Dr. Aseem Malhotra

He's like, this is unbelievable.

How can they say, this is not what you say, blah, blah, blah.

And I was calming him down and saying, Richard, we take this as a backhanded compliment.

You're over the target.

You get one of the most powerful, influential newspapers in the world to go for you like this.

And I'm someone that- And who's their advertisers?

Well, that's a fair point.

But I think ultimately what came out in the case as well, Mark, and there's also, again, I'll mention this crucial bit of evidence, which is extraordinary and helped, I think, shift the case and win it, is that the people who were fueling the health editor to write the article and the people who are commenting on it were all connected or part of something called the CTT, the Cholesterol Trialist Collaboration in Oxford.

These are the most powerful, um, statin promoters and some of the most powerful doctors in the world in medical research.

But again, which wasn't declared is that their institution has received hundreds of millions of dollars from drug companies that manufacture statins or new cholesterol lowering drugs.

Okay.

in in a lot of how we think about things in medicine because of of the money if you follow the money you understand where things are are driven from yeah absolutely right mark and that reminds me actually of somebody who i cite quite regularly um professor john ainidis i i refer to stanford yeah in stanford i refer to him as a stephen hawking in medicine he's the most cited medical researcher in the world

He is a professor of medicine and epidemiology and statistics at Stanford.

He's a mathematical genius.

And he published a paper in 2006 that we've talked about before, I think, which is called Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.

And one of the risk factors for false research is this.

The greater the financial and other prejudices in a given field,

the less likely the research findings are to be true.

Think about that.

So when you start with statins, you're talking about one of the most lucrative drugs in the history of medicine.