Karen, the sentence before the one you quoted, he said that the heart disease mortality has fallen. Mike was inferring (I think) that the 'statin worshippers' take the credit for the mortality falling, but are curiously silent on the fact that the incidence of heart disease is about the same. Whereas according to Mike's reading of the smoking rate/statin use effect on CHD, statins have squat to do with the CHD mortality reduction, which he thinks is because there are fewer smokers. Mike is well known to also believe that one of the most prevalent causes of CHD is a high carb diet. But his slightly older blog entry points out that only smokers seem to die of heart attacks. You can have heart disease your whole life, and eventually die of some other cause, without ever suffering a heart attack, if you don't smoke. Not that he's recommending CHD of course. It's just that he thinks it's seldom life threatening unless you also smoke. So he reads the data as the fall in smoking reducing people dying from heart attacks, whereas our friends the statin pushers incorrectly claim that reduced mortality for their own.

I know who I find more credible