The Bordeaux court condemned the Sanofi Pasteur laboratory following the complaint of a patient suffering from multiple sclerosis. Illness he would have developed after being vaccinated against hepatitis B.
While the hepatitis B vaccine has just been made compulsory by the Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn, the 1st civil chamber of the Bordeaux Court of Appeal ruled on January 23 that the world leader in vaccines Sanofi Pasteur was responsible for the multiple sclerosis of a former painter-boilermaker.
Case by case
After a long judicial journey, the Bordeaux court finally held that the appearance of multiple sclerosis in the plaintiff had occurred after three injections of the hepatitis B vaccine, as well as the absence of a favorable genetic background. Vaccinated in 1996, the patient developed multiple sclerosis a few months later, while none of his close relatives suffered from this disease.
“We must differentiate: a court decision is law, it is not a scientific decision. They are two different things. It is a court decision on a responsibility”, explains to 20 minutes Aymeric Bouyssonie, lawyer in health law within the Juris santé association, specifying that it is “a decision on a case-by-case basis”.
Serious, precise and concordant indices
In other words, the Bordeaux court based its decision on legal, not scientific, arguments. The European Court of Justice indeed stipulates that “in the absence of scientific consensus, the defect of a vaccine and the causal link between this one and a disease can be proved by a bundle of serious, precise and concordant “.
While most scientific studies show that there is no link between multiple sclerosis and the hepatitis B vaccine, some of them, identified by WHO, sow doubt. A medical uncertainty that directly impacts the population: only 69% of French people currently trust vaccines, according to an Ipsos study.
Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease, causing in particular extreme and unusual fatigue, memory impairment, concentration or even depressive episodes. 90% of children under 9 months were vaccinated against hepatitis B in France in 2015.
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