Nicolas Sarkozy awards Jacques Servier the Grand Croix ... lesinrocks.com
Last year, Jacques Servier, founder and CEO of Laboratoires Servier, the drug company that aggressively marketed the dangerous diabetes drug Mediator as a diet aid, dismissed rumors with a wave of his hand:
"Le Mediator, il ne s'agit que de trois morts."
"Mediator, it's only three deaths"
-Servier told his employees.
The intrepid researcher who broke the story placed the number at 500. Now, according to Le Monde, two researchers at Inserm are estimating the number of dead at 1320.
Jacques Servier, who was awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has long been thought to be a major UMP donor.
Numerous warnings about Servier's drug went ignored by Afssaps, the French version of the FDA (the same agency that did nothing to stop PIPs breast implants).
Long after similar molecules were banned in the USA, French Social Security continued to reimburse Mediator for use by non-diabetics.
From 1976 to 2009 it is estimated that more than five million people took the potentially dangerous pills.
Originally licensed for diabetics, French family doctors began to prescribe Mediator in the mid-1990s as an appetite-suppressant pushed by agressive marketing from Servier.
"Despite the ringing of alarm bells over the years about its links to heart disease, both in other countries and within the French medical profession," The Economist states, "the drug was not withdrawn in France until 2009. By that time, according to different estimates, between 500 and 2,000 people who had been taking the drug had died."
There is hope that this scandal, combined with the PIPs scandal, coming after the contaminated blood, the mad cow, the asbestos and the growth hormone scandals, might help to shed some cleansing light on the dark and highly lucrative corners of the French drug industry.
However in the absence of class action suits and political will, there is little evidence as yet that anything will change.
