Paris (AFP)

"It was worth nothing": the founder of the medical journal Prescrire, the first whistleblower in the affair of the Mediator, denounced Wednesday in Paris "the bluff" and "smoking" laboratories Servier to promote this drug " ineffective "and held responsible for hundreds of deaths.

"I have a total independence since the beginning of my life": in his first words, Gilles Bardelay, 72 years old retired general practitioner, emits small smiles in the court of the correctional court, which judge since September 23 the group Servier and the National Agency for Drug Safety (ANSM).

"No one is neutral, but one chooses his side: the interest of the patient or the exclusive interest of the laboratories.I am in the camp of the quality of care", will nuance later this "old leftist", when it is questioned by the defense about his involvement in a union calling for the "boycott of medical visitors".

In February 1977, Gilles Bardelay and his wife pharmacist Danielle put "on the hot seat" a brand new drug called Mediator in the journal "Practices, the notebooks of utopian medicine", ancestor of the magazine "Prescrire" born in January 1981 and broadcast with practitioners.

"What was the Mediator," a medicine to treat diabetes as sold by Servier or an anorectic, launches the voluble control with snow-white hair. "It was enough to look at chemistry, it is a derivative of amphetamine", but with "farfetched indications," he says.

- "Grand illusionist" -

The Mediator is first mentioned in 1986 in the Prescrire journal, and ten years after the start of its commercialization, "there is still no evidence that it is useful in the treatment of diabetes," says Bardelay .

In 1997, the medical journal evokes for the first time the adverse effects of anorexigenic and draws attention to the Mediator, sold as antidiabetic but widely prescribed as appetite suppressant. Other alerts will follow regularly in the 2000s, until the withdrawal of the drug on November 30, 2009.

"Anyone who really wanted to know what the Mediator could know," scratching a bit, "says Gilles Bardelay, who adds:" It was worthless and took risks. "

"When a drug is not essential and it begins to have adverse effects, it is removed," says the former doctor, criticizing the health authorities, doctors who prescribed the Mediator "who deserve the shots. Assisted and virulent against the laboratories, who have always denied that it was an anorectic.

Faced with the court obliged to reframe it when he goes astray, Gilles Bardelay describes "the method Servier", made according to him of "falsification or half-truth or lie by omission".

This method, accuses Mr. Bardelay who once portrayed Servier as a "great illusionist", is "trying to guide the prescriber's thinking through a biological mirage". "All of Servier's drugs, all of them, are never positioned in their pharmacological or chemical family," he says.

The Mediator is finally for this whistleblower "a record of longevity, with bluff on therapeutic indications, bluffing on its usefulness", "smoking".

"For us, there is first the responsibility of a pharmaceutical firm", but also "the insufficiency, the failure of the Agency of the drug, which took a lot of time to take into account the reality of its file ", summarizes on his side the current director of Prescrire, Bruno Toussaint.

It was while reading an article of this review that the pulmonologist Irène Frachon had begun to make a link between the Mediator and valvulopathies observed in patients of the CHU of Brest. She publicly revealed the scandal in 2010 and is due to be heard on October 16th.

In total, eleven legal entities and twelve natural persons are scheduled to appear until the end of April 2020.

The Servier laboratories are judged in particular for "undue approval of marketing authorization", "aggravated deception", "fraud" and "homicides and involuntary injuries", a last qualification also retained against the Agence du médicament, pursued for have delayed hanging the Mediator.

© 2019 AFP