Theranos, Ubiome, Curative, Ancestry, 23AndMe, and Other Chinese Attacks on American Health Care
Why Chinese-backed Silicon Valley won't save us, especially on health tech
A recent journalist friend called me and told me that he loved my newsletter and wanted to know if he should credit me. I told him he could if he wanted but it is far better to be read than credited. I told him what I tell you now. “Plagiarize as you see fit.”
A British friend of mine once told me that all of American health care was compromised by the Chinese.
“Americans love to examine things from afar, but the Chinese are much more practical. They’ll just control your drugs,” he said matter-of-factly before tucking into his meal and downing his rosé. “Big Pharma owns America and China owns Big Pharma.”
My British colleague had been around the block and earned the nickname “Cambridge” from some of his travels in the old Soviet Union.
We spoke about the families who own the drug companies and their own ties to China — ties which have been only now coming into focus as the Sackler family tries to sell its China unit. Oh, you think the Sackler family did it all on their own, did you? You don’t poison a generation of Americans without more than a little foreign help.
Later my British friend and I worked together on the Chinese compromising of the COVID testing in the United States. How much of an impact we made I couldn't say but I do know of at least a few arrests that happened as a result.
When I attended the American Society of Human Genetics the largest sponsor was none other than BGI. That’s right — Beijing Genomics Institute was sponsoring the American Society of Human Genetics — one year before a global pandemic.
I suspect the Chinese operations to collect American DNA continue apace.
Let’s consider some recent headlines:
“U.S. Warns of Efforts by China to Collect Genetic Data,” New York Times, October 22, 2021.
“China’s Gene Giant Harvest Data From Millions of Pregnant Women,” Reuters, July 7, 2021.
“China’s Massive Effort To Collect Its People’s DNA Concerns Scientists,” Nature, July 7, 2020.
America has space. China has biology.
And if Americans try to intrude in the biological space, they’ll get in trouble as several recent companies attest.
You didn’t know that these companies were Chinese but their cap tables don’t lie. I am referring, of course, to Ubiome (poop), Theranos (blood), Curative (spit), and 23andMe/Ancestry (DNA).
To preserve their advantage China will happily run ops against us. If the ops succeed, great. If they fail, they’ll discourage Americans from trying to start health tech companies.
UBiome
Is the microbiome a scam? It certainly feels as if it is, and perhaps that’s why it’s attracted some of the most scammy people.
A Jewish billionaire friend of mine met with Jessica Richman, the CEO behind Ubiome. She hilariously told him about how bad it was that Theranos had ruined health tech. Months later she was indicted by the Justice Department for running her own health care fraud.
As with Elizabeth Holmes, so too with Richman. You couldn’t criticize her. She was a female CEO. You’re not anti-woman, are you? Much as the use of some racial and ethnic minorities is a strategy used by our adversaries, I have come to believe that the use of female CEOs is deliberate.
Richman’s startup — with her secret younger husband Zach Apte— stole $300 million from Medicare and private health insurance companies. Today she and Apte are at large in Germany of all places. (The German state doesn’t return its citizens outside of Europe.)
Apte, who is Jewish-American with few apparent current ties to Germany, appears to have become a German citizen, thanks to a 2019 law allowing a kind of right of return. This is reportedly a photo of his great-grandma, Ilse Lebenbaum, from whom he derives German citizenship.
Did Apte commit fraud to obtain German citizenship? You aren’t allowed to apply for German citizenship if you committed a crime in the home country. The FBI investigation into Apte and Richman reportedly began right around that time. I wonder…
In any event one of the first major investors in UBiome was a company called Zhen Fund — which is rather obviously a front for Chinese intelligence. You can examine some of UBiome’s investors here.
I once visited Zhen Fund, run by a rather charming Chinese-American woman named Olivia Wang. Her office in San Francisco — if it could be called that — was a sort of converted apartment without any of the frills of a San Francisco venture fund. One of her Chinese colleagues seemed to be studying me the whole time I was there.
Despite her youth and her seeming Americanness — born in Ohio, educated in Andover — Wang had all kinds of weird and interesting ties to Chinese party officials back in the motherland. Here’s how her Forbes 30 Under 30 bio described her.
Olivia Wang has expanded the U.S. presence of ZhenFund, the Beijing-based seed fund led by Bob Xu and Victor Wang and partnered with Sequoia Capital China. ZhenFund has more than 150 portfolio companies and has participated in several IPOs. Wang opened two offices for the firm in the greater San Francisco area and has led more than 15 deals across both U.S and Chinese companies.
Bob Xu is allegedly a former pizza deliveryman. Uh huh. Sure.
Balaji Srinavasan was a friend of the Zhen Fund folks too — and an investor, along with A16Z, in UBiome.
Joe Lonsdale, backed by Emirati cash, led the round into UBiome.
Today Joe Lonsdale talks a lot about American policy and has fashioned himself as something of an expert. Has Joe Lonsdale called upon the new German government to push for extraditing Zachary Apte and Jessica Richman? Nope!
Theranos
We’ve already explored Theranos, one of the most fascinating ops that no one really understands. Whose op was it? And for what purpose?
We are left with only questions:
How should we think of General Jim Mattis’s involvement, he, who served for six years on her board? Are we really supposed to think that Holmes and Balwani conned the entire military, most of corporate America, and a few billionaires and they all just sort of didn’t care all that much?
