Safeway grocery stores dropped a $350 million deal with Theranos, according to the Wall Street Journal. Theranos put out a statement today disputing the Journal’s report but failed once again to dispel the claim.
“We were disappointed to see yet another inaccurate WSJ article, entirely relying on anonymous sources,” said the Theranos statement. “As we relayed to the Journal, the information published in this piece is again inaccurate, misleading and defamatory.”
However, the two-paragraph post never mentioned what, exactly, was the inaccuracy.
According to the Journal, Safeway was building testing clinics in more than 800 of its grocery stores to offer Theranos blood tests. However, Theranos missed the testing deadline and several former and current executives allegedly told the WSJ they had their own reservations about the accuracy of tests Theranos had administered to Safeway employees.
The WSJ wrote a series of articles this past month accusing the blood diagnostics startup of only using one test on its proprietary machine, of the inaccuracies of tests conducted and uncovering an FDA investigation – all of which Theranos has continued to say were inaccurate reports.
The perplexing part is that while Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has railed against the WSJ, and promised to release facts and data to back up Theranos’ claims, she’s also admitted many of the claims made by the WSJ articles – including that there was an FDA investigation and that of the 240 tests offered, only one used Theranos’ nanotainer technology.
Walgreens recently halted any further test center expansions with Theranos and reportedly hired an internal team to investigate the claims.
Safeway told TechCrunch it would not be commenting on this story and so far Theranos has not responded to our inquiry to clarify what was inaccurate in the piece.
Carreyrou is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for his team work on a piece looking into Medicare.The Journal has said repeatedly that it stands by the integrity of its reporter.