PART 2

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These therapies are extremely expensive and often do not work. These guidelines immediately boosted the sales of statins from fifteen billion per year when the report was released in 2004 to over twenty-two billion in 2005. And now we come to find out there is not a shred of scientific evidence to support that lowering cholesterol in this manner will reduce cardiovascular disease, compared to simply having an LDL lower than 130.

Statins are also being pushed for prevention of a first heart attack in people with only moderate cardiovascular risk. A careful analysis of the statistical data shows that such statin use may very slightly reduce cardiovascular death in this preventive population over a ten year period. However, the drugs kill 1% as a side effect, due to accidents, suicide, and infection, completely canceling out any benefit. This means there is no value at all, from a societal point of view, in wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on this pointless preventive strategy.

The amount of money spent on this fraudulent scheme is at least seven billion dollars a year, money that is in essence stolen from hard working Americans. Class-action lawsuits have already been filed against Pfizer for illegal Lipitor promotion, many are sure to follow.

Big Pharma Concocts an Authentic Appearance

The National Cholesterol Education Program is part of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), meaning that it is part of our federal government and has an operating budget of about one million dollars per year. In 2004 it selected a panel of nine “experts” to review statin drug use and make recommendations as to guidelines doctors should follow to reduce cardiovascular disease.

On July 13, 2004, these nine experts published their findings in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association. Their paper lists the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; American College of Cardiology Foundation; American Heart Association as coauthors – meaning these various groups supported the findings. It doesn’t appear to be very difficult to get published in your own marketing magazine.

Circulation failed to disclose that six of the nine authors had direct financial ties to the makers of statin drugs. Those drugs include Pfizer's Lipitor; Bristol-Myers Squibb's Pravachol, Merck's Lovastatin, and AstraZeneca's Crestor. For example, Newsday.com reported on July 14, 2004, “Dr. H. Bryan Brewer, a physician-scientist at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, was one of the guidelines' authors. He was the subject of a letter to the director of the National Institutes of Health last week from a consumer watchdog, Public Citizen's Health Research Group. The advocacy organization charged that Brewer had failed to disclose his ties to AstraZeneca. Brewer, according to the letter, had written a glowing report in a medical journal about Crestor without disclosing that he is a paid consultant and had presided over a company-sponsored symposium.”

Even though these connections were slightly exposed in the media at the time, no action was taken to review the credibility of the statin science by other less biased researchers. Instead, the public relations buzz was that the statin “science” was solid.

The October 3 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine tears this “solid science” to shreds, something that should have been done two years ago. The review explains the deceitful manipulation of statistics and how not one study proves that lowering LDL cholesterol to the super low levels recommended has any benefit in reducing cardiovascular disease. Simply put, this report is shocking.

The bottom line: there is no credible science, and there never was, that offered proof that lowering cholesterol levels to physiologically abnormal levels reduced cardiovascular risk. Thus, basing a broad governmental public health recommendation on no solid science is flat out wrong. Why aren’t these faulty recommendations being reversed?

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GL