David Montagné with AFP 8:06 a.m., January 9, 2023, modified at 8:07 a.m., January 9, 2023

The appeal trial of the health scandal of the Mediator, a drug from Servier laboratories accused of having caused the death of hundreds of patients, opens Monday for six months before the Paris Court of Appeal.

Wrongly prescribed as an appetite suppressant until 2009, the Mediator caused serious side effects on thousands of patients, leading to the death of some of them.

The appeal trial of the health scandal of the Mediator, a drug from Servier laboratories accused of having caused the death of hundreds of patients, opens Monday for six months before the Paris Court of Appeal.

The hearing, which takes place in the "room of the great trials" of the Palace of Justice which has already hosted the trials of the attacks of November 13 and Nice, must begin at 1:30 p.m.

Marketed as an antidiabetic in 1976 but unduly prescribed as an appetite suppressant until 2009, the Mediator has caused serious side effects on thousands of patients suffering from cardiac or pulmonary pathologies and sometimes led to their death.

It has been prescribed to approximately 5 million people during its thirty-three years of marketing.

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At first instance, Servier laboratories and their former number 2, Jean-Philippe Seta, were found guilty of aggravated deception and manslaughter and involuntary injury.

Servier was fined 2.7 million euros, Jean-Philippe Seta Seta received a four-year suspended prison sentence and a fine of 90,600 euros.

The group was also ordered to pay a total of more than 183 million euros in damages to the victims.

In its judgment, the Paris Criminal Court considered that the Servier laboratories "had from 1995, enough elements to become aware of the mortal risks" linked to the Mediator.

The second French laboratory, on the other hand, was acquitted of the offenses of improperly obtaining marketing authorization and fraud, in particular to the detriment of Social Security, which led the Paris public prosecutor's office and civil parties to call.

In their wake, the pharmaceutical group also appealed.

Sentenced to a fine of 303,000 euros for having delayed suspending the marketing of Mediator despite its toxicity, the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM, ex-Afssaps) did not appeal.

More than 7,500 civil parties

Only the Servier group and Jean-Philippe Seta will therefore be tried before the Court of Appeal chaired by Olivier Géron.

"The Servier and Jean-Philippe Seta Seta laboratories still deny having deliberately deceived patients and prescribing doctors about the dangerousness" of the Mediator, François De Castro, one of their lawyers, told AFP.

“On the first day of the marketing of this drug, they had the perfect knowledge of the extremely serious side effects” of the drug, estimates on the contrary Jean-Christophe Coubris, lawyer of approximately 2,500 civil parties.

More than 7,500 civil parties were constituted before the opening of the hearing.

As for the trials of the attacks of November 13 and Nice, they will be able to follow on a web radio the debates scheduled until June 28, at the rate of two and a half days of hearing per week.

About fifty civil parties are expected to testify at the bar for four days at the end of February.

The pulmonologist Irène Frachon, who had revealed to the general public the extent of the scandal, will come again to testify at the bar, even if she told AFP that she had "lost confidence in the ability of justice to condemn this type of offenses commensurate with the seriousness of the offenses committed".

Confirmation of the first instance judgment

"The mountain gave birth to a mouse" in the first instance, she said, regretting "the modesty of the sentences", below the requisitions of the prosecution, and a missed opportunity to "give a strong signal" to the industrialists of the medicine that does not respect the rules.

"My clients have been very marked that social security has not been reimbursed for everything it has exposed in reimbursement of the Mediator, since the end of the 1970s. It represents almost 500 million euros. And it takes any price that the laboratory reimburses (this sum editor's note) and even, that the profit made thanks to the Mediator, is confiscated from it", explains to the microphone of Europe 1 Me Charles Joseph Oudin, who represents more than 1000 civil parties.

In a column published in the Sunday newspaper, the practitioner of the Brest-Carhaix hospital (Finistère) asked Emmanuel Macron to modify the code of the Legion of Honor in order to posthumously withdraw this decoration from Jacques Servier, the founder of the laboratories of the same name, who died in 2014 without having been brought to justice.

For the lawyers of the civil parties, the stake of the trial is to obtain the confirmation of the judgment of first instance, the maintenance of a minimum of the compensation paid to their clients and that Servier be found guilty of fraud.