Image source Express UK.

Health Impact News Editor Comments

The cholesterol-lowering statin drug empire continues to crumble. On February 15, 2015, the Sunday Express in the UK published a headline story stating that Oxford professor Dr. Rory Collins, whose research had been used to support putting millions of patients on statin drugs, was reassessing the data behind those studies for possible drug side effects they might have missed previously.

According to the Express:

Although the original research looked at the effect of statins on the heart and considered cancer risks it did not examine other side effects.

A Pharmaceutical Scandal that Can No Longer Be Hidden?

This announcement by Dr. Collins is stunning, to say the least, and points to a massive cover-up and scandal related to statin drugs.

In 2014, Dr. Collins supported calls in the UK to put more people on statin drugs. However, he met with some opposition, and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a couple of articles documenting some of the side effects of statin drugs, which would call into question new government guidelines that would encourage physicians to put more patients on the already popular class of cholesterol-lowering drugs. Statins are the world’s best selling pharmaceutical drugs of all time, with no close competitors.

Dr. Collins criticized the  BMJ articles, and demanded that they retract them. According to Dr. Malcolm Kendrick:

He stated that these articles were irresponsible, worse than Andrew Wakefield’s work on the MMR vaccine, and that thousands would die if they were scared off taking their statins by such articles. (Source.)

An independent review panel set up by Fiona Godlee, editor of the BMJ, looked at the BMJ’s data and rejected his demands.

Dr. Collins is head of the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT) Collaboration, and as Dr. Kendrick points out:

you should know that for a number of years, people have been trying to get Rory Collins to release the data he and his unit (the CTT), holds on statins. [The CTT was set up purely to get hold of and review all the data on statins, it has no other function].

He has stubbornly refused to let anyone see anything. He claims he signed non-disclosure contracts with pharmaceutical companies who send him the data, so he cannot allow anyone else access. Please remember that some of the trials he holds data on were done over thirty years ago, and the drugs are long off patent.

Now, amazingly, after running the CTT for nearly twenty years, Collins claims that ‘he has not seen the full data on side-effects.’ In an e-mail to the Sunday Express he stated that ‘his team had assessed the effects of statins on heart disease and cancer but not other side effects such as muscle pain.’

Let that statement percolate for a moment or two. Then try to make sense of it. So, they have got the data, but not bothered to look at it? Or they have not got it – which surely must be the case if he hasn’t even seen it. Give us a clue. Either way, Collins states he has not assessed it. (Source.)

So why this sudden about face by Dr. Collins in admitting the data on statin drugs needs to be reassessed due to potential side effects not previously studied? Could the thousands of lawsuits currently being filed in the United States against Lipitor, the best-selling drug in the history of the world, for causing diabetes, be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of serious side effects that are now about to become public?

ABC Australia Investigative Report on Statin Scam Pulled from ABC’s Website

Dr MaryAnne Demasi from the Catalyst. Her investigative reporting on the dangers of statin drugs has now been banned.

Dr. MaryAnne Demasi’s documentary on the criminal activity of the pharmaceutical industry regarding cholesterol-lowering statin drugs sent shock waves through the mainstream media in Australia at the end of 2013. Published in two parts on the popular news show The Catalyst, the pharmaceutical industry complained loudly after the first show, and requested the network not air the second episode, “Heart of the Matter Part 2 – Cholesterol Drug War.”

ABC Australia aired it anyway, but the pharmaceutical influence was apparently too strong, as they later announced that the network would remove the videos from their website because “they breached its impartiality standards.”

If you know anyone currently being prescribed statin drugs to lower their cholesterol, this information could save their lives.

Heart of the Matter – Part 1

Heart of the Matter Part 2 – Cholesterol Drug War

See Also:

Study: Government Guidelines on Low-fat Diet Were Not Supported by Science

More on the Cholesterol Myth

More on the Statin Scam

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