Statins Are Pharma Trash, Research Mounts

On a long enough timeline, most medical scams — even the most persistent ones — have a way of unraveling.

“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”
-George W. Bush

Every major pharmaceutical firm in the West — Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck, et al. — has its own proprietary statin drug, which together represent billions of dollars in sales annually in the U.S. alone.

Via Data Bridge Market Research(emphasis added):

“Between 2015-2018, approximately 11.4% of U.S. adults had high total cholesterol. There was no significant difference in high total cholesterol prevalence between men (10.5%) and women (12.1%). The highest prevalence was among adults aged 40–59 (15.7%), compared to 7.5% among those aged 20–39 and 11.4% among those aged 60 and over. Adults aged 60 and over also had a higher prevalence of high total cholesterol than those aged 20–39. There were no significant differences in high total cholesterol prevalence among adults based on race or Hispanic origin.

The U.S. statin market size was valued at USD 4.53 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 5.10 billion by 2031, with a CAGR of 1.5% during the forecast period of 2024 to 2031.”

The flimsy, lazy cholesterol-causes-heart-disease lie is predicated on flawed and manipulated studies going back decades that purportedly demonstrate a correlation between high cholesterol and heart disease, which is simply taken as causation on faith, even though in other cases — conveniently, ones where the industry’s interests align with dismissing correlation as causation — they are adamant that the two are not one and the same.

Via Business Insider (emphasis added):

“Speaking to science journal Nature, vaccine expert Kathryn Edwards, professor of pediatrics in the division of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, said that health authorities must strike a "delicate balance" when information is disseminated about the side effects of COVID vaccines.

Edwards added that, at times, it might be hard to even prove if the adverse reactions were due to the vaccine, particularly if the reported symptoms strike the patient days after the jab was administered.

Nature also cited a study that detailed how challenging it was to link any adverse events through vaccines — as this has to be done through specific lab tests. This is because correlation is not causation — and work has to be done by scientists to determine what caused the reaction, before comparing it with the probability that this symptom occurred purely by chance.”

Does correlation equal causation according to The Science™? The answer depends on which side of the equation the biggest dollar sign sits.

Via Midwestern Doctor (emphasis added):

“In the 1960s and 1970s, a debate emerged over what caused heart disease. On one side, John Yudkin effectively argued that the sugar being added to our food by the processed food industry was the chief culprit. On the other side, Ancel Keys (who attacked Yudkin's work) argued that it was due to saturated fat and cholesterol.

Ancel Keys won, Yudkin's work was largely dismissed, and Keys became nutritional dogma. A large part of Key’s victory was based on his study of seven countries (Italy, Greece, Former Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, America, and Japan), which showed that as saturated fat consumption increased, heart disease increased in a linear fashion.

However, what many don’t know (as this study is still frequently cited) is that this result was simply a product of the countries Keys chose (e.g., one author illustrated that if Finland, Israel, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Sweden had been chosen, the opposite would have been found).

Fortunately, it gradually became recognized that Ancel Keys did not accurately report the data he used to substantiate his argument*s. For example, recently an unpublished 56 month randomized study of 9,423 adults living in state mental hospitals or a nursing home (which made it possible to rigidly control their diets) that Keys was the lead investigator of was unearthed. This study (inconveniently) found that replacing half of the animal (saturated) fats they ate with vegetable oil (e.g., corn oil) lowered their cholesterol, and that for every 30 points it dropped, their risk of death increased by 22 percent (which roughly translates to each 1% drop in cholesterol raising the risk of death by 1%)—so as you can imagine, it was never published.”

*Manipulating data sets to get the outcome you want based on personal and institutional financial interests?! Why, who could ever accuse the sacred Science™ of such scandalous behavior? Don’t you see the white coat priest robe? These are men of God, doing the (Dark) Lord’s work.

The sugar industry — or, more accurately, the fake sugar industry, which promotes diabetes-friendly high-fructose corn syrup feed — was also in on the con.

Continuing:

“Likewise, recently, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world published internal sugar industry documents. They showed the sugar industry had used bribes to make scientists place the blame for heart disease on fat so Yudkin's work would not threaten the sugar industry.”

To facilitate more statin prescriptions, the industry developed calculators for adult-child doctors to use, into which they punch in a bunch of numbers and the computer then tells them whether their patient needs statins (they always do, somehow). It turns out — you’ll be shocked to learn — the calculators overestimated the risk of heart disease by 600%.

Continuing:

“The American College of Cardiology made a calculator to determine your risk of developing a heart attack or stroke in the next ten years based on your age, blood pressure, cholesterol level, and smoking status. In turn, I’ve lost track of how many doctors I saw proudly punch their patient's numbers into it and then inform them that they were at high risk of a stroke or heart attack and urgently needed to start a statin. Given that almost everyone ended up being “high risk” I was not surprised to learn that in 2016, Kaiser completed an extensive study which determined this calculator overestimated the rate of these events by 600%. Sadly, that has not at all deterred the use of this calculator (e.g., medical students are still tested on it for their board examinations).”

Here, I just barely, for the sake of time, scratched the surface on the deception. If you have an hour to kill, check out Midwestern Doctor’s extensive article on the topic.

And throw the statin prescription in the trash or, better yet, in your doctor’s face. Even better yet, just don’t go to doctors for nutrition or metabolic counseling.

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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