Theranos fires back at the Fortune editor who said the company 'misled' him
Parloff, who wrote a cover story on Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes in June 2014, wrote in a new story for Fortune published Thursday saying that the company misled him.
After describing how he didn't address all of his original doubts about Theranos' technology, he writes:
"So I blew it. And I should have included all these colloquies in the original story. I regret the error."
Back when the Silicon Valley-based startup, known for its blood tests that allegedly only used a finger-prick's worth of blood, was still largely keeping quiet about how its technology worked, Parloff reported that the 200 tests the company offered could run "without the need for a syringe."
Parloff called that a "whopping false statement."
In recent months, as Theranos has come under fire following reporting in The Wall Street Journal raised questions about how the tests were administered and run, Theranos has clarified exactly how they run their tests. Not all are run using the finger-prick method, and another method of venous draws that only require a small amount of blood drawn from a vein (unlike standard tests that require at least four vials of blood, depending on the test).
"As much as I'd like to say that Holmes lied to me, I don't think she did," he wrote in Thursday's article. "I do believe I was misled - intentionally - but I was also culpable, in that I failed to probe certain exasperatingly opaque answers that I repeatedly received."
But, Brooke Buchanan, Theranos's vice president of communications, wrote in a Letter to the Editor in Fortune on Sunday that Parloff's article itself was "inaccurate and - ironically - misleading."
The point which Buchanan contends is over the use of misled. She argues Theranos had all its information available on its website regarding how they administer the test.
"If Mr. Parloff now feels that because of recent reporting he got one sentence in his story from mid-2014 about Theranos wrong, it was not because he was misled, but rather because - as he states - he now feels he made faulty assumptions that he now thinks he should have further clarified," she wrote.