The appeals process over the Mediator health scandal, a drug from the Dienst Laboratories accused of causing the deaths of hundreds of patients, opens on Monday for six months at the Paris Court of Appeal.
The hearing, which will take place in the “Great Trials Room” of the Palais de Justice, where the trials on the November 13 attacks and Nice have already taken place, is due to start at 1.30 p.m.
Marketed as an antidiabetic in 1976 but inappropriately prescribed as an appetite suppressant until 2009, Mediator has caused serious side effects, sometimes fatality, in thousands of patients with heart or lung disease.
It has been prescribed to approximately 5 million people in its thirty-three years of marketing.
In the first instance, Dienst Laboratories and their former number 2, Jean-Philippe Seta, were found guilty of aggravated fraud, manslaughter and negligent assault. Dienst was fined €2.7 million and Mr Seta was given a four-year suspended sentence and a €90,600 fine.
The group was also ordered to pay a total of more than 183 million euros in damages to the victims.
In its verdict, the Paris Criminal Court considered that Dienst’s laboratories had “since 1995 sufficient elements to be aware of the lethal risks associated with the mediator”.
The second French laboratory, on the other hand, was acquitted of the offenses of fraudulently obtaining marketing authorization and fraud, in particular against French social security, prompting the Paris public prosecutor and civil parties to appeal.
As a result, the pharmaceutical company also appealed.
The French Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM, ex-Afssaps) was fined €303,000 for delaying the suspension of the mediator’s marketing despite its toxicity.
More than 7 500 civil parties
Only the Dienst group and Jean-Philippe Seta will therefore be tried before the Court of Appeal, presided over by Olivier Géron.
“Serving Laboratories and Mr. Seta still deny intentionally misleading patients and prescribers about the dangerousness,” the mediator, François De Castro, one of their lawyers, told AFP.
“On the first day of marketing this drug, they had perfect knowledge of the extremely serious side effects” of the drug, estimates Jean-Christophe Coubris, lawyer for around 2,500 civil parties.
More than 7,500 civil parties were constituted before the opening of the hearing. As for the trials of the November 13 and Nice attacks, you can follow the debates scheduled until June 28 two and a half days a week on web radio.
About fifty civil parties are expected to testify before the Bar Association for four days at the end of February.
Pneumologist Irène Frachon, who revealed the extent of the scandal to the general public, will come again to testify before the Bar Association, although she told AFP that she had “lost confidence in the judiciary’s ability to properly deal with this type of crime.” to be sentenced with the seriousness of the crimes committed”.
“The mountain gave birth to a mouse in the first instance,” she said, regretting “the modesty of the verdicts,” amid prosecutor’s demands and a missed opportunity to “give a strong signal” to medicine industrialists. that doesn’t follow the rules.
In a column published in the Sunday newspaper, the doctor of the Brest-Carhaix hospital (West) asked French President Emmanuel Macron to change the Code of the Legion of Honor in order to posthumously deprive this award to JacquesServ, founder of the laboratories of the same name, who died 2014 without being held accountable to the judiciary.
For the lawyers of the civil parties, the stake of the process is to obtain confirmation of the first instance verdict, maintenance of the minimum compensation paid to their clients, and the conviction of Dienst of fraud.