The LSHTM Paper

Executive summary
* This note covers a paper that is interesting per se. It is especially interesting because it was key to our legal case Harcombe/Kendrick vs Associated Newspapers.
* The paper was written by seven authors; five were part of the Department of Non-Communicable Diseases Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The paper became known in the trial as the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine paper – abbreviated to LSHTM.
* The LSHTM paper was a modelling exercise. It was based on the premise that two articles published in the BMJ in October 2013, which were critical of statins, resulted in a six-month period of elevated media coverage of statins. It estimated that this six-month period of elevated media coverage had resulted in approximately 200,000 people stopping taking statins. It then estimated that this had resulted in approximately 2,000 people having a cardiovascular event over the following 10 years.
* The fundamental issue for the LSHTM paper in the trial was that the Second Defendant, Mr Calman, assumed that Dr Malcolm Kendrick and I wrote one of the two articles published in the BMJ in October 2013. We didn’t and we told Mr Calman that we didn’t, but he proceeded with the allegations, nonetheless.
* Notwithstanding that the LSHTM paper had nothing to do with me or Malcolm, its assertions that two articles in the BMJ had led to adverse media coverage and that this had stopped c. 200,000 people taking statins and that this had led to c. 2,000 cardiovascular events does not withstand scrutiny. The LSHTM paper and supplemental report presented many issues to undermine its own claims.