Wow, it's as if the WSJ anticipated that Theranos was going to respond with "the WSJ's reporting is a bunch of lies; we're passing the FDA's gold standard of quality", and so purposely held back the revelation that an "inspection was triggered by concerns the agency had about data Theranos had voluntarily submitted to the FDA" for a second-day piece.

I understand PR is an exceptionally hard game when you want to be a revolutionary company, but Holmes's response so far has been shameful. Theranos's first public response last night was a tweet [1] to John McCain, Joe Biden, and Arianna Huffington linking to a puff piece of bullet points and unlabeled line charts. On Kramer's show, besides focusing on touting the relationship to the FDA, she avoided answering the most basic questions that required stating actual numbers or facts [2]. And instead of doing a point-by-point response against the WSJ's claims [3], Theranos chooses to throw a bunch of impressive sounding numbers -- ("more than 1,000 pages of statements and documents"...because volume of printed paper is in itself evidence?) in the same vague way that it has been bragging about its purportedly revolutionary technology while refusing to even name the third-parties that they claim to have audited them, even to friendly journalists [4].

It's sad, it really does sound like she hit on a worthy-billion dollar idea. And she's put in the time and energy into it for many years to see it through. But I hate the way the way her company's official response has been to kick up a cloud of meaningless data in such a way to obfuscate true accountability, hoping that most people will think "Well medicine is above my head, there's probably just no way to test their genius inventions!"...good for the WSJ for actually putting some time and thought into examining the claims while many of its respectable peers have been publishing puff pieces, even as recent as this week [5] (yes, I know the NYT's style section is not the same as its investigative team, but it doesn't seem likely the NYT had an active investigation into Theranos).

[1] https://twitter.com/theranos/status/654547567426928641

[2] http://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/elizabeth-holmes-refutes-...

[3] https://theranos.com/news/posts/statement-from-theranos

[4] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/eli...