Larry Wood
Analyst · Evercore ISI. Please state your question.
Yeah. Thanks, Bernard. Yeah. This whole thing about the curves continuing to diverge, just isn't really accurate. I think we had a little bit of a catch up. But if you notice from the New England Journal Medicine manuscript, we are impacted somewhat by the patients that withdrew on the surgical side disproportionately. And when we did the phone sweep, the absolute difference that we're showing at five years is about 1%. When you go into the causes of death, you look at cardiovascular mortality, they're about the same. We had, I think, double the rate of cancer. We had 3 times as much COVID death in the TAVR group, as we had in the surgical group. And I think higher rates of sepsis, which were all adjudicated to be not TAVR related. And I don't think anybody is suggesting that TAVR causes cancer or COVID. So when you get into the depths of the data, I mean, we feel great about the data. What's amazing about this data set is that both groups performed incredibly well. And given the prominence of Edwards surgical valves, and then obviously our TAVR cohort, we're looking at both groups that have over 90% survival at five years. And the other thing that people have been worried about with TAVR was durability. And you're right, we did use the bark definitions for durability, which remember, isn't what -- with surgery is historically used. Surgery historically is used, freedom from X plant due to structural valve deterioration, not echo derived criteria. And so, part of what drives the New England Journal of Medicine publication is we used all the contemporary standards, all the contemporary things. So, I don't want to comment on other people's data. You can ask them about their data and what methodologies they use. But I'm very comfortable we applied the highest academic standard STAAR study. And again, we feel great about the data. And I think there's just a little bit of an oddity here that, that people are discussing that somehow TAVR has to be better than the surgery. If we have two procedures, TAVR and surgery, and we can go to patients and say, your results are identical at five years. Then that's going to automatically default people to the less invasive therapy. And now, we need to continue to follow these patients. We need to follow them all the way up to 10 years. But for a pretty significant interim look at the data at five years, I don't think we could be any happier about the data than we are.