Judgment in the Mediator trial: "We must punish up to the seriousness of the facts"

Monday, the Paris court must render its judgment against Servier laboratories and the Medicines Agency in the Mediator trial.

On Europe 1, the whistleblower Irène Frachon, who revealed the health scandal in 2010, said she was waiting "for the facts and the truth to be finally told".

And regrets that the laboratory still has a storefront. 

INTERVIEW

More than ten years after the scandal, the trial of the Mediator, this drug held responsible for hundreds of deaths, is coming to an end.

Monday, the Paris court is due to render its judgment against Servier laboratories and the Medicines Agency after an extraordinary trial opened in September 2019 and ended in July 2020. The prosecution has been reproaching for years Servier laboratories for having concealed the dangerous side effects of the drug used by 5 million people until it was withdrawn from the market in 2009. In 2010, it was pulmonologist Irène Frachon who revealed the health scandal to the general public.

Invited from Europe 1, the one who continues to support victims today confides her expectations.

"We must punish according to the gravity of the facts," she said. 

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"This judgment, we have been waiting for years, since the trial was announced every year from 2014, and it was postponed because of delaying tactics by the defense of the laboratory", explains Irène Frachon.

First of all, she continues, "we are waiting for the victims, for their relatives and for the surviving victims, that we finally tell the facts and the truth in the face of an unshakeable lie from the Servier laboratories".

"The Mediator has damaged the confidence of the general public"

"The second thing is that we must qualify these facts. Is it a simple error of the Servier laboratory? Or is it a frightful offense, that is to say the marketing and maintenance for decades of a product that Servier knew perfectly well was a deadly poison? ”says the whistleblower.

Finally, she claims, "we must punish up to the seriousness of these facts".

Because "the Mediator affair has profoundly altered the confidence of the general public in the drug industry and in the ability of health authorities to discern good and bad drugs".

For Irène Frachon, this long-awaited trial "will clarify the issues a little bit. That is to say, we must not mix what comes under pharmacovigilance and what comes under 'pharmaco-delinquency'".

Because "the problem of the Mediator is not a problem of difficulty in identifying a signal, it is that this signal has been concealed", she adds. 

"For Servier, it's 'business as usual'"

On Europe 1, the pulmonologist is indignant at the lack of reaction from the medical world to the Servier laboratories.

"The victims are completely appalled to see that the Servier laboratory is still well established and is still hosted at the Academy of Medicine by learned societies, forges partnerships with the Ecole Polytechnique, etc." it

"The health authorities have nevertheless largely reformed in relation to their weaknesses of those periods", agrees Irène Frachon, "but it is also necessary that the medical world, which is still massively watered by the money of Servier, learns he too and knows how to set aside this laboratory. Since the Mediator affair broke out, for Servier, it's 'open bar', it's 'business as usual'. If our healthcare world can continue to deal with delinquent labs, we can no longer believe anyone. That's the issue, "insists Irène Frachon.