Drug Companies Prove that High Cholesterol Does NOT Cause Heart Disease

In 2015, Eli Lilly shocked the medical world when it announced the termination of a Phase III trial with evacetrapib, its new cholesterol drug. Some 12,000 patients in 37 countries were participating in the trial, which had been going for 2 years, and had 2 more to go.

Magic Bullets

Abnormal cholesterol levels have been blamed for heart disease for over half a century, and statin drugs have been the magic bullets dispensed to many millions in the last 20 years. The hype was extraordinary, and soon we had public health experts urging governments to add the drug to town water supplies like fluoride.

Virtually all the statin trials were sponsored by drug companies, the participants carefully selected and the inconvenient data locked away. That’s another story, but there’s no doubt that statins were magic bullets for drug companies: Pfizer made $130 billion from Lipitor alone, in just 10 years.

Great Expectations

Around 2010, the patents on statins began running out, and drug makers were working day and night on the next blockbuster. They came up with a new drug class: Cholesteryl Ester Transfer Protein inhibitors.