“Our fight is not over.” The lawyer for 34 plaintiffs, Jean-Christophe Coubris, commented on the announcement that the Gardasil investigation had been closed on Wednesday, November 4. The Paris prosecutor’s office considered that there was no direct link between this vaccine and pathologies of the nervous system denounced by patients.
Jean-Christophe Coubris will file a complaint with civil action to obtain the opening of a judicial investigation and the appointment of one or more investigating judges.
This vaccine against cancer of the cervix, marketed by the Franco-American group Sanofi Pasteur MSD, had been the subject of a first criminal complaint at the end of 2013. Fifty women had joined the procedure.
The Paris prosecutor’s office, which had entrusted the investigations to the gendarmes specialized in attacks on the environment and public health (Oclaesp), closed the investigation on October 26.
The analysis of the prosecution echoes that of the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM). She assured in September that vaccines against papillomavirus (HPV) infections, themselves the main causes of cancer, did not cause “no increase in the overall risk of occurrence of autoimmune diseases”. The ANSM had conducted a study with health insurance on more than two million teenage girls.
The vaccine is accused of being particularly involved in the occurrence of multiple sclerosis, lupus, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (inflammation of the central nervous system) and macrophage myofasciitis (a disease which results in muscle pain and fatigue chronic).
