“Sounds like a thriller, only it’s all real!” After the film, the books and the play, the Mediator scandal is told in a breathtaking and didactic comic strip, under the…
“Sounds like a thriller, only it’s all real!” After the film, the books and the comedy, the Mediator scandal is told in a breathtaking and didactic comic, from the pen of the informant Irène Frachon.
“The true factual story from A to Z had never been written”, assures the pulmonologist of the Brest-Carhaix hospital (Finistère).
Entitled “Mediator, a chemically pure crime” (Ed. Delcourt), this comic, which should be published on January 4, was written with former journalist Éric Giacometti and drawn by François Duprat. It undertakes to retrace not only the history of the Mediator but also that of its manufacturer, the Servier laboratories, and of another of its drugs banned in the 1990s: Isomeride.
“It’s an industrial crime that began in the 1960s: Servier invented a series of amphetamine-derived appetite suppressants. And, despite the warning signs that manifested themselves very quickly, Servier did everything possible to prevent the withdrawal of these appetite suppressants because they are extremely profitable products,” Dr. Frachon tells AFP.
Marketed in 1976 for the treatment of diabetes but widely misused as an appetite suppressant, Mediator was prescribed to an estimated five million people until it was withdrawn in November 2009.
It is by discovering the similarity of the Mediator with Isomeride that the pulmonologist will realize its danger. Because “in reality, Isoméride and Mediator are the same thing. They release the same poison in the body. Servier knew it and hid it,” underlines Mrs. Frachon.
The Isomeride scandal, withdrawn from the market in 1997, caused a sensation in the United States. But in France, the story “has made a point to the displeasure of a journalist from Le Parisien, Éric Giacometti”, author of several articles on the subject, says Ms. Frachon.
It was from their meeting that the idea for comics was born. Having become a thriller author and screenwriter of Largo Winch, Giacometti helped set the pace for this 200-page story, peppered with medical-scientific explanations that could have made it daunting.
“I’ve been experiencing this case for years as a thriller but I don’t know how to tell it like this”, confides Irène Frachon, who however specifies that “it’s all real”. “There is no place for fiction in comics,” she describes, listing Servier’s “barbouze methods” and the “scary documents” of the criminal investigation.
– “Deadly Poison” –
This “graphic documentary” recalls the role of the doctors who supported Servier, but also the involvement of all those who warned of the Ombudsman’s danger and helped Irène Frachon in her fight against the laboratory and the health authorities.
“It is very important to show the collective work behind it”, underlines the one whose story inspired the film “La fille de Brest” by Emmanuelle Bercot (2016).
Along with others, this scandal has helped undermine public trust in health authorities, fueling anti-vaccine plots and rhetoric. Aware of this threat, the pulmonologist proposes to remedy it a drastic fight against conflicts of interest which remain “ubiquitous even today in the medical world”.
He also calls for greater severity of justice against white-collar crime, while the appeal process for the Mediator scandal will open on 9 January.
“We are dealing with a laboratory that has been knowingly selling a deadly poison for more than ten years, resulting in thousands of deaths. I think it deserves exemplary sentences,” he said.
In March 2021, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced Servier for “aggravated deception” and “involuntary homicide and bodily harm” to a fine of €2,718 million and acquitted him of the crime of fraud. A sentence well below the demands of the prosecution.
Despite his ban 13 years ago, victims continue to die because of the Ombudsman. Like Cathy, who disappeared in December, a few weeks before the publication of the comic in which she appears.
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