Elizabeth Holmes exposed: The $9 billion medical ‘miracle’ that never existed | 60 Minutes Australia

Elizabeth Holmes promised the world a

medical

revolution at age 19. She claimed to have invented a miniaturized machine that with a single drop of blood could map our health. Her boast was that serious diseases like cancer could be prevented before they occurred, and it wasn't just a surprising moment. for patient high profile investors invested a fortune in

elizabeth

holmes

' company theranos their money was guaranteed she became Silicon Valley's first self-made female

billion

aire but her invention was an invention that didn't work

elizabeth

holmes

is not a visionary , is a scammer who has risked people's lives and if a convicted person faces 20 years, it is discovering what you were born to do when you really give it your all, then you can realize great things.

Holmes was making the biggest promise of all: she could save lives through a revolutionary blood testing device she had created. and that she would make available to everyone through supermarkets and pharmacies. Theranose means being able to see the onset of the disease in time to be able to do something about it. I would like to welcome Elizabeth Holmes, the true delight, the incredible Elizabeth Holmes, California's Silicon Valley. and some of the richest people in the world bought into the dream there are people in this world revolutionizing our lives coco chanel steve jobs bill gates walt disney and elizabeth holmes mark my words turning theranos into a staggering 9

billion

giant and making the homes those of the tech valley The first self-made female billionaire, you founded this company 12 years ago.

Tell them how old you were. I was 19. Celebrity commentators and cash investors couldn't get enough of this new kid on the block in Silicon Valley. She was the new darling. and a lot of that was because she was an entrepreneurial woman, which is a very popular thing, it's been a man's world, you know, for so long she wore black turtlenecks like Steve Jobs and she sold her ponytail and everyone bought it. for a time, the revolution. Elizabeth Holmes' promise was to put preventative healthcare within our reach - literally, all it would take would be a tiny drop of blood from a finger prick to perform hundreds of blood tests using an innovative miniaturized testing device that would provide more reliable and faster results. and cheaper results people don't like having big needles stuck in their arm, yes, part of it, you are one of those people so deeply that Elizabeth's machine would destroy the traditional way of doing things, larger volumes of blood drawn from the arm by large needles and expensive and time-consuming laboratory tests, the mission was to allow everyone to have blood tests as frequently as once a month to build a personal health profile and detect diseases such as cancer as soon as possible, people don't even know that they have a basic human right to be able to access information about themselves and their own bodies that can change their lives, but as the whistleblowers would expose, the Elizabeth Holmes revolution turned out to be an extraordinary fraud , a lie that put lives in danger if he were ever asked to do so. falsify data or destroy data, oh just get rid of these tests you've done, you wiped out almost a billion dollars of investors' money, there was no money available, it all just evaporated any feedback to investors and you may well end up with homes after the bars for up to 20 years his trial for fraud will come at the end of this month to the extent that please raise your right hand swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth I do how would you describe the rise and the rise and then? the fall of elizabeth holmes well I think it's a comment on the culture of Silicon Valley, there is so much hype and so much hype in this culture that you know that young entrepreneurs are basically bred to behave this way and as the investigative journalist discovered john carraroo, there were a lot of people in the room ready to drink the kool-aid, all hoping to break the unicorn club, the billion dollar startups emerging in silicon valley at the time, this was the boom of unicorns and this was 2015 and things were getting really frothy in Silicon Valley and, uh, people.

I didn't want to miss the next Facebook and a lot of people wanted to get on board this next rocket to wealth when I was first interviewed. I must say I was a little starstruck. Science graduate Erica Chung wasn't about to get it. Rich, she just wanted a job and Theranos with Ernest Elizabeth Holmes at the helm was the dream choice. She was really excited as a kind of young scientist to work for a company that seemed to have a compelling vision and a strong leader that seemed to back it up. too, but Erica was shocked to discover that the Theranos dream was actually a fairy tale sold by Holmes and COO Ramesh Sunny Balwani, Elizabeth's boyfriend at the time, despite all the excitement, the little box The couple claimed that the reality of working at Theranos was that many of the things being said about the company were not actually what was happening behind closed doors, this revolutionary new device in It didn't really exist, it hadn't

existed

at all.

