages, or the result that came back from Palo Alto was negative for the virus when it should have been positive.”
Corporate partners terminated their relationship with Theranos, after it was clear Holmes was all talk. This didn’t cause her to rethink her plans, however. Instead of listening to the engineers & scientists who actually did the work of building these prototypes, she frequently insulted and denigrated them:
“Don’t listen to them,” she’d said of the scientists. “They’re always complaining.”
These consistent failures (which Holmes often concealed from her own staff) didn’t dissuade retail chains Walgreens and Safeway, however. Both gave Theranos major contracts to bring the Edison - still a non-functioning prototype - to their stores. One might consider this to be highly unethical, but this is 2010s-era Silicon Valley we’re talking about, where at one South by Southwest conference, the homeless were recruited to become walking Wi-Fi hotspots, paid only in tips.
Vinay Prasad: A Graduate of the Balwani School of Management?
“Alan didn’t mince his words about [Sunny] Balwani: he was a dishonest bully who managed through intimidation.”
In the past year of reporting on the melodrama at the Food & Drug Administration, it is impossible not to see paralells between CBER head Vinay Prasad and Theranos’ second in command, Sunny Balwani - who was also Holmes’ romantic partner. Balwani made his money from the dot-com bubble, and somehow assumed this made him a genius. In reality, however:
“Sunny didn’t know or understand any of this because he had no background in medicine, much less laboratory science. Nor did he have the patience to listen to the scientists’ explanations.”
When he was still a UCSF professor, Vinay Prasad made a name for himself by making obnoxiously incorrect and ridiculous statements about entire medical and scientific fields he knew nothing about. When those with the relevant experience pointed out his frequent errors, he would simply block them. He clearly prioritized ranting and raving to his captive audience of anti-vaxxers, exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic for personal profit, over his professional responsibilities.
It was clear to anyone with sense that Prasad was a power-hungry narcisscist obsessed with promoting himself, having little respect for his professional colleagues and the general public. You don’t need a Master of Business Administration to figure out that he would clearly fail in any sort of leadership role. Balwani’s obnoxious antics at Theranos would become the blueprint Prasad would bring to FDA’s CBER:
“Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Sunny put it more bluntly: anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should ‘get the fuck out.’”
As recent headlines have shown, Prasad has brought the same frequent f-bombs and demands for resignations to his role as a civil servant at the Food & Drug Administration. In leaked e-mails to staff, Prasad has made it clear that he considers Balwani to be a role model worth emulating. This goes so far as to when Balwani would order his employees to engage in fraud:
“Balwani had tasked a Theranos software engineer named Michael Craig to write an application for the miniLab’s software that masked task malfunctions. When something went wrong inside the machine, the app kicked in and prevented an error message from appearing on the digital display. Instead, the screen showed the test’s progress slowing to a crawl.”
Compare this to when Prasad falsely claimed in an intentionally leaked internal FDA memo that the COVID-19 vaccine had killed ten American children. Throwing red meat to his fellow anti-vaccine grifters on social media, Prasad shares Balwani’s belief that outright lying is acceptable conduct.
They also share a mutual hatred of Personal Protective Equipment:
“Balwani had fired Lina Castro, a well-liked and respected member of the microbiology team. Lina’s sin had been to push the company to institute standard environmental health and safety protections in the lab.”
Woefully out of his depth, proving himself to be completely unqualified and incompetent, Prasad is merely covering for his own failings just like his hero Balwani. Firing experts who actually know what they’re talking about, threatening & cursing out staff, and showing a total disregard for basic ethics, it’s evident that Prasad is not taking his duties as a civil servant seriously. If one wanted to compromise the Food & Drug Administration to a permanent end, staffing the leadership with abrasive cranks such as this is one way to do it.
The Great Humiliation
When John Carreyrou finally started his investigation of Theranos, one wouldn’t be out of line to think that the startup had become “too big to fail.” No amount of obvious fraud was enough to halt the gravy train. Elizabeth Holmes was becoming a household name, who relished the spotlight at every turn as a “role model” for young girls. Cozy with the Obama Administration, the company even entertained a visit from former Vice President Joe Biden:
“Holmes and Balwani wanted to impress the vice president with a vision of a cutting-edge, completely automated laboratory. So instead of showing him the actual lab, they created a fake one.”
The same cheerleader who rallied Democrats to support the invasion of Iraq based on obviously fraudulent claims of “weapons of mass destruction” called this obviously fake carnival “the laboratory of the future.” Apparently, not a single White House staffer bothered to evaluate the validity of Theranos’ outlandish claims. None the less, this stunt only furthered the brand’s credibility.
As Carreyrou’s investigation into Theranos ramped up, Balwani began to behave more like a lowlife mafiaoso than a tech executive. Intimidating current and former employees was not enough. At one point, Balwani was having the reporter tailed and then driving around Arizona, personally threatening the doctors and patients who spoke with him.
Even through Theranos executives and their hotshot legal team pulled out every stop to silence the story, The Wall Street Journal published John Carreyrou’s atomic bombshell explosing the company’s deliberate fraud. Many wealthy and powerful people suddenly had a rotten egg on their faces. Not all would admit the shame of having been bamboozled, however:
“Some venture capitalists reflexively jumped to Holmes’ defense. One of them was former Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, whose wife had just profiled Holmes in a cover story for the New York Times’ style magazine headlined ‘Five Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs Who Are Changing the World.’”
Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen (interviewed above) is a Trump-supporting maniac with all sorts of nasty ties, including to Bari Weiss’ “The Free Press” propaganda rag, and has produced all sorts of morally depraved rants. One doesn’t have to think too hard about what his feelings about federal regulatory authority might be. This same federal regulatory authority would inevitably be what brought an end to Theranos:
“...the FDA had forced the company to stop testing blood drawn from patients’ fingers and declared its nanotainer an ‘unapproved medical device.’”
