Instead of just the one Thanos, a woman called Theranos and a man called Thimanos. 
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Do you have a link for that?
10% of millions of tests they did were bad and those bad results caused a lot of mental anguish, for people thinking they had AIDs or were carrying a stillborn, and I don’t want to diminish that.
It also caused people to act on bad information, doing things that would have been smart if the results were accurate.
But weren’t because they weren’t, causing them to take unnecessary risks.
That’s definitely worthy of punishment.
But I have only seen proof her deception could have physically hurt people.
Not that it actually did.
This might be an industry wide problem
How many tests did Theranos actually sell?
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Potential endangerment isn’t the same thing as actually endangering someone.
They sold tests for three years.
She could have potentially led to deaths but there’s no proof of it that I could find.
You can’t logically extend into infinity and assume that just because it would happen if given enough time and tests it must have when we’re looking at a finite time and a finite amount of tests
The business model of shady blood tests is unfortunately not gone and will eventually lead to serious repercussions if it hasn’t already
But does that mean she’s responsible for when someone who uses another shady service dies?
She didn’t pioneer the shady blood test.
She just popularized it.
The one example I saw was Joe Rago, who was given all clears using Theranos’ tests. 4 years later he had died of a rare blood disease that wasn’t tested for often but was one of Theranos’ targets, Sarcoidosis - Wikipedia . The Theranos test cleared him of that (obviously, because it was all fraudulent.) It was believed he suffered from it when he took those tests.
There’s tons of other examples in the case though.
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more specifically
John Carreyrou was not the only Wall Street Journal reporter to cover Theranos. Back before the scandal exploded, the firm was the subject of articles by Joseph Rago, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specialized in covering healthcare and whose tragic, totally unexpected death in July 2017 shocked many people. We wondered what could have happened to an apparently healthy 34-year-old with most of his adult life and journalistic career seemingly still ahead of him. The cause of Rago’s death turned out to be sarcoidosis, an infectious condition in which bodily organs get afflicted with inflammatory cells.
It seems curious, to say the least, that in all the articles written about Theranos and in the coverage that followed Rago’s passing, no one takes note of a fact mentioned by Carreyrou on page 176 of Bad Blood or goes on to ask some obvious questions. In the course of Rago’s research and reporting on Theranos, Holmes offered Rago a demonstration of one of the firm’s blood tests, which Rago agreed to undergo. Rago got his results by email before he even left the premises. We now know that Theranos’s testing machines didn’t work and left people who took the blood test totally in the dark about conditions that an accurate test would have brought to light.
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That’s like saying “I didn’t invent selling snake oil as a cure for childhood cancers, I just built a multibillion-dollar business empire selling the stuff even though I knew it didn’t work. Besides, you can’t prove that any of those kids would have survived if I hadn’t lied.”
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I mean, sure. I’m not trying to defend her. I just apparently suffer from resting sealion prose lol.
And I got the answer I was looking for which I did not know about.
.
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Her real crime IMO was treating her employees like shit. The sentence is for her crimes against other rich people, whom I personally have no compassion for whatsoever.
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Good summary of the time line, links.
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The AUSA likely asked for a higher sentence (and judge went a little higher) than your average white collar criminal so her sentence would act as a “cautionary tale” to others with similar plans (like FTX). The other big factor is scope of harm, which for good or ill is mostly gauged by dollar amount that was defrauded. So yea, my guess is her sentence came out to be about double your average white collar criminal’s sentence.
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There were also cases of false positive “results” that caused people the expected amount of extreme short-term stress before a real test confirmed there was no issue.
I know she got the sentence because she committed the ultimate sin of defrauding wealthy and powerful people (including some serious arseholes). However, I’m still going to see it as justice on behalf of victims like the man you mentioned, as well as the employees she bullied and intimidated (especially the horrific case of Ian Gibbons).
The sentence should also serve as a reminder to other sociopaths who think they’re immune from consequences.
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It really raises the question of what it even means to “have a kid” if you’re going to produce a child and then not be around for their childhoods. Or not be around until they’re adults - the prosecutors could have asked for 20 years, after all. Though the 15 years they asked for is almost as bad, and 11 years is bad enough, missing out on pretty much an entire childhood. I suppose it might have had more to do with her partner, but it’s a bit of a coincidence that her two pregnancies coincided with her appearance in court during its two phases…
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At least she’s guaranteed to be around for her kid’s birth. That’s more than can be said for a lot of rich assholes out there.
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it’s not hyperbole, the author goes mechanically through the sentencing guidelines, and arrives at a 80 year sentence.
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To be fair, 80 years is the statutory maximum that the judge could have imposed had he run the sentences of the 4 counts consecutively. And while he had that discretion, such sentences are usually run concurrently. So the headline is somewhat hyperbolic. But his greater point is accurate, white collar criminals do tend to get lighter sentences. They also get released on bond a whole lot more often than other offenders.
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https://guidelines.ussc.gov/gl/§2B1.1
This is where the enhancements ratchet up
P was specifically contemplated.
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Correct, the Guidelines got her up to Level 45, which contemplates Life, but the statutory limit for each count of Section 1343 is a maximum of 20 years.
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Obviously better to not have the kid; but at least when you are a sufficiently bad person being in prison during your child’s formative years is, relatively speaking, practically being a a good influence.
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Silver linings!
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