This is a contentious subject on this site!
I'm going two answer to posts above, from two people I have huge amounts of respect for,
@Dillinger and
@Squire Fulwood .
I work in clinical trial analysis, mostly looking at patient safety; not for diabetes (yet), mostly oncology and respiratory. I don't know the ins-and-outs of it, but regarding the doctor that was on Radio 4 discussing the safety of statins. The safety analysis of all drugs is the same, regardless of the therapy area that they are studying. So if the safety analysis for statins was done for an oncology study (as suggested), you can be surethat statins are safe generally because the safety signals would be the same.
A lot of people on here tend to think that evil big pharma are pulling the wool over peoples' eyes when it comes to statins. Clinical trials tend to go on for around 5 years (give or take), the early phases are focussed on safety, but safety is a key focus throughout the trial, including when analyzing efficacy results. Everyone, from analysts, to physicians, even to receptionists, must take Adverse Event reporting training. Throughout the trial, the data will be unblinded and an external company will come in to assess the safety. They will then report to the FDA (or whomever is the authority in the area). Finally, once a trial is complete, the third party and the FDA will do their own independent analysis of the safety.
Everything and everyone that I work with is focussed on safety first and foremost - safety trumps efficacy. Yes, big pharma is shareholder driven (too much in my opinion), but just think of the effect an unsafe drug would have on share price.
It's therefore very difficult to get an unsafe drug to market. In my opinion, statins are one of the safest drugs out there - you should see the oncology ones. Could there be some long-term problems with them? Sure, but you can't blame big pharma for not conducting decades-long clinical trials, you wouldn't see ANY drugs - in fact, very few members of this forum would be alive if that was a requirement.
Finally, the report that
@Dillinger posted. Unfortunately, that is not a study of diabetic patients. Something like 10% of diabetics have had a CVD event in the past two years. There's much exaggerated risk there and, unfortunately, we cannot rely on a study of non-diabetics to asses diabetics' CVD risk.
That being said, I'm not saying statins are efficacious. I don't know the answer, but I'd argue that by-and-large they are very safe.
Sorry for the verbosity.