Holmes and Balwani’s response was to lead the company in “Fuck you, Carrey-rou!” chants. This did little to turn their fortunes around. The chief regulator of clinical laboratories, a federal organization now helmed by a man who invited a convicted pedophile to his Valentine’s Day party in 2016, found upon inspection that Theranos posed an “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.” It wasn’t hard to see why:
“As for the lab itself, it was a mess: the company had allowed unqualified personnel to handle patient samples, it had stored blood at the wrong temperatures, it had let reagents expire, and it had failed to inform patients of flawed test results”
CMS would ban Holmes and her company from the laboratory business. Theranos came under criminal investigation as well as a civil probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Holmes continued to parade in the spotlight none the less, hosting fundraisers for Hillary Clinton’s failed Presidential campaign and making more outlandish claims about the miniLab, claiming that it could test for viruses such as Zika. Just imagine if they had survived to 2020!
In the years of lengthy litigation which followed, which saw Elizabeth Holmes sent to Club Fed for screwing with rich people’s money, the real victims of Theranos began to emerge. This included over 75,000 Arizona citizens as part of their deal with Walgreens. In November 2021, a CNBC headline read: “Former Theranos patient testifies that a blood test at Walgreens came back with false positive for HIV.”
Holmes and her MAHA fans don’t consider what Carreyrou writes as “the emotional and the financial toll of a health care brought on by inaccurate results” to be a crime. Those who received inaccurate test results often had to pay out of their own pocket to finally receive accurate results. Heck, that’s not even what Holmes eventually went to jail for.
Now keep this in mind as we look at the current leadership philosophy of the Food & Drug Administration.
Rise of the Fully Automated Malpractice
On January 6th of this year, Food & Drug Commissioner Marty Makary announced at what Better Offline’s Ed Zitron would call the “Anti-Consumer Electronics Show,” or CES, that the Food & Drug Administration would “cut unnecessary regulation and promote innovation” with regards to “artifical intelligence.” This is a dishonest framing for what is actually automated remixing largely based upon stolen work made by actually intelligent humans.
One might remember that last year, Makary promised to fast-track drug approvals by “unleashing” an in-house “AI” tool named “Elsa,” and that did not end well. Marty never acknowledged the error, because this was yet another taxpayer-funded government handout to yet another scam artist. Doubling down on this “AI” scam, Makary is going all in on making “AI-enabled wearables” an essential requirement of the agenda to “Make America Healthy Again.” His boss RFK Jr. has said as much:
Now, no serious physician will tell you that having an electronic device recording your health metrics 24/7 is going to magically improve your health. More data does not necessarily translate into better outcomes. However, if you were part of an authoritarian regime that wanted to massively expand the surveillance state, encouraging this in one form or another would be a great way to do so. We’ve already seen federal agencies abuse this.
Many express concern that this would enable insurance companies to jack up rates or deny coverage to people not deemed to be “Making America Healthy.” Worse, it might become a requirement for Medicaid/Medicare eligibility. It also lines the pockets of wellness grifters, such as selling glucose monitors to people without diabetes.
What these scam startups at the Anti-Consumer Electronics Show are pitching to the public is that if you purchase their “AI-enabled” wearables, the onboard artificial intelligence will analyze your day-to-day health metrics and provide “personalized” recommendations for your exercise and diet. This all sounds very impressive, sure. Yet when you put the glossy advertising to the side, the reality of what “artificial intelligence” has demonstrated in the real world is quite concerning:
Multiple children have been “coached” into taking their own lives by chatbots.
FDA-Authorized medical AI devices are recalled at double the standard rate
This is the “technology” that the federal government wants surveilling your health at all times and is dismantling regulatory safeguards for. The same disregard that Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani had for the public’s health has now become the standard of the Food & Drug Administration. How is this anything but a federal handout to lowlife scam artists and grifters? As John Carreyrou wrote in 2018,
“Health care was the most highly regulated industry in the country and for good reason: the lives of patients were at stake.”
Emphasis on “was,” as it’s clear now that Theranos walked so “Make America Healthy Again” could run. Treating patients as lab rats for non-functional garbage to mislead investors is not “promoting innovation.” This is not only an insult to patients who are entitled to safe & competent care, but also to the hardworking doctors and nurses who rely upon effective technological innovation to save lives. What “MAHA” is doing is criminally indefensible.
This is a federal handout to scam artists.
Closing Thoughts
John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood is phenomenal (and my personal favorite) roller coaster of arrogant incompetence. Cursed to fail from the beginning, Holmes and Balwani could do nothing for Theranos but double down on fraud in a masturbatory reign of terror over their employees. The filmed adaptations and documentaries fail to truly highlight the depths of absurdity all involved found themselves in, as well as the exploitative suffering visited upon the general public.
Our legal system did not punish Elizabeth Holmes for the trauma her fraudulent testing inflicted upon the public, but for humiliating wealthy investors and corporate partners. Political leaders such as Joe Biden never apologized or suffered consequences for lending credibility to such obvious fraud. Now, the story told in Bad Blood has become a blueprint for widespread fraud on an unprecedented scale.
It’s clear what the endgame of “MAHA” is: The dismantling of federal regulatory safeguards so that scam artists and grifters may exploit the public, for profit guaranteed by the government. They see Elizabeth Holmes as a victim of tyranny, as their vision of “medical freedom” is the freedom to hurt others for personal gain. This is the enemy of all decent people, and there is no “middle ground” or “compromise” to be made, lest they enslave and kill us all to serve their perverse fantasies.
“Bad Blood,” indeed.
