Imagine a world where everyone is on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs. Not just sick people. Everyone.
Astra Zeneca has imagined it, and now they’re going to see their dream come true. On December 16, the FDA announced their approval of Astra Zeneca’s cholesterol-lowering drug Crestor for use in people without high cholesterol despite the fact that a new study showed conclusively that the drug causes diabetes. By a vote of 12 to 4, the panel judged that even people at very low risk of heart disease should take the cholesterol medication anyway.
“I do think the diabetes problem is real, but I’m comforted by the fact that the drug works even in that patient group, so it’s very convincing,” said Michael Proschan, a statistician with the National Institutes of Health. In other words, even after Crestor gives you diabetes (or some other problem, see below), it may still cut your risk of certain types of heart disease, so why worry?
How you see the world with diabetic retinopathy
If you’ve been reading my blog, you probably aren’t surprised by this absurd determination. As I’ve said elsewhere, the intention of the drug companies is to market their products like Wrigley’s markets chewing gum: to sell to everyone, not just sick people. And the FDA often lends them a helping hand.
The December 16, 2009 declaration was made after the FDA completed a review of a large study published in 2008, known as the JUPITER study.
In designing the JUPITER study, Astra Zenica wanted to show that Crestor might benefit people without high cholesterol in order to expand Crestor’s potential customer base by an estimated 65 million people. So Astra Zenica enrolled people with normal cholesterol but high levels of body inflammation as measured by a protein called CRP, or C-reactive protein. Then they waited to see what would happen.
The study concludes that Crestor reduced the subjects’ risk of certain kinds of heart disease by 40%. But that’s not what the study actually shows—and the FDA knows it!
The people who make money selling Crestor designed and paid for the study, so of course it would be foolish to take any of these results at face value. But that’s exactly what the FDA does, assuming enough of us will be fooled by the pretense of oversight to make this whole charade profitable.
To give JUIPITER and other studies the appearance of legitimacy, drug companies have perfected the art of stacking the deck in their favor by a variety of methods. Basically, they cheat.
How drug companies cheat…
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