A landmark trial over a weight-loss pill believed to have killed as many as 2,000 people begins today. French pharmaceutical giant Servier stands charged with corporate manslaughter and other offences over deaths allegedly linked to its Mediator slimming drug. France’s drugs watchdog is also on trial, accused of negligence and dragging its feet in banning the drug. Mediator was prescribed to up to five million people between 1976 and 2009. The pill was marketed to overweight people with diabetes but doctors often gave it to women hoping to shed a few pounds or even simply avoid weight gain. Authorities have confirmed 500 people died of heart valve problems due to the drug, but other estimates by doctors’ put the actual death toll at around 2,000.
Thousands more now live with debilitating heart and lung complications, with some women who were in previous good health finding themselves too weak to climb a flight of stairs. Servier, France’s second-largest drugmaker, has paid out €132 million (£116 million) in compensation to almost 4,000 patients. Courts have ordered the French government to cover 30 per cent of the payouts. Irene Frachon, a lung specialist who raised the alarm in 2007 after looking at patients’ records, said: ‘The trial comes as huge relief. Finally, we are to see the end of an intolerable scandal.’ Health concerns had been flagged as early as the mid-1990s, but the pill was only banned in 2009 at the recommendation of the EU’s drugs watchdog. It had been withdrawn years earlier in Spain and Italy and was never approved in the UK or the USA.
The huge trial will see 21 defendants face more than 2,600 plaintiffs over seven months. Ten years in the making, it has been described as the biggest case since the 1997 trial of France’s wartime police chief, convicted for helping to send 1,700 Jews to Nazi concentration camps. Jacques Servier, the billionaire founder of the firm who was charged over the scandal, died aged 92 five years ago. Charles Joseph-Oudin, a lawyer for 250 plaintiffs, told Reuters: ‘The fact that a trial is ultimately taking place is, in itself, a victory for the victims.’ Servier says it did not lie about the drug’s effects and did not act against patients’ interests.
