A French court on Monday found pharmaceutical Company Servier guilty of aggravated fraud and involuntary manslaughter over a diabetes and weight loss pill.
The drug Mediator, blamed for hundreds of deaths in the country, was on the market for 33 years and used by about five million people before being pulled in 2009 over fears it could cause serious heart problems.
Many of the victims who testified in court on the impact of the drug on their lives were women. Initially intended for overweight people with diabetes, Mediator was widely prescribed to healthy individuals as an appetite suppressant.
Servier’s former deputy boss was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of four years, and the court fined the company 2.7 million euros.France’s medicines agency was fined 303,000 euros for its role in the scandal.
12 people and 11 legal entities — Servier, nine subsidiaries as well as France’s medicine watchdog, were tried in late 2019 and early 2020 over their alleged role in the scandal.
The Mediator affair was the subject of a 2016 French film titled “150 Milligrams”, about the work of lung specialist Irene Frachon, who was instrumental in bringing the alleged wrongdoing to light.
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