2023-12-20 22:31:10
More than thirteen years after the Mediator scandal, an anti-diabetes drug used as an appetite suppressant and blamed for hundreds of deaths, the French pharmaceutical group Servier was harshly condemned on Wednesday (20), at the Court of Appeal in Paris, for great relief from the civil parties.
Published on: 20/12/2023 – 21:31
3 min
Marketed in 1976 as an adjunct to antidiabetic treatments, the drug was often inappropriately prescribed as an appetite suppressant and caused serious and potentially fatal cardiovascular damage in thousands of patients.
In 2013, a legal expert report, disputed by Servier, estimated that between 1,300 and 1,800 people died from long-term heart disease as a result of Mediator.
“This is a huge victory for the victims who I have been representing and defending since the first complaint in November 2010,” commented Charles-Joseph Oudin, one of the lawyers representing the more than 7,000 people affected.
France’s second largest medical laboratory was found guilty of all the crimes of which it was accused, including “fraud” and “improperly obtaining marketing authorization”, for which it had been acquitted at first instance. The responsible court confirmed Servier’s guilt for the crimes of “aggravated fraud” and “manslaughter and involuntary injury”.
Billion-dollar fines
The six companies that make up the group will have to pay a total fine of €9.173 million (more than R$48 million).
The court ordered Servier to pay health insurance funds and mutual insurers more than €415 million (approx. R$2.2 billion) in financial damages, more than €1 million in disorganization damages and more than €5 millions in legal costs.
Jean-Philippe Seta, the former right-hand man of the group’s all-powerful founder Jacques Servier (died in 2014) and sole defendant in the appeal, was sentenced to four years in prison, including one year under house arrest, and fined a total of of almost €90 thousand. In the first instance, he received a suspended sentence of four years in prison and a fine of €90,600.
Concealment Policy
The court did not accept the prosecution’s request for the confiscation of Servier’s profits related to Mediator, i.e. €182 million (R$977 million), arguing that this could “compromise the group”.
In March 2021, during the trial at first instance, the Paris Criminal Court fined Servier’s six companies €2.7 million, ruling that it had “sufficient evidence, since 1995, to be aware of the fatal risks” associated with the Mediator.
During the presentation of the sentence, the president of the court, Olivier Géron, emphasized that the laboratory had “put its financial interests ahead of the interests of patients”.
Mediator has been prescribed to around 5 million people
There was “a systematic policy of withholding information from doctors who had doubts about Mediator,” Géron said. The group “never took the necessary measures”.
Around 5,000 other cases of manslaughter or unintentional injury continue to be investigated by the Paris public prosecutor’s office, paving the way for a second Mediator trial in the coming years.
In 1999, a first case of “valvulopathy”, a dysfunction of the heart valves, was detected in a person taking Mediator. The drug was withdrawn from the market in Spain and Italy in 2003-2004.
In 2007, Dr. Irène Frachon, a lung specialist in Brest (western France), began research into the dangerous effects of the drug and revealed the extent of the scandal. In 2009, the drug was withdrawn from the market. In 2010, the whistleblower reported her investigation and difficult battle in the book “Mediator 150 mg, combien de morts?” (“Mediator 150 mg, how many deaths?”).
(With information from AFP)
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