Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, will compensate victims of a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland with around 4 million francs (4.2 million euros). In this center, medical products for clinical trials were administered without authorization for four decades, according to the local government this Friday. The multinational based in Basel will thus participate in the total compensation of 12.5 million francs (13.4 million euros) that has been agreed with the government of the canton of Thurgau (northeast Switzerland) for the victims of these tests. , carried out between 1940 and 1980 in the psychiatric clinic of Münsterlingen.
The Swiss authorities indicated in the statement that around 500 people could be entitled to this compensation, each receiving 25.00 francs (26,800 euros).
Who was primarily responsible for the trials?
The main person responsible for these trials was the well-known psychiatrist and director of the clinic Roland Kuhn (1912-2005), who participated in the development of one of the first antidepressants, Imipramine, and was one of the pioneers in the research of the Rorschach (psychological evaluation through drawings with symmetrical spots).
A study carried out by the canton of Thurgau in 2021 revealed the unethical tests of the psychiatrist in the clinic, in which some 60 medications, some in the clinical trial phase, are administered without permission to 3,000 people, of whom 36 died during the experiments.
Kuhn was paid by the laboratories where these drugs were produced, and although Novartis did not yet exist during these unethical practices, it is considered to be the heir to some of these firms (the multinational was born in 1996 by the merger of the pharmaceutical company Sandoz and the company Ciba-Geigy chemistry).