Built even worse, they were using a makeshift version of the machine to perform blood tests on patients, the results were often false or misleading, but this too was hidden from the unsuspecting public despite the significant health risks. I just wanted to let people know that they were taking advantage of this defective device being tested on patients and it needed to be stopped. Rumors circulated about Therano's malpractices, but it was Wall Street Journal journalist John Kariu who would be the first to begin investigating after a tip from a skeptical pathologist. What I know started to come into focus for me and I realized that this was not just a commercial fraud and a corporate fraud, but potentially a fraud that had big public health implications, so I thought, well, this is a great story. for all. hope and hype now accused elizabeth holmes of being fake, but as it became clear that the consequences of her fraud were real and dangerous, this is unforgivable now and forever.

The remarkable story of healthcare startup Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes begins in Stanford. college in 2003. this used to be my advisor's office, we entered when we were just 19 and after just two semesters of studying chemical engineering, Holmes dropped out of college to become a medtech entrepreneur, another few chemical engineering classes were not necessary for what I wanted. One of the first to hear of his future business plans was Stanford University medicine professor Dr. Phyllis Gardner. Unlike most of those who found homes, Dr. Gardner was not impressed. Did Elizabeth Holmes always have big dreams? In his opinion, absolutely her ambition was overblown and, unfortunately, The person who introduced her to me twice said that she's just brilliant and that she's brilliant and that when you're surrounded by Nobel Prize winners you take it with a grain of salt, a rock of salt. , she had no knowledge of medicine and a rudimentary knowledge of engineering and she was 19. and she didn't really want any experience, she thought she knew very well, you don't, at 19, I'm sorry, but from the beginning, Elizabeth Holmes knew the power of the PRI I believe that the individual is the answer to challenges. healthcare provider, didn't bother to prove that its so-called breakthrough blood testing device could do everything it promised through peer review or publishing extensive data, let's take these tests and make them accessible, instead, it gathered a court-martial on his board, reveling in his fame. and credibility, so it includes three former US Cabinet secretaries, two former US senators, a retired Navy admiral and a retired Marine Corps general, including george schultz, henry kissinger, how did you do that?

The board consisted of george schultz, jim mattis, henry kissinger and a group of four stars. generals and someone said that this is like a junta that is going to take over the world and, uh, but what does it have to do with

medical

advances? Nothing, so everyone was deceived. Silicon Valley really got nervous about this, but initially liked so many. Small-time investor Eileen Lepro was impressed after she was advised to invest her hard-earned $100,000 in Was there something in the nature of what Elizabeth Holmes was hoping to do promising to attract him to this type of investment?

Was there something altruistic about it? It wasn't for me, I was looking to make money, but I was working for a venture capitalist at the time and he said it would be equivalent to Apple and I would get as many shares as I could, regardless, there was no evidence of money flowing to Theranos. it was huge, almost a billion dollars at one point, rupert murdoch was the biggest investor who bought shares worth 125 million dollars, coincidentally as owner of the wall street journal, he was also the boss of investigative journalist john kararu at the time in which kararu

exposed

holmes' spin as subtitles not available and has generally been right, as for the other investors, you certainly know they should have done more due diligence.

I think it was a deliberate choice for Elizabeth to focus on what I would call uncharitable, dumb money, billionaires and their family offices. Unlike the sophisticated Silicon Valley venture funds, who I don't think would have fallen for the same lies, what do you think of the investors who lined up to give him almost a billion dollars in money? Older white men, right? I'm telling you, I've told you, brains go south, they weren't thinking with their brains, that's what you're saying, huh, I don't know and they believed her and she could be lovely, she could be. Sure I didn't love her, but she could be charming with older men.

