President Joe Biden once promoted Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted on four federal counts of fraud this week, and her company Theranos, according to the Washington Examiner.
Holmes was found guilty this week of defrauding investors and falsely advertising Theranos’s products to consumers. She faces a maximum of 20 years in prison per charge.
Back in 2015, as vice president, Biden visited the Theranos headquarters and touted his meeting with Holmes repeatedly, calling Theranos the “laboratory of the future.”
“Information is the lifeblood of research.” -VP Biden on innovation in health care today at the Theranos manufacturing facility
— VP Biden (Archived) (@VP44) JULY 23, 2015
“Talk about being inspired,” Biden reportedly said during the visit. “This is inspiration. It is amazing to me, Elizabeth, what you’ve been able to do.”
Vice President Joe Biden participates in a roundtable discussion yesterday in the Theranos machine shop in California pic.twitter.com/qfw30XrzbN
— VP Biden (Archived) (@VP44) July 24, 2015
Biden even claimed then-President Barack Obama supported Holmes, saying, “You know, the president and I, as I hope we’ve demonstrated, led by the president, share your vision of a new healthcare paradigm focused on preventive care.”
Theranos also advertised the vice presidential visit, using it as proof that Holmes was ushering in a “new era of preventive health care.”
“It is an absolute privilege and a tremendous honor to have Vice President Biden here with us,” Holmes said during Biden’s visit. “He is someone I so deeply respect and am so inspired by the context of his service to our country and the bold actions he has taken in service to our country throughout his career.”
An investigation into Theranos’s services by the Wall Street Journal in 2015 and 2016 revealed that the blood-testing devices used by Theranos were inaccurate and that Theranos had to run blood tests on other companies’ machines.
