This is so incredibly dangerous and will be seen by millions of people.
I'm a cardiologist who opens the arteries of people with heart attacks.
1. Secondary vs primary prevention - Here, Malhotra is talking about someone taking a statin who has *already had a heart attack*.
First of all, if you survive a heart attack without any major damage, you're lucky. A lot of people aren't as lucky. I know this because I do this work for a living.
Primary prevention is for people who've never had any clinical event. If you've had a heart attack, you are NOT THE SAME as someone your same age, etc who has NOT had one. The game is changed and much riskier for you. You are at a HIGHER RISK of ANOTHER heart attack. You need to be MORE AGGRESSIVE to lower that risk. If your first one spared your life, the second one might not. That is secondary prevention.
2. "Benefit over 5 years" - This is such a classic, silly misinformation trick. OK sure - but that assumes you're only planning on living another 5 years and then are ok with just dying.
That's obviously absurd and I don't believe anyone agrees with that. As your cardiologist, I'm not trying to keep you alive and well for just 5 years. I'm talking 10, 20, 30 years, decades.
The real true benefit of statin therapy is over decades. As in, they help keep you alive longer. You can't just measure it at an arbitrary 5 year cut off.
3. Not magic bullet - Prevention is not just statins. It is changing your entire lifestyle, diet, exercise, etc, and meds. Statins are not magic either. People on statins have heart attacks too.
But life is about risks and probabilities. You do what you can to reduce risk as much as possible. You cannot reduce risk to 0, but you can bring it pretty damn close to 0.
It is so fascinating to me that there are so many highly intelligent and accomplished people who have an intimate understanding of risk and probabilities, and who make major decisions in their daily lives based on this understanding. But when it comes to statins and vaccines, they just abandon all logic.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra: "If you take a statin for 5 years after a heart attack... in that 5 year period, how much would you think or hope it would add to your life expectancy?"
Joe Rogan: "25%? 30%?"
Malhotra: "Just over 4 days."