Giving people the right to obtain a laboratory test will, by definition, begin the process of allowing them to take care of their health. Their homes are magnificent with Elizabeth's charm offensive throughout. The results from the flight back to the lab were going from bad to worse, according to former lab associate Erica Chung, they were consistently producing really wildly inaccurate and imprecise results on many different types of blood tests - you know, tests like hepatitis C or the thyroid test or test that would predict cancer is telling us very clearly that we should stop testing patients, everyone should have the ability to have that type of test, but Elizabeth was not listening desperate for her technology catches up with your vision, your health is really important.

For us, when we were children, of all those dropped by theranosmania, it would be the patients who would have the most to lose because nothing is more important than the health of their loved ones, it was simply a great fraud and if a fraud can be perpetrated , smile. going to dinners at the white house that to me is just not awareness this notion that she was faking it until she could make it do you think she ever believed in what she could do? I probably mean, it's almost like another fantasy world. selfishness that I can't describe, I don't have it, I doubt you have it, fake it until you make it, excuse the patience, I don't believe it, what's your opinion on that thing they're happy to go live with? a system that is still being tested and is actually failing, yes it is unconscionable, it is unethical, it is immoral, since you know all the words you can think of to describe that and in Australia, why the miniature black box of Elizabeth Holmes was

never

going to work out, she was

never

able to do what she claimed she could founder and CEO of the startup theranos elizabeth holmes promised to make the impossible possible in the name of preventative medicine, the problem arises when she essentially tried to take over a lab of pathology and squash it into a little black box and promised to be able to do all those tests all the time for people and it takes years and years to develop a single one of those tests to the standard where it can be accurate, so it was ambitious not Ambitious medical scientist Dr Darren Saunders of the University of Sydney has closely followed the rise of Elizabeth Holmes and her promise that this mini-lab could perform hundreds of blood tests from a single drop of blood. blood.

Her experience in the field made him incredulous from the beginning. Over the last 11 years we have reinvented traditional laboratory infrastructure. It's quite a strange thing to see because you feel like screaming that the emperor is not dressed properly and as a scientist, I think frustrating is the word I would use, incredibly frustrating because you felt like taking these people aside and looking, it doesn't happen. nothing here why are you spending so muchmoney on something that there is no evidence that exists, that was the phrase I always used, it was exactly that the emperor has no clothes and that is the perfect metaphor for what the dr.

Phyllis Gardner was equally disturbed as a professor at Stanford University, she knew Elizabeth Holmes when she was a student there until then, because of the way they had to draw before she dropped out and acquired the Steve Jobs outfit. I'm so dehumanizing that it's an incredibly emotional process, so before his voice changed, it's wonderful to be here. I started this company because what's wrong with the deep voice? Did you have a deep voice when you were dealing with no, I was surprised when I heard a voice because before it didn't matter, certainly that is a voice that is not forgotten in a woman oh, hello, yes, the rate to protect health and well-being carefully elaborate or otherwise corporations were lining up Until embracing Elizabeth Holmes, his success was sealed when in 2013, in a multimillion-dollar deal, Theranos was launched at the Walgreens pharmacy chain.

We have an operational plan that will allow us to be within five miles of each person's home through the Walgreens we have. We have opened and continue to open nationwide. It was about access and ease. Customers could get a blood test in the store with a simple finger prick. It cost next to nothing, they would even get their results in four hours, that was the promise, the truth was another matter according to the former Theranos laboratory associate, Erica Chong, you know, this thing that was supposed to be five would suddenly show up. up to 60 and then you ran it and it showed up as, you know, four and it was just that the degree of internal accuracy was too high to be acceptable to start running it on patients, so I did the Thera nose test.

Done like July 29th and then July 31st, another lab did a test on me and it was different, unaware of the wildly unreliable results, Pallav Schader himself, a doctor turned medtech entrepreneur, went to Walgreens to get a Theranos blood test. The results were surprisingly bad for this health conscious doctor, they showed that he was pre-diabetic, fortunately pallav's own doctor was suspicious of the diagnosis and ordered another blood test from another laboratory, that was the moment I felt cheated because there was a little from My pride hurts because I'm from the industry, if you hadn't gotten a second opinion, a second test, what course of action would you have taken at age 35?

I would have started taking antidiabetic medications and no medication comes without side effects. So I get emotional thinking about how important it was to me, if you had followed Theronos' model, you would have been taking medication for a disease you don't have. Yes, absolutely, this is unforgivable now and forever. Was it a fact that there were diseases? That may not have been detected that people who might have been suffering from life-threatening illnesses and just didn't know it because they got a false result, yeah, the devices were so unreliable that they couldn't really be trusted with anyone.

Testing Theranos' innovative technology was a sham, instead Theranos was secretly using traditional, commercially available blood analyzers because those machines require larger amounts of blood to perform their tests. Staff were ordered to dilute small blood samples collected through finger pricks, making the results unsafe. The tests were done on standard equipment and they were diluting the blood which invalidates many of the results so I knew there was fraud from the beginning but still the marketing myth continued and you make the decision to do something, you do it and that's it. All in all, a lab that didn't exist before was created and filled with as many black boxes as the company could find.

Vice President Joe Biden was then invited to inspect this is some kind of laboratory of the future not knowing that the devices were not working and that he along with the world was being tricked into knowing that she created a fake laboratory to show to joe biden, I mean , what a bold act of deception, well she was bold, I'll give you that and everything she did, I think there are some, this is my opinion. there is some sociopathy involved and the ability to lie and not care is not normal from my perspective as a doctor she was trying to overpromise and then hoping her engineers and biochemists would catch up and when they finally did and her machine It worked, no one would notice.

The problem is that she wasn't even close. Elizabeth Holmes was revered as the superwoman scientist who came to rescue and revolutionize the US healthcare system, but the real heroes of Theronos' story are the brave whistleblowers who helped the investigative journalist. John Kararu of the Wall Street Journal

exposed

the farce of his testimony. He later wrote the award-winning Bad Blood and hosts a podcast called Bad Blood. The final chapter. These are people who wanted to do good. These are people who couldn't. They slept at night because they were worried that patients would trust false results, right? Did that catch your attention too?

They could not, in conscience, continue without saying anything. They felt the need to speak and felt that lives were in danger. and that the longer this went on, the worse it would be erica chung was one of those heroes when theranos ignored her concerns, she left upset but still feared for her customers erica alerted regulators about what was happening behind closed doors, you were being extraordinarily brave yes you clearly felt obligated to get someone else's even though it was scary and stressful and at the time theranose was at least threatening to sue me and they followed me around to intimidate me from speaking out against them.

It's just that they had to stop doing this right, they had to stop testing patients and that the truth needed to be discovered. This is what happens when you work to change things and first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then suddenly you change the world elizabeth holmes came out fighting but the regulators acted against her by closing the Theranos labs and banning medical testing after They found a massive fraud that put patients in serious danger the company once valued at nine billion dollars was now worth zero and That was good, like the mission had finally been accomplished in that moment I was finally able to sleep at night and I I realized that you know my work was done in additional legal actions.

Elizabeth and her ex-boyfriend Sunny Balwani are now in the middle of a delayed criminal trial for defrauding investors, patients and doctors, and could be jailed for up to 20 years if the convicted Holmes' trial is delayed until later this month, first because of the undercover news and after she was expecting her first child, a son who was born in July, getting pregnant when you are in court is the height of irresponsibility in my opinion, what happens to the baby? Well, do you think it was a planned pregnancy or do you think it was an accident? I definitely think it was.

I mean, I was predicting. It's because it's the best way to gain sympathy to try to stay out of prison. I think she needs to go to prison for a while. I think 25 years sounds about right. Those closest to the Theranos dream, including investor Eileen Lipra, still believe Elizabeth Holmes should take it on. the toughest sanctions because beyond money there was a lot at stake, everyone knows it was all a farce, so why would you get a slap on the wrist? You know, if it was just about money, that's one thing, but what's not right are people's lives, their medical situations.

Hi everyone, I'm Tara Brown, thanks for watching 60 Minutes Australia. Subscribe to our channel now to receive new stories and exclusive clips every week and don't miss our bonus minute segments and full 60 minute episodes on Nine Now dot com. to u and app nine now