Kipk,

You seem to be singling out the statin portion of standard of care. However, the standard of care also includes various drugs for diabetes, hypertension, and anti-platelet agents. You seem to question why they pooled the patients taking different statin types (atorvastatin vs. rosuvastatin), but you aren't questioning them pooling together these other standard of care drug classes. Here's a prior post and ESC 2019 poster summarizing the BETonMACE standard of care.

Apabetalone might work differently with atorvastatin compared to rosuvastatin. They pre-specified this subgroup comparison and we should know soon. However, the primary endpoint all along since the trial design was finalized was to look at the combined statin group. 

If you are critical of that, then you should also be critical of them pooling together patients taking (or not taking) metformin, GLP-1R agonists, SGLT2 inhibitors, insulin, sulfonylureas, DPP4 inhibitors, beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, etc. Did you expect all patients to be on the exact same standard of care drug combinations? Maybe I am not understanding your criticism correctly. 

BearDownAZ