The Oxford professor who triggered a public row over statins says the Department of Health and other authorities should intervene to ensure the public gets accurate information on the risks and benefits of the potentially life-saving drugs.

Prof Sir Rory Collins said he had little confidence in an inquiry convened by the British Medical Journal to decide whether two papers it published last year that made an error on the extent of side-effects should be completely withdrawn.

The papers published by the BMJ were by John Abramson, a clinician working at Harvard medical school, and Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist in the UK. Abramson said statins in low-risk patients did not reduce mortality. Both authors said that in the low-risk group the side-effects meant they sometimes did more harm than good.

The authors have retracted statements on the frequency of side-effects but Collins said that as long as the papers were in circulation, they would wrongly undermine confidence in the drugs, and he did not believe the inquiry was truly independent. He said: “I don’t think it is appropriate for the British Medical Journal to investigate itself,” and called on the General Medical Council, the Academy of Medical Sciences or the Department of Health to investigate.

He said when the BMJ “gets things wrong, it doesn’t correct them properly; when it’s shown it gets things wrong, it doesn’t make that clear – for example blaming the peer reviewers when it wasn’t the peer reviewers’ fault – and they shouldn’t be in a position where they are investigating themselves. That wouldn’t be happening in any other sphere.”

Cholesterol-lowering statins are life-savers, helping prevent heart attacks and strokes in people who have already had one and so are at high risk of another. But the battle now raging is over the use of the drugs in healthy people at low risk.

Draft guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has recommended that everybody with a risk as low as 10% over 10 years (rather than 20% as now) should be eligible for statins from their GP. About 7 million middle-aged people are now taking a daily statin and the regulator’s proposed guidance could extend that to 5 million more.