Patients, former employee express concerns about Theranos | 20/20 ‘The Dropout’ Preview

Walgreens boots that's the largest they have decided that your way is the way to go by 2015 theranos was in about 40 Walgreens stores in California and Arizona access for every person means rolling this out ultimately within five miles of every person's home and people weren't just investing their money they were now potentially putting their lives on the line as they turned to theranos to test for hundreds of diseases everything from cholesterol to cancer and home says the next step is to have therano centers Nationwide when will I have that opportunity to go use a small test like that and find out data for myself working on it as fast as we can I can tell you our next states are underway [Music] one of the new patients was Sherry ackert a wife and grandmother when she began the fight of her life I first was diagnosed with breast cancer back in 2013 I had the bilateral mastectomy in the beginning of reconstruction I had four months of chemotherapy I managed well through the treatments and I just kind of went back to life kind of my new normal I guess the new normal after a patient has recovered or been treated for cancer often involved some form of surveillance testing to check and see if it's possible that something has recurred my OB GYN said how do you want to try one of the theranos labs I think Walgreens has a great reputation so oh they're willing to bring theranos in they must be okay all right this is the Walgreens where I had the infamous blood draw they seem to know what they were doing and that was that but things take a really terrifying turn when Sherry gets her results I will never forget that day when I saw that the estradiol amount was over 300. I also called my oncologist's office and the nurse called me back and she said I am so sorry that's not good there could be a tumor growing somewhere that's where your alarm buttons kind of signal more because then you're saying why is this value so abnormal right now did something happen between then and now and am I missing something the doctor recommends she go to a non-theranos Lab in order to get another test it was about a week later I got the call from my doctor and he said congratulations your estrogen is basically non-existent Boomer no cancer the tests were off by hundreds of points and Sherry says she reaches out to the company and doesn't hear anything back no one from theranos ever called me to apologize that's the least you can do when you mess up so badly not okay and it turns out this isn't an isolated incident retired dentist Merrill Ellsworth needs to get his PSA level checked to screen for prostate cancer my physician said there's a group called theranos The Walgreens run by him get your finger pricked a normal reading for PSA tests is you want to keep it under four the results were 26.1 very concerning when you see a value that jumps up that much to suddenly be confronted with something that was about 1 300 percent off normal that was not the happiest news when I first heard it the first time four days later at the urging of my physician I was retested and lo and behold the results were were in a very normal range out of an abundance of caution his doctor suggests a third test test number three which was again up in the 20s something's not right for his fourth test theridos takes a tube of blood from his arm instead of a drop from his finger Zane draw was 0.95 which was the lowest of the bunch it is not normal to get four tests to confirm a result the accuracy of these tests is incredibly important and it can be really life-changing over time the complaints from customers start coming in what those customers don't know is that employees on the inside are having real concerns too Erica Chung starts working in the lab in 2013. and this is your first job out of Berkeley the first job out of Berkeley at what point do you start to think something isn't right here I think the transition happened is when I started processing patient samples so you basically start out with a base test you put that base test in your machine just to say okay we know that it's working we know that it's cleared exactly and what happened and it kept failing I kept running it over and over and over and how it was handled it totally blew me away they took out data points and they said oh well this is like the best two out of six the way that we kind of average things so you're you're saying essentially that you were cherry picking exactly the information right in order to make the information make sense but the thing is is we were still processing patients meaning those patients were taking information that you were providing to them and making medical decisions right because our quality controls are failing at one point what seemed almost every day it really ate me up inside I had a conversation with sunny balwani the CEO of the company he had asked me so how do you like working for this company I said I really enjoy working for this company but there are a lot of problems we're having a lot of issues with our quality controls and then he just sort of lost it at that point and he's like I'm tired of people coming in here and and starting fires where there are no fires Erica and others say Elizabeth and theranos ignore the warning signals from their own people and Forge ahead we've been able to serve a huge number of people over the course of the last year and it has been phenomenal Elizabeth Holmes is about to face her undoing no one would believe it if you just wrote the script but the anonymous whistleblower was George Schultz's grandson did Ms Holmes know at the time that theranos could not do all those tests yeah and while she won't get a Hollywood ending Elizabeth's story will certainly get the Hollywood treatment with Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried channeling Elizabeth Holmes anybody who doubts my company doubts me part of the human trait being fascinated by a train wreck can't feel your eyes away hi everyone George Stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel if you'd like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our Channel and don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts thanks for watching

Channel: ABC News

Views: 62,003

Keywords: 20/20, Ackert, Dr., Ellsworth, Mehrl, Sheri, Theranos, abc, blood, breast, cancer, company, dentist, employee, former, inaccurate, news, p_cmsid=2494279, p_vid=news-83252871, patients, retired, survivor, testing, tests

Id: GyEJ2Wmqd9Y

Length: 7min 27sec (447 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2022