Did Holmes’s attorney David Boies know all of this while he was providing a platform for Virginia Giuffre to sue Prince Andrew? Or for Harvey Weinstein to silence his victims? Who does David Boies really work for? If his firm is on the up and up why have so many people left the firm?
The most curious of all is who really is Sunny Balwani?
Given the role that Pakistani intelligence has played penetrating the Pakistani community we have to ask: Was he a spy?
He seems to have had a penchant for secrecy. Why?
What was he doing in China when he first met Elizabeth Holmes?
If, as his lawyer claims, his family moved to India because being a Hindu in a mostly Muslim country was difficult, why did he join the Pakistani Students Association, which was presumably a very Muslim group?
Where did Sunny come from? Why was he married to a Japanese artist who he divorced in 2002? Why is he “a virtual ghost”?
Curative
Another fraudulent company that hasn’t gotten enough attention is Curative, founded by British wunderkind Fred Turner and Vlad Slepnev.
The company was largely operated by Matt Michelsen, formerly a partner at DCVC. Before that, he worked with Rebekah Mercer of Cambridge Analytica fame to broker a deal with Facebook. Seriously. Before that, Michelsen worked with Lady Gaga to build a social media platform for all of Lady Gaga’s fans. Michelsen and Gaga aren’t in touch anymore, I’m told.
Nowadays Michelsen is pushing government contracting which he got started doing with COVID. You can watch Michelsen give a presentation of how the test was administered.
DCVC’s Matt Ocko invested in Curative. Ocko’s LPs are Chinese and he “has been active in helping develop China’s venture capital and technology regulatory framework for two decades,” according to his bio.
Michelsen was a partner at DCVC for a moment before decamping to be the “operator” of Curative. At one point Curative was running something like ten percent of all tests in the U.S. But wait! The tests, which were developed in less than a week, didn’t work — at least according to the FDA and the Los Angeles Times.
Here’s The L.A. Times describing the one-two punch.
In January, the Food and Drug Administration cautioned that COVID-19 tests made by Curative might inform patients they were free of the virus, even when they weren’t — a so-called false negative that would allow infected people to unwittingly spread the deadly illness.
Not long after, administrators at a Colorado health system grew skeptical over a string of positive results from Curative and decided to have employees retested by another lab, only to find that the original results were wrong — a so-called false positive, in a healthcare setting where infected patients are kept together, which could expose those who don’t have the virus to those who do.
“It’s scary,” said Yvonne Myers, the system’s director. “You could give them COVID.”
Wait, what? You could give them COVID?! No wonder the British turned down the free tests.
We don’t really know how much money Curative and Michelsen made but the Houston Chronicle has a rough estimate.
…Gothams sold Texas more than $400 million worth of COVID testing services using a controversial test from Curative Inc. In January 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration flagged the test for producing a “risk of false results, particularly false negative results.” The FDA stopped short of recommending the test be discontinued but six months later the agency revoked its emergency use authorization at Curative’s request.
Curative Inc. is still providing tests and testing services, including in Texas, but not with the discontinued test it developed at the outset of the pandemic, the company says.
The Gothams CEO, Matt Michelsen — who described himself as an early investor in and “operator” of Curative — defended the start-up company’s original oral fluids tests as better than invasive nasal swab tests. He said the FDA action was motivated by nothing more than “political nonsense.”
“The test was superior but we caved to the FDA,” Michelsen said in a brief phone interview with the Chronicle. “It should have been a scientific test, not a political test.”
How does someone who was selling weird glasses know it wasn’t a scientific test? Does he have any scientific training? Nope! Did his old business partner Lady Gaga tell him? Or how about 50 Cent? Or was it the Emiratis who he worked with?
Was Curative, which got billions of dollars in taxpayer funding, an op too?
Who actually made this fake test?
That would be Turner’s cofounder Vlad…. Here’s Turner describing it.
Fred Turner: The technology behind it is not that complicated. It's PCR testing. I've been working on PCR testing of one kind or another for probably a decade ish at this point, in cows and then in STDs and then in sepsis. Vlad has been doing it for substantially longer. So, the science behind it isn't that complicated. It's more how do you actually scale this up operationally and how do you fix the supply chain issues. So, knowing that we could do the testing wasn't really an issue.
Then Vlad had actually already built a prototype COVID test literally like in his spare time in evenings and weekends, mostly because he wanted to test himself. I think at the beginning it was just sort of he was interested in it, rather than he thought anything would come of it. So, he had already developed a lot of the actual test and had run it on a few people in the lab. We knew pretty quickly that it could be done. I think the unanswered questions were how fast can we scale this up, and can we actually provide testing at the scale of tens of thousands per day.
Michelsen keeps extremely detailed files on everyone he met on his phone. What is he really? Why does he have such a close relationship with Rebekah Mercer and Cambridge Analytica?
And could he be a major reason the pandemic became an endemic in the United States? Was this a part of a Chinese plot?
…We will examine the personal genetics companies in a subsequent post but to whet your appetite here’s a great post we did on Anne Wojcicki.
And who could forget the greatest female business leader of our time, Sheryl Sandberg? Mazel tov to Sheryl Sandberg and Tom Bernthal. Third time is the charm?
That’s not a Mossad-Mob wedding, no sir!
We shall soon examine Sheryl Sandberg’s mentee — Ancestry CEO Deborah Liu — who just so coincidentally also wrote a book about women in business.
I read it — well, most of it — so you didn’t have to.
The title revealingly speaks for itself, “Take Back Your Power.” Hmm…..
I find this one particularly fun since I worked on three of these restructuring cases!