“The Servier firm has a complicated relationship to reality, it is a central element of this case. This Tuesday, on the first day of the requisitions in the Mediator trial, at the TGI in Paris, which will continue on Wednesday, the charge of the prosecutor Aude Le Guilcher has been harsh vis-à-vis the pharmaceutical laboratory which manufactured the drug Mediator . This one, maintained on the market between 1976 and 2009, is suspected of having caused more than 500 deaths and thousands of hospitalizations following valvulopathies of the heart. And the company is accused of knowingly lying to the authorities, in order to be able to continue selling its product, which brought in more than 570 million euros. What she denies.
“We can only bow to the courage of the victims. Faced with this, we noted a hard-line and a relentlessness of the Servier laboratories to maintain at all costs their medicine on the market, "declared the prosecutor from the outset. She even uses the term "conspiratorial vein" to reject certain methods of this laboratory, accused of "bringing discredit on persons or entities", in particular the investigators and witnesses heard at the stand.
"But who are we kidding?" "She thunders, recalling that investigators have just found in a search at the headquarters of the laboratory" exhibits that were going to be crushed ". "We are facing a firm more concerned with its financial and commercial interests than with patient safety," she adds.
The shadow of the founder
The prosecutor returns, during her presentation, to the central figure of Jacques Servier, founder of the group. "Power has long been concentrated in its hands, in a very centralized operation." The initial lie, consisting in hiding from the authorities studies showing the dangerousness of the product, in order to obtain its marketing authorization, seems to be his idea. But he irrigates his entire firm.
PODCAST. Mediator: "I want Servier to close"
"Throughout the history of this drug, there has been manipulation, concealment and maneuvering on the part of the group," she accuses. Among the "mystifications", the thesis that the Pick is an "original" molecule very different from appetite suppressants, like Ponderal, banned by health authorities since 1997. But the prosecutor does not exempt from responsibility the number 2 of the group, at the time, Jean-Philippe Seta, today on the defendants' bench.
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“It is a tandem that has led the group since 1996. Until his brutal ouster and surprise in October 2013, Jean-Philippe Seta was put into orbit to succeed Jacques Servier. At no time did his speech move an iota. In assuming responsibility, he had the unique opportunity to sweep away the past and start off on the right foot by pointing out the dangers of the Mediator. It was not the choice that was made. "
The Medicines Agency "in the fog"
On the contrary, the continuous concealment, trapped in the initial lie: “They never wrote in the drug's instructions that it could cause pulmonary arterial hypertensions. Doctors have never been able to link the symptoms of the patients to this medication. They were even victims of disinformation by the group's medical visitors who told them that this medicine was not a problem. This is why the public prosecutor accuses the laboratory of "aggravated deception on the quality of the product", but also "of homicide and involuntary injury".
The prosecutor did not spare the Medicines Agency, which has since become the National Medicines Safety Agency. The criticisms were particularly severe from the second part of the 1990s, when independent studies began to show that the Mediator could indeed belong to the dangerous family of anorectic drugs.
“The Agency was unable to emerge from the fog, which had been set up by Servier. She was unable to have a global view of the risk of this drug. But for it to do so, it would have had to abandon certain dogmas, such as the systematic search for consensus between the experts. It was taking forever. "Paying tribute to Doctor Irène Frachon, who was the first to really update the rumors, the prosecutor said:" Without her determination and her courage, how long would it have taken the Agency for ban, end of 2009? "
