March 29, 2021. After 517 hours of debate, the Mediator river trial delivers its judgment. Servier laboratories – which marketed the drug for 33 years – are condemned for “aggravated deception” and “manslaughter and manslaughter”. For Irène Frachon, the pulmonologist who revealed the case to the general public, it is the culmination of a fight of more than ten years. “Victims now know that what was done to them is illegal, it’s forbidden, it’s a crime, that we don’t have the right to do it.”
Where there is frustration is that the punishment is not up to par
Irene Frachonon franceinfo
The Servier laboratory was sentenced to pay a fine of 2.7 million euros and the former number two of the pharmaceutical group was given a four-year suspended prison sentence, as well as a fine of nearly 100,000 euros.
For Irène Frachon, the whistleblower, the sanctions are not enough. “VSis a little slap on the wrist. It’s a suspended sentence, and don’t do it again! After thirty years of deception, it’s just delusional. It is a few hours of turnover of the laboratory which remains completely beneficiary of this fraudulent manipulation. Deception is fully characterized. The amount of evidence that has accumulated over seven months is overwhelming. And despite this evidence of a monstrous deception, in full knowledge of the facts, with thousands of deaths, the industrialist comes out practically unpunished. Needless to say, this is an extraordinarily reassuring signal to continue doing anything. It’s completely surreal, actually/”
On several occasions since the start of the affair, the Servier group has sometimes tried to muzzle the whistleblower. “The Servier laboratory has mobilized a lot to discredit me by finding relays within the medical world. The Servier group falsifies my scientific articles to deceive the judges and prevent the victims from being compensated, even today, by saying that , for example, I would have written that until 2009, there was no warning signal on the Mediator. Delusional assertions, I can’t stand it! So what do you want me to do? Either I fight in court, either I continue respecting our institutions, or we take out the guns. And that, I can’t do.”
“JI’m a privileged whistleblower, now, continues Irène Frachon. Rather alert, because I have a job that I love, that I live in pleasant conditions, that I am well surrounded. And the second thing is the companionship with the victims, since a large number of them are quite simply my patients, people I see, with whom I exchange permanently. The third thing is that the issue of compensation has not been resolved and that every day I receive several expert reports from victims’ associations and law firms who ask me to comment on these reports. So in fact, the job is not finished.”
Initially, Irène Frachon did not imagine “absolutely not” left for a legal marathon. “I did not imagine that it would be so difficult to assert on the one hand the rights of abominably poisoned people, and on the other hand to put out of harm’s way a criminal and delinquent pharmaceutical firm in France” says the pulmonologist who has therefore taken on the costume of the most famous whistleblower in France. “It allowed me to meet great people who are in this civic approach. It also allowed me to understand that it’s a complex environment, with sometimes conspiratorial, conspiratorial, somewhat paranoid tendencies. And I, I think I shouldn’t disperse myself. So I remain completely focused on the Mediator whistleblower. We’re not going to become ‘indologist’ because we risk recovery. I think the definition of a whistleblower is that he is not a professional, he is not a journalist, he is not an investigator. It is the meeting of a citizen and an alert that was not planned in the program.”
In a few months, a new trial will take place since the prosecution has appealed the judgment of first instance. This time, Irène Frachon hopes that the sanctions will be “more just” and “more severe”. In the meantime, the pulmonologist – who has found her patients from the Brest University Hospital – is preparing a comic strip which traces her ten years of